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

“The early…Hawking regarded the no-boundary proposal as a description of the creation of the universe from nothing. In those days, Stephen strove to give a fundamentally causal explanation of the universe's origin: why, not how. But holography advances a more radical interpretation of his theory. [It] shows that what Stephen's time-turns-into-space transition is… that physics itself fades away…back into the big bang”

“Holography paints a universe that is being continually created. It is as if there is a code, operating on countless entangled qubits, that brings about physical reality, and this is what we perceive as the flow of time. In this sense holography places the true origin of the universe in the distant future, because only the far future would reveal the hologram in its full glory.”

“Holography tightens the top-down triptych into a unifying knot that constitutes a genuinely novel framework for prediction. First, by excising time from our list of fundamentals, it fuses dynamics with boundary conditions. Second, by placing holographic entanglement prior to spacetime, it integrates observership.”

“holography seals the top-down approach to cosmology. The central tenet of holographic cosmology—that the past projects from a web of entangled quantum particles that form a lower-dimensional hologram—implies a top-down view of the universe. If, as holographic cosmology posits, the surface of our observations is in some sense all there is, then this builds in the backward-in-time operation…”

“However, the later Stephen went further, much further, and took us from imaginary time to no time at all. Exploiting the holographic properties of gravity, we came to envisage the boundary of the disk as a hologram made of entangled qubits from which the interior spacetime-our past history-projects down. Holographic cosmology builds in a top-down view in which the past is in some sense contingent on the present.”

“To get a grip on its quantum origin, the early Stephen, in the 1980s, conceived of the universe in imaginary time. Thinking in imaginary time, all dimensions behave as directions of space, two of which are shown here. The origin of the universe lies at the center of the disk and it expands outward in the radial (imaginary-time) di-rection. The universe today corresponds to the circular boundary.”

“Even though much remains to be learned before we will be able to recount a black hole's history by reading its ashes—the Hawking radiation-many theorists now agree that there is no longer a real paradox. Moreover, I'd argue that this development is something entirely different. Moving from a single spacetime to emergent spacetimes has truly foundational implications.”

“Einstein showed that gravity is a manifestation of warped spacetime. Holography goes further and postulates that warped spacetime is woven from quantum entanglement.”

“entanglement between the inside and the outside of an evaporating black hole can be thought of as generating a wormhole stretching across the horizon. It is as if the particles of Hawking radiation together with their antiparticle partners behind the horizon collectively sew their own space-time bridge, transforming an old black hole from a hermit kingdom into sort of drive-through.”

“a quantum mechanical link... Physicists say they remain "entangled." The entanglement means that if you measure the emitted radiation on its own, it looks like random thermal radiation. But if one were able to consider the members of the pairs jointly, one would find that they do contain information encoded in fine correlations that interlink their individual properties.”