“The problem for Hawking was his struggle to understand how the universe coul have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life,” says Hertog. “Stephen tol me he now thought he had been wrong, and so he and I worked, shoulder to shoulder, for the next 20 years to develop a new theory of the cosmos, one that could better account for the emergence of life.”
“It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of organizing entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics,” Hertog says.
Hawking and Hertog worked with this for over 20 years, and the result has just been published in their new bookThey found a deeper level of evolution in which
“The usual theory of eternal inflation predicts that globally our universe is like an infinite fractal, with a mosaic of different pocket universes, separated by an inflating ocean,” said Hawking in an interview in 2017.
“The problem with the usual account of eternal inflation is that it assumes an existing background universe that evolves according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity and treats the quantum effects as small fluctuations around this,” said Thomas Hertog. Thomas Hertog is a professor who worked with Hawking on his last paper. “However, the dynamics of eternal inflation wipes out the separation between classical and quantum physics. As a consequence, Einstein’s theory breaks down in eternal inflation.”
“We predict that our universe, on the largest scales, is reasonably smooth and globally finite. So it is not a fractal structure,” (Stephen Hawking).
Stephen Hawking saw that today’s physics could not be right. We can’t have specific theories for nuclear physics which do not work with astrophysics. A theory of physics should work on both nature’s smallest and nature’s larges components. Since quantum mechanics did not align with general relativity, he started working with unifying the theories. Late in his career he tried this through string theory.
Both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking thought our present physics could not be correct. They both spent years trying to make a unified theory of physics. Albert Einstein did not believe in quantum physics. Stephen Hawking tried through quantum physics with string theory to make this theory. None of them succeeded.
I wrote an article around this. Is general relativity outdated like Hawking says? Can string theory close the gap between nuclear and astrophysics?
https://lnkd.in/ddmQDui3 By: Bent Rolf Pettersen, 2023.