NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stephen Hawking’s closest collaborator offers the intellectual
superstar’s final thoughts on the cosmos—a dramatic revision of the theory he put forward in A
Brief History of Time . “This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary
individual the creative process and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the
cosmos.”—Lord Martin Rees Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his
extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable
to life. In order to solve this mystery Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe
but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a
multiverse—countless different universes most of which would be far too bizarre to harbor
life. Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge Stephen Hawking and his
friend and collaborator Thomas Hertog worked on this problem for twenty years developing a new
theory of the cosmos that could account for the emergence of life. Peering into the extreme
quantum physics of cosmic holograms and venturing far back in time to our deepest roots they
were startled to find a deeper level of evolution in which the physical laws themselves
transform and simplify until particles forces and even time itself fades away. This discovery
led them to a revolutionary idea: The laws of physics are not set in stone but are born and
co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape. As Hawking’s final days drew near the two
collaborators published their theory which proposed a radical new Darwinian perspective on the
origins of our universe. On the Origin of Time offers a striking new vision of the universe’s
birth that will profoundly transform the way we think about our place in the order of the
cosmos and may ultimately prove to be Hawking’s greatest legacy.
