![]() But eventually Hawking and Roger Penrose proved Lemaître right.Įver since, the origin of time has been the cornerstone, but also the Achilles’ heel of Big Bang cosmology. Albert Einstein famously rejected it, because it reminded him of Christian dogma. The idea that time had a beginning in a Big Bang was championed in the early 1930s by the Belgian priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître. He made us feel as if we were writing our own creation story, which, in a sense, we did. ![]() Being around him, one could not fail to be influenced by his determination and by his epistemic optimism that we could tackle these mystifying cosmic questions. Our shared scientific quest meant that inevitably we grew close. After all, the prospect – or hope – of being able to crack the riddle of cosmic design drove much of his work. Yet this was exactly where Hawking liked to venture. Such questions take physics far out of its comfort zone. What are we to make of this mysterious appearance of intent? The enigma at the centre of our research throughout this period was how the Big Bang could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. What started out as a doctoral project evolved over some 20 years into an intense collaboration that ended only with his passing five years ago on March 14, 2018. In 1998 Stephen Hawking took me on as his PhD student “to work on a quantum theory of the Big Bang”. The Universe is a hologram: Stephen Hawking's final theory, explained by his closest collaborator ![]()
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