In the public’s mind, Stephen Hawking is a giant of 20th century science. He burst onto the popular stage with the 1988 publication of A Brief History of Time, which presented his esoteric ideas of evaporating black holes and the birth of the universe. It was an international bestseller, but given the complexity of its ideas, A Brief History has been called the most unread book of all time.
Hawking continued to explore the fundamental nature of the universe until his death in 2018. In a new book, On The Origin of Time, Belgian physicist Thomas Hertog unravels Hawking’s final theory, which focuses upon one of the biggest questions of all – just why our universe is the way it is.
