Al Owski’s Reviews > On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory > Status Update

“Finally his screen lit up and clicking resumed, slowly this time. "With [a] top-down [approach] we put humankind back in the center [of cosmological theory] Interestingly, this is what gives us control." "In a quantum universe we switch on the light", I added. ”

“Look around you; identify as many law-like patterns in your data as you can; use these to construct histories of the universe ending up like the one you observe; add them together to create your past. So, instead of a background of absolutes, top-down cosmology prioritizes the historical nature of everything.”

“Far-fetched in his time, Wheeler's vision of a participatory universe would wind up as a centerpiece of our top-down cosmology forty years later. Hawking took Wheeler's observer's participance seriously—very seriously and applied it not just to retroactively determine the paths of quantum particles but of the universe as a whole.”

“The delayed-choice experiment illustrates vividly and strikingly that the process of observation in quantum mechanics introduces a subtle form of teleology into physics, a backward-in-time component.”

“the unobserved past in quantum mechanics exists as a spectrum of possibilities only—a wave function. Much like electrons or radioactive decay particles, fuzzy photon wave functions morph into a definite reality only when the future to which they give rise has been fully settled, i.e., observed.”

“We are, of course, all too familiar with backward-in-time reasoning from thinking about other layers of evolution, from biological evolution to human history. I briefly described in chapter 1 how history at all levels is shaped by the chance outcomes of countless branching events. These frozen accidents add a retrospective component to the study of history…”

“history at the very deepest level emerges backward in time. It is as if a constant flux of quantum acts of observation retroactively carves out the outcome of the big bang, from the number of dimensions that grow large to the types of forces and particles that arise. This renders the past contingent on the present, a further reduction of causality…”

“observership in quantum cosmology isn't a mere afterthought or an anthropic post-selection principle acting in a giant preexisting multiverse, but an agency operating at a deeper level, an indispensable part of the continual process through which physical reality—and physical theory, we argue—come about.”

“Whereas Bohr argued that all but one outcome survives, Everett claimed this is only the view from within a given branch of history.”

“The universe we see around us, this branch of reality, is the collective result of innumerable such environmental acts of observation. Having registered and built upon countless chance outcomes, over a period of billions of years, each contributing a few bits of information to our branch of history, this is how the world around us has acquired its specificity.”