Thursday, November 12, 2026, 16:00
WBGB/019
Thomas Hertog, KU Leuven
Abstract:
Perhaps the deepest question Stephen Hawking pursued throughout his extraordinary career was how the universe could have evolved to become so remarkably hospitable to life. Working shoulder to shoulder, Hawking and I developed a fresh vision of the universe’s birth that could account for its biophyllic design. Venturing back to the Big Bang, we were led to the startling possibility that the universe in its earliest stages may have undergone a deeper level of evolution, in which the laws of physics themselves transform and simplify, until familiar notions of particles, forces and even time begin to dissolve.
In this colloquium, I first recount our quest to get a grips on the origin of time, and the bold new take on some of the universe’s fundamentals we were led to. I then turn to an exciting new observational frontier: ESA's LISA mission, the space-based gravitational-wave observatory scheduled for launch in the mid-2030s. By listening to gravitational waves from the distant cosmic past, LISA may allow us to uncover relics of the universe's earliest moments — opening an unprecedented window onto the physics of the Big Bang.