'A wonderful book about Stephen Hawking's biggest legacy' Spectator 'Truly mind-stretching...
Immensely rewarding' The Times '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' Sir Martin Rees Stephen Hawking's closest collaborator offers the
intellectual superstar's final thoughts on the universe. 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 harbour 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
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. Instant Sunday Times
bestseller April 2023
