Al Owski’s Reviews > On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory > Status Update
Al Owski
is on page 208 of 352
“We started out searching for a deeper explanation of the universe's fitness for life in the physical condition at the origin of time. But the quantum cosmology we developed to this suggests we were looking in the wrong direction. Top-down cosmology recognizes that, much like biology's tree of life, physics tree of laws outcome of a Darwinian-like evolution that can only be understood backward in time.”
— 4 hours, 21 min ago
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Al Owski
is on page 209 of 352
“In A Brief History of Time, the early (bottom-up) Hawking famously wrote, "Even if we do find a theory of everything, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations?" The answer of the later (top-down) Hawking was: observership. We create the universe as much as the universe creates us.”
— 4 hours, 16 min ago
Al Owski
is on page 207 of 352
“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. ”
— 15 hours, 0 min ago
Al Owski
is on page 207 of 352
“"I wrote in Brief History." I completed the thought for him: "that we are just a chemical scum on a medium-sized planet orbiting an average star in an ordinary galaxy." His eyebrows went up in assent. That was the old bottom-up Hawking appeared on the screen. From a God's-eye view we are but an irrelevant speck.”
— 15 hours, 4 min ago
Al Owski
is on page 198 of 352
“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.”
— Dec 22, 2025 11:37AM
Al Owski
is on page 196 of 352
“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.”
— Dec 21, 2025 06:19AM
Al Owski
is on page 194 of 352
“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.”
— Dec 21, 2025 06:17AM
Al Owski
is on page 194 of 352
“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.”
— Dec 21, 2025 06:16AM
Al Owski
is on page 189 of 352
“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…”
— Dec 21, 2025 06:10AM
Al Owski
is on page 189 of 352
“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…”
— Dec 21, 2025 06:09AM
Al Owski
is on page 189 of 352
“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.”
— Dec 21, 2025 05:34AM
