According to Hertog, Hawking did not wish to make philosophy, but made philosophy when making quantum cosmology. Hawking wished to unravel the mysteries of physics and Universe and despite his physical condition was able to communicate his optimistic enthusiasm to his research group in Cambridge. The current quantum theory of the Big Bang presently dismisses the theory of multiverse, at least until it is disproved by new telescope observations or other mathematical theories.

In the first chapter, Hawking discusses the history of astronomical studies, particularly ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's conclusions about spherical Earth and a circular geocentric model of the Universe, later elaborated upon by the second-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Hawking then depicts the rejection of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic model and the gradual development of the currently accepted heliocentric model of the Solar System in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, first proposed by the Polish priest Nicholas Copernicus in 1514, validated a century later by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei and German scientist Johannes Kepler (who proposed an elliptical orbit model instead of a circular one), and further supported mathematically by English scientist Isaac Newton in his 1687 book on gravity, Principia Mathematica. Observationally, we don't know the answer to any of these questions. The Universe, as far as we can observe it, only contains information from the final 10 -33 seconds or so of inflation. Anything that occurred prior to that— which includes anything that would tell us how-or-if inflation began and what its duration was— gets wiped out, as far as what's observable to us, by the nature of inflation itself. Special: Stephen Hawking, Peter Jenni, Fabiola Gianotti (ATLAS), Michel Della Negra, Tejinder Virdee, Guido Tonelli, Joseph Incandela (CMS) and Lyn Evans (LHC) (2013) Jeffery W. Kelly, Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer (2022)In this chapter, Hawking also covers how the topic of the origin of the Universe and time was studied and debated over the centuries: the perennial existence of the Universe hypothesised by Aristotle and other early philosophers was opposed by St. Augustine and other theologians' belief in its creation at a specific time in the past, where time is a concept that was born with the creation of the Universe. In the modern age, German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued again that time had no beginning. In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding Universe implied that between ten and twenty billion years ago, the entire Universe was contained in one singular extremely dense place. This discovery brought the concept of the beginning of the Universe within the province of science. Currently scientists use Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics to partially describe the workings of the Universe, while still looking for a complete Grand Unified Theory that would describe everything in the Universe. Alim Louis Benabid, Charles David Allis, Victor Ambros, Gary Ruvkun, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier (2015) The different ways dark energy could evolve into the future. Remaining constant or increasing in ... [+] strength (into a Big Rip) could potentially rejuvenate the Universe, while reversing sign could lead to a Big Crunch. Under either of those two scenarios, time may be cyclical, while if neither comes true, time could either be finite or infinite in duration to the past. NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Finally, the expanding Universe could have been an eternal state, where space is expanding now and always had been and always would be, where new matter is continuously created to keep the density constant. Like many great discoveries in science, this leads to a slew of delightful new questions, including: Chapter 1: Our Picture of the Universe [ edit ] Ptolemy's Earth-centric model about the location of the planets, stars, and SunThe Universe could be expanding today because it was contracting in the past, and will contract again in the future, presenting an oscillating solution. In a hypertorus model of the Universe, motion in a straight line will return you to your original ... [+] location. If time is like a torus, it may be cyclical in nature, rather than having always existed or coming into existence a finite amount of time ago. We do not, even today, know the origin of time. ESO and deviantART user InTheStarlightGarden This section may be too long and excessively detailed. Please consider summarizing the material. ( January 2022) For a time, there were multiple competing ideas which were all consistent with the observations we had.

Cornelia Bargmann, David Botstein, Lewis C. Cantley, Hans Clevers, Titia de Lange, Napoleone Ferrara, Eric Lander, Charles Sawyers, Robert Weinberg, Shinya Yamanaka and Bert Vogelstein (2013) Whenever we think about anything, we apply our very human logic to it. If we want to know where the Big Bang came from, we describe it in the best terms we can, and then theorize about what could have caused it and set it up. We look for evidence to help us understand the Big Bang's beginnings. After all, that's where everything comes from: from the process that gave it its start. The thesis of the cosmological theory Hawking developed with his PhD student is that the origin of time is the Big Bang and that the laws of physics do not precede the Big Bang, but were born with the Big Bang. The main hypothesis of their work is that physics laws evolve with time, at least during the very first moment of the Universe and are not transcendant and immutable at the scale of the birth of our Universe as supposed by the theories of Newton and Einstein.

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The book's epigraph is "The question of origin hides the origin of the question", a sentence borrowed by Hertog from the Belgian poet François Jacquemin from Liège. In other words, as also stressed in an interview of Thomas Hertog, "The physical theory of the origin contains the origin of the theory". [3]

Yifang Wang, Kam-Biu Luk and the Daya Bay team, Atsuto Suzuki and the KamLAND team, Kōichirō Nishikawa and the K2K / T2K team, Arthur B. McDonald and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory team, Takaaki Kajita and Yōichirō Suzuki and the Super-Kamiokande team (2016) Saul Perlmutter and members of the Supernova Cosmology Project; Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess and members of the High-Z Supernova Team (2015)

But this severely alters our conceptions of how the Universe began. Earlier, I presented you a graph of how the size (or scale) of the Universe evolved with time. The graph displayed the differences between how the Universe would expand if it were dominated by matter (in red), radiation (in blue), or space itself (such as during inflation, in yellow) at early times. However, I wasn't completely honest with you in displaying that graph. James P. Allison, Mahlon DeLong, Michael N. Hall, Robert S. Langer, Richard P. Lifton and Alexander Varshavsky (2014)