On the Origin of Time

''A wonderful book about Stephen Hawking''s biggest legacy'' Spectator ''Truly mind-stretching... Immensely rewarding'' The Times ''This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos'' Sir Martin Rees Stephen Hawking''s closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar''s final thoughts on the universe. Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. In order to solve this mystery, Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse - countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to harbour life. Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen