Hello everyone, welcome to the Binescape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Stephen Hawking is known for any number of revolutionary advances in theoretical physics.

The singularity theorems that he did with Roger Penrose and others in the late 60s,

the evaporation and radiation from black holes in the mid 70s, and in the early 80s,

with Jim Hartle, he calculated the wave function of the universe to try to explain the creation of

the universe from nothing. But in 1988, Hawking revolutionized not theoretical physics,

but the scientific publishing industry, with the appearance of a brief history of time,

his surprise runaway bestseller. I was a little bit too young to take advantage of this,

but I'm told that in the late 80s, after brief history of time came out, if you were a theoretical

physicist with a book to write, you could get a million dollar advance, no problem. Not like that

anymore, but those were the days. Andre Lindey is a well-known cosmologist whose name will appear

again in this episode. He's also a mischievous guy and he likes to tell the story back in the late 80s,

he would be writing an airplane, sitting next to someone who was reading a brief history of time,

and Lindey would inevitably say, you know, I like the book, but I didn't really understand it,

and the person reading it would go, oh yeah, it's really not that hard, you just have to really

concentrate while you're reading it. But Hawking never gave up doing science, you know, he wrote more

books, but he also wrote a lot of technical papers in the published research literature,

and his views continued to evolve about how to do quantum cosmology, how to think about the nature

of the quantum universe. Today's guest Thomas Hurtog was one of Hawking's most frequent collaborators

in those years. He was a PhD student with Hawking and then continued to write papers with him,

and has now come out with his own book called On the Origin of Time, Stephen Hawking's final theory,

and it's a joint theory that he's describing between himself and Stephen. So we'll talk about that

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