When Thomas Hertog first walked into Stephen Hawking’s office 25 years ago, the connection between the young Belgian researcher and the legendary British astrophysicist was immediately established. Their meeting marked the beginning of a long collaboration on the origin of the universe, writes AFP.

It was 1998, at Cambridge University. The already world-famous Stephen Hawking called a young researcher who became his doctoral student.

“We clicked,” says Thomas Hertog, a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. This connection was never interrupted, although Stephen Hawking, affected by Charcot disease, lost the ability to speak.

“The Last Theory” by Stephen Hawking.

For 20 years, they worked closely together and created a new vision that disrupted the way science understands the cosmos. This was the “last theory” of Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018 at the age of 76. Thomas Hertog first fully expounded this theory in his book On the Origin of Time, published in the spring of 2023 in Great Britain and France.

In an interview with AFP, the author talked about cooperation with his mentor and friend. He described how Hawking eventually realized that his seminal book, A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 10 million copies, was written “from the wrong point of view.”

The universe responds to “design”

From the very beginning, Hawking answered the question that worried him: “The universe we observe seems to be as intended.”

“The laws of physics turned out to be perfect for the universe to be habitable,” said Thomas Hertog.

This amazing chain of favorable circumstances extends from the delicate balance that allows atoms to form the molecules needed for chemistry to the expansion of the universe itself that allows massive structures such as galaxies to appear.

“Since its turbulent birth, the universe has emerged in a configuration strikingly suitable for the emergence of life – even if it did not appear until billions of years later,” the scientist writes.

“The great quagmire of paradoxes into which the multiverse drags us”

A fashionable answer to this conundrum is the “multiverse,” an idea that has recently become popular in movies as well. According to the 47-year-old cosmologist, the theory tries to explain the apparently patterned nature of the universe, seeing it as one of countless other universes that are “uninteresting, lifeless”.

But Hawking realized “the great quagmire of paradoxes into which the multiverse drags us.” The multiverse and even A Brief History of Time were “attempts to describe the creation and evolution of our universe from what Stephen would call a divine perspective,” Hertog continued. For 15 years, two scientists have turned to the strangeness of quantum theory to propose a new theory, starting from a different point of view.

“I thought it was over”

In 2008, Hawking lost the ability to use a voice synthesizer, further isolating himself. “I thought it was the end,” admits Hertog. But the two managed to develop a “little magical” non-verbal communication and continued their cooperation.

He sat in front of the physicist, asked him questions and looked into his eyes. Hawking “had a wide range of facial expressions, ranging from strong disagreement to maximum enthusiasm.” The connection was such that, according to the Belgian scientist, it was “impossible to distinguish” the ideas coming from him or from Hawking.

Their theory focuses on what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang. Rather than the next explosion of an existing set of rules, these two suggest that the laws of physics themselves evolved at the same time as the universe.

So if you go back far enough, “the laws of physics start to get simpler and disappear,” Hertog says. “In the end, even the dimension of time disappears.”

The laws of physics and time would develop like biological evolution – the title of his book refers to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

“Biology and physics are two levels of a great evolutionary process.” However, proving this theory is difficult because the early years of the universe remain “hidden in the mist of the Big Bang.” (Source: Agerpres)