On the Origin of Time

<!--HTML--><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px;background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(50, 49, 48);font-family:&quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Segoe, Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-weight:400;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:2;text-align:start;text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-thickness:initial;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;">Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary career was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life.</div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px;background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(50, 49, 48);font-family:&quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Segoe, Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-weight:400;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:2;text-align:start;text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-thickness:initial;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;">Pondering this mystery led him to study its big bang origin, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing many universes, most far too bizarre to harbor life.</div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px;background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(50, 49, 48);font-family:&quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Segoe, Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-weight:400;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:2;text-align:start;text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-thickness:initial;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;">Holed up in theoretical physics departments across the globe, Hawking and I worked shoulder to shoulder for twenty years, to develop a novel quantum framework for early universe cosmology that could account for the emergence of life. At the heart of our cosmogony lies a theory of the beginning that predicts that time and indeed physics itself fade away back into the big bang.</div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px;background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(50, 49, 48);font-family:&quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Segoe, Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-weight:400;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:2;text-align:start;text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-thickness:initial;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;">In this colloquium I recount our quest to get a grips on the origin of time,&nbsp;and the bold new take on some of the universe’s fundamentals we were led to.&nbsp;</div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width:0px;background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);color:rgb(50, 49, 48);font-family:&quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Segoe, Tahoma, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant-caps:normal;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-weight:400;letter-spacing:normal;orphans:2;text-align:start;text-decoration-color:initial;text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-thickness:initial;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;">Short bio: Thomas Hertog is a theoretical cosmologist at the KU Leuven. He is the author of On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory.<br><br><i>Coffee and tea served at 16:00pm.</i></div>