Thomas Hertog, Stephen Hawking's closest associate, talks ''On the Origin of Time'' (video)

The Sofia Science Festival has started, and with it came the new edition of the revolutionary book "On the Origin of Time. The Last Theory of Stephen Hawking" by Stephen Hawking's closest collaborator and biographer - Thomas Hertog.

The world-famous scientist arrived in Sofia in an unusual way - by night train from Istanbul and first gave an interview to Iskra Angelova and OFFNews, for which we are especially grateful to "Beautiful Science" and Lubov Kostova.

Thomas Hertog met the Sofia audience on Saturday, May 11, at 7:00 pm, when he signed books, and gave his absolutely astonishing lecture at 8:30 pm in the Cosmos Hall of Sofia Tech Park. He presented in a very in depth and the same time accessible, impressively visualized and smooth, smart, interesting way a completely different perspective on the history of the universe, the origin of time and the laws of physics.

Pleasant, polite and very open, Hertog cannot fall into the typical cliché of a scientist - he freely communicates, assumes different hypotheses, passionately argues his unusual views and reflects with pleasure for more than an hour. A conversation with him is a feast for the mind. The interview treats many interesting issues - both Hawking's personality itself, his way of communicating, the non-verbal contact the two of them developed in the later years of their close collaboration, which lasted 25 years, and their revolutionary theory about the origin of the world, time and our (supposedly) single intelligent and evolved species in the universe... About God or his absence. How philosophy enters science. About the art of the exact sciences. About artificial intelligence and the likelihood of our self-destruction as a species. As well as about the inexplicable and pure genius of Stephen Hawking himself, and the freedom of his mind, imprisoned in the cage of a body utterly inadequate, diseased and impervious to the commands of his brain.

Thomas Hertog has been by his side all these years, and together the two have worked on Hawking's theory of the Origin of Time. All the way back to the creation of the world and the primordial explosion known as the Big Bang.

You can see the entire conversation in the video, and for more videos like this, subscribe to the OFFNews YouTube channel. The video with the Bulgarian translation you can watch HERE.

Want to know more?

Thomas Hertog is a Belgian cosmologist at KU Leuven and a long-time major collaborator of Professor Stephen Hawking.

Thomas Hertog was born on May 27, 1975. He graduated with honors from KU Leuven in 1997 with a Master's degree in Physics. He obtained his MSc at the University of Cambridge and defended his PhD at Cambridge with a thesis on the origin of cosmic expansion under the supervision of Stephen Hawking.

Hertog had the opportunity to conduct research with Stephen Hawking on cosmic inflation, a branch of the Big Bang theory.

He then worked as a researcher at the University of California - Santa Barbara in the United States and at the University of Paris VII in France. In 2005, he became a research fellow at CERN in Geneva. In October 2011, Hertog was appointed professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Leuven through the Flemish government's Odysseus programme. He leads a research group that studies the relationship between the Big Bang and string theory with the idea that concepts such as space and time lose their meaning. He also emphasized Georges Lemaître's insight that the Big Bang was central to Einstein's gravitational waves. Hertog worked in quantum cosmology and string theory with James Hartle and Stephen Hawking. In 2011, after many years of research, they came to a new insight by combining the mathematics of quantum cosmology and that of string theory. in 2018, he published "A smooth exit from eternal inflation?" with Stephen Hawking.

Books by Thomas Hertog:

Hertog, Thomas; Baert, Barbara; Van de Stock, Jan (2021). Big Bang: Imagining the Universe
Hertog, Thomas (2023). On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory

Based on his work with Stephen Hawking over the last 25 years of his life and together with him, Hertog continues to build a new theory about the origin of the world. According to Stephen Hawking's last theory, scientists, including Hawking himself, have long viewed the universe in the wrong way. They have tried to study it as if they were outside observers - from the perspective of almost gods, outside of time and space. "It's time to stop pretending to be God," Hawking used to say. "For how can we observe something from the side if we are part of the thing?"

In his book, Hertog describes precisely the thrilling moment of epiphany when Hawking discovered his error, and the hard years of research, of revolutionary perspective shifting, in which the two scientists together traced the history of the universe from a very different perspective.

Assoc. professor Kiril Hristov (who helped big time with the translation to Bulgarian, but is cut from this edited version) was born in Sofia in 1985, graduated from NPMG, in Physics class in 2003. He completed his higher education in Germany and the Netherlands, where he also defended his PhD. After further specialization in Italy, since 2015 he has been living in Sofia and working at the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, BAS. Since 2020, he is also an associate professor (i.e. lecturer) at the Faculty of Physics, Sofia University.

His research and specific knowledge is in the field of theoretical physics, in particular black holes and quantum effects in gravity as part of string theory.

Iskra Angelova is a Bulgarian television journalist, producer, writer and actress. She is a Fulbright scholar with MA degrees in literature from Sofia University, in acting from the National Theatre and Film Academy in Sofia and in broadcast journalism from Emerson College in Boston, USA. She has worked as an associate producer for the CBS morning show in New York. Since 2000, she has created, produced and hosted her own original shows on private and public national television in Bulgaria. For 14 years her evening cultural talk show Night Birds (Нощни птици) has been one of the highest-rated and loved shows on Bulgarian national television. In it Iskra has interviewed guests from the Bulgarian cultural, political and social elite, as well as, among many others, directors Wim Wenders and Andrei Konchalovsky, writers Elif Shafak and Frederic Beigbeder, the creator of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, the Bulgarian-French intellectual star in semiotics and psychoanalysis Julia Krasteva, John Lawton from Uriah Heep, actors like Sergio Castelitto and John Savage and many others. Since her show was censored and stopped by the political status quo in 2019, Iskra was in comma, but lived and she works for the free online media OFFNews as a columnist, cultural journalist and editor. With her production company Wonderland productions she made 24 short documentaries for them in 2023 and more recently hosts editions of their podcast. She has 1st prize at National Olympiad in Literature, Fulbright special achievement scholarship, Award for special contribution to Bulgarian journalism by Union of Bulgarian Journalists, recently she won the 1st prize at International TV and Film Festival NEM at Zagreb with her original idea for documentary unscripted series about kids, reading, fairy tales, travel and cooking Eat a Book, which she wrote with and for her daughter Alice. 

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The Sofia Science Festival had many exhibitions, workshops and demonstrations. The festival is a four-day event organized by the Beautiful Science Foundation.

The organizers point out that already in March they received applications for participation from 2500 students from dozens of schools in Sofia, Samokov, Pirdop, Zlatitsa and other villages close to the capital.

During the four days there were many lectures by scientists from Bulgaria, Austria, Belgium, Spain, China, Portugal, Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, France and the USA.

Scientists from CERN answered questions about Bulgarian participation and global developments. The Belgian cosmologist prof. Thomas Hertog as well as prof. Nikolai Bobev, professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), where he teaches and does research in fundamental theoretical physics were among them.

Dr. Humberto Campins, who is a member of NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission that brought the asteroid sample back to Earth in 2023, also joined by video link.

In addition to the foreign scientists, the festival featured young and established Bulgarian scientists, and it is these face-to-face meetings with scientists, that are one of the most valuable things the public can enjoy.

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