Status Updates From On the Origin of Time: Step...

“His parting message… encapsulates it all: "When we see the earth from space we see ourselves as a whole; we see the unity and not the divisions. It is such a simple image, with a compelling message: one planet, one human race. Our only boundaries are the way we see ourselves. We must become global citizens. Let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit."”

“By revoking the view from nowhere, Stephen's final theory offers a powerful kernel of hope.”

“When the later Hawking outlined our post-Platonic cosmology at the Vatican, in November 2016, there were no more battles with God or the pope to be fought. Quite on the contrary, Stephen found a strong and moving resonance with Pope Francis in their shared goal of protecting our common home in the cosmos for the benefit of humanity today and tomorrow.”

“Freed from any claims on absolute truth, top-down cosmology provides space for a multitude of spheres of thoughts, from art to science, each serving different purposes and spurring complementary insights. If our top-down thinking does contain the seeds of a new worldview, then it is a thoroughly pluralistic one.”

“This is where Hannah meets Stephen. That is, the later, top-down Stephen. Hawking's final theory frees cosmology from its Platonic strait-jacket. It brings the physical laws in a sense back home. Adopting an inside-out perspective on the universe, the theory is rooted in what Arendt would call our earthly conditions.”

“At the core of Arendt's argument lay the idea that science and technology could only truly add to the stature of man in as much as we desire to be at home in the universe. "Earth is the very quintessence of the human condition," she held. Whatever we find out about or do to the world are human discoveries and endeavors.”

“This is the paradox. In our attempt to find the ultimate truth and absolute control over our existence as humans on Earth, we risk ending up smaller, not larger.”

“Our pride in what we can do would dissolve into some kind of mutation of the human race, transforming us from subjects of Earth to mere objects. If it should ever reach this point, Arendt concludes her essay, "the stature of man would not simply be lowered by all standards we know of but will have been destroyed." That is, we would lose our freedom. We would cease to be human.”

“Arendt argued that if we begin to look down upon the world and our activities as if we are outside it, if we begin to lever ourselves, then our actions will ultimately lose their deeper meaning. This is because we would begin to see the Earth as an object like any other and no longer as our home.”

“Physicists were told to "shut up and calculate" and not to worry about the ontology of quantum theory. But Arendt did exactly that and pointedly noted that it was as if the sciences, with the advent of quantum theory, did what the humanities knew all along but could never demonstrate, namely, that humanists were right to be concerned about the stature of man in the new scientific world.”

“Interestingly, in support of her thesis she quotes the quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg, who said that "man in his hunt for objective reality suddenly discovered that he always confronts himself alone." Heisenberg was referring here to the key role of the observer in quantum theory, the fact that the very questions one asks affect how reality is manifested.”

“Her central thesis was that this position is antithetical to humanism. Of course, the scientific approach has been phenomenally successful, in both theoretical and practical terms, and its benefits to humanity are undeniable. But the flight from our earthly roots that is the hallmark of modern science has also led to a chasm between our human goals and the supposedly objective workings of nature.”

“Arendt felt strongly that modern science and technology lay at the roots of man's estrangement from the world. As a matter of fact, she pointed to the central insight that sparked the modern scientific revolution—the idea that the world is objective—as the main culprit.”

“[Arendt] traced [totalitarianism, complacency] in the sociopolitical sphere to the social corrosion brought about by what she called world alienation, the loss of a sense of belonging to the world and of the recognition that we are all bound together, a sense that there is a oneness to humanity and the civic engagement this bond entails.”

“[Arendt] reflects on how science and technology transform what it means to be human. Central to her concept of humanism is the idea of freedom. The freedom to act and be meaningful, she held, is what enables us to be human. Arendt went on to ponder whether human freedom is threatened when we increasingly acquire the know-how to redesign and control the world from our physical environment and the living world...”

“"We are a way for the universe to know itself." Carl Sagan famously said. But it seems to me in a quantum universe – our universe – we are getting to know ourselves. ”

“And so it happened that, 35 years after he first spoke at the Vatican, Stephen sat again in the Pontifical Academy's temple behind St. Peter's Basilica, where he explained that there is a dual description of the cosmos, a completely different and profoundly counterintuitive way of looking at reality, in which the expansion of space and indeed time itself is a manifestly emergent phenomenon...”

“The early…Hawking regarded the no-boundary proposal as a description of the creation of the universe from nothing. In those days, Stephen strove to give a fundamentally causal explanation of the universe's origin: why, not how. But holography advances a more radical interpretation of his theory. [It] shows that what Stephen's time-turns-into-space transition is… that physics itself fades away…back into the big bang”

“Holography paints a universe that is being continually created. It is as if there is a code, operating on countless entangled qubits, that brings about physical reality, and this is what we perceive as the flow of time. In this sense holography places the true origin of the universe in the distant future, because only the far future would reveal the hologram in its full glory.”

“Holography tightens the top-down triptych into a unifying knot that constitutes a genuinely novel framework for prediction. First, by excising time from our list of fundamentals, it fuses dynamics with boundary conditions. Second, by placing holographic entanglement prior to spacetime, it integrates observership.”

“holography seals the top-down approach to cosmology. The central tenet of holographic cosmology—that the past projects from a web of entangled quantum particles that form a lower-dimensional hologram—implies a top-down view of the universe. If, as holographic cosmology posits, the surface of our observations is in some sense all there is, then this builds in the backward-in-time operation…”

“The chief difference between holograms that mirror AdS interiors and those of inflating universes lies in the nature of the extra dimension that pops out. In the former case the emergent direction is a curved dimension of space. It is the interior depth of AdS. In the case of an expanding universe, the time dimension is emergent. That is, history itself is holo-graphically encrypted.”