Preface
Early and Later Hawking Perspectives
The above image centered between the two arrows can be found on page 144 of On the Origin of Time by Thomas Hertog**. The bottom of this illustration just below the three dashed vertical line is the universe before the Big Bang exploded into it’s current state of expansion. I will try to briefly explain what I think Stephen Hawking meant when He said: “I have changed my mind. [A] Brief History [of Time] is written from the wrong perspective.” (Page 166.)
A Brief History of Time was written from the bottom-up perspective indicated by the arrow on the right pointing up from the universe before the Big Bang. Hawking’s perspective is now from the top-down indicated by the arrow on the left pointing from the branching that occurred during the moments of disrupting the symmetry of the universe as the expansion exploded into the 5 headings at the top of this illustration. There are more branches that have occurred, but these appear to be the critical developments. The right side of this illustration depicts the classical approach toward exploring physics. The bottom of page 167 explains the perspective of that classical perspective:
. . . by conceiving Earth and the planets as if he were hovering high above them, Copernicus ushered in a revolutionary new way of thinking about the cosmos and our place in it. He discovered what one might call the Archimedean point in physics and astronomy, the idea that there is a distant viewpoint from which it is possible to leverage an objective understanding. (On the Origin of Time, p. 167.)
The Archimedean point of view of classical physics has fallen away because no scientist can view the universe from outside of it. Every one and every thing is inside the universe; therefor, the actual perspective of scientists is within the universe and, specifically, after all of the current branching has taken place. Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time from that classical (Archimedean) point of view.
Quantum mechanics appears to me to be an important development that lead to the correction away from the bottom-up approach to the more accurate top-down approach in physics and in the exploration of astronomy. Page 198 summarizes the differences between the top-down and the bottom-up approaches to physics.
…the bottom up strategy … Start with a nugget of space …apply the everlasting objective laws (or metalaws) …watch the universe (multiverse) evolve …hope it comes out something like the one we live in …commonly employed from laboratory experiments and to classical cosmology.
The first bottom-up attempt to untangle the riddle of the design was to search for a profound mathematical truth at the kernel of existence.
The second line of attack …also relied on the timeless metalaws …augmented with the anthropic selection of a habitable island universe.
…top-down cosmology turns the riddle of design upside down …it mixes the ingredients in a very different order. …Look around you; identify as many law-like patterns …as you can; use these to construct histories of the universe …add them together to create your past. …prioritizes the historical nature of everything. ….deep down at the quantum level, a tangible universe and observership are tied together.
Top-down cosmology is the change in the perspective employed by Hawking in On the Origin of Time over the bottom-up cosmology from which A Brief History of Time was written. Scientific observations are, now and always, perceived from within the universe not outside of it. Hence, observership (the observer) is now always a factor that must be an integral element to be integrated into the scientific experiment whereas the old, classical strategy is to put the observer outside of the experimental action as if from a god’s view of the observation and not as a participant in the outcome of what is being observed.
**© 2023 published by Batam Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC in New York.