Think of two big ideas meeting. The first comes from Thomas Hertog and Stephen Hawking. Their picture of the early universe says: at the very beginning, there isn’t a sharp “first moment” with fixed rules. There’s a kind of quantum fog—many possible ways the cosmos could unfold. As the universe grows, some patterns become stable and copyable, and we get the familiar, steady laws of physics we measure today. Hertog (with Hawking) adopt a worm’s-eye tube perspective where origin, evolution, and observership are connected.
The second idea comes from Kurt Gödel. Gödel thought mathematics isn’t just a human game; it’s a real, timeless landscape of truths. He also showed that no single neat set of rules can capture all mathematical truth—there will always be true statements that sit beyond any finite axiom list. And he suspected that time, as we feel it flowing, isn’t fundamental. Reality, deep down, may be more like a whole—the way an entire novel exists at once, even if we read it page by page.
How do these ideas fit together? Here’s a simple way to see it.
Picture a timeless library that holds every consistent mathematical blueprint for a universe—every geometry, every set of forces, every possible “law book,” and even every full history that could exist. The library itself doesn’t change. That’s Gödel’s realm: all at once, outside of time.
Now picture a single route traced through that library: that route is our universe. As you move along it, time shows up as an ordering of events; things happen; memories accumulate. Early on, the route passes through the “quantum fog” sections of the library, where many alternatives overlap. Later, the route enters chapters where familiar, stable rules dominate—gravity behaves the way we expect, atoms keep their structure, stars form, chemistry works. The rules haven’t changed in the library; what’s changed is which part of the library our route is running through. That’s the Hertog–Hawking story: along the route, laws become effectively fixed for us.
There’s another twist in their picture: top-down selection. The facts we observe now—say, that galaxies exist and carbon chemistry works—act like clues at the end of a mystery novel. Knowing the final chapter narrows which earlier chapters could have led here. In physics terms, our present data “filter” the space of possible beginnings. Out of all the early quantum possibilities, only those compatible with what we see survive as serious candidates for our past. This isn’t magic; it’s just conditional reasoning writ large.
Where do observers fit in? Climb the “ladder of observership,” from physics to culture.
At the bottom, quantum systems bump into their surroundings and leave traces. Most delicate quantum states wash out, but a few sturdy patterns survive and can be copied again and again. That copying—called decoherence in technical language—builds the common, classical world we agree on.
Life evolves to read those traces. Eyes catch photons, ears catch pressure waves, noses catch chemicals. Creatures compress huge streams of raw data into simple cues: light means day, a smell means food, a shadow means danger.
Brains go further: they predict. They build inner models, compare expectations with what actually happens, and update. Attention and consciousness feel like the control panel for that ceaseless modeling. Minds don’t just register; they guess, test, and learn.
At the top, science and mathematics supercharge this basic loop. We build instruments that stretch our senses. We share methods that make facts stable across people and places. And we craft symbols—equations and concepts—that capture deep regularities with amazing economy. In short, observers are not outside the story. They’re a late, powerful part of how one branch of the library becomes legible and law-like.
What about Gödel’s famous limits? They give us a gentle warning. If mathematics is deeper than any one tidy axiom list, then we should not expect a final, small “theory of everything” that explains all facts once and for all. Instead, we should expect a framework that tells us how to weigh possible histories and why certain patterns dominate in worlds like ours. Inside that framework, our “laws” will be incredibly good—good enough to land probes on comets and design microchips—but still effective and regime-bound. Push into extremes—the very early universe, the inside of black holes—and some of those laws may bend or give way to a more general description. Think of this as a Gödel-shaped horizon on our explanations: there’s always a wider view.
This also softens the old fight about time. At the library level, nothing flows; the whole structure simply is. Along our route, time is as real as anything—memories pile up, entropy grows, arrows point from past to future. Both views can be true at once because they speak about different levels: the map (timeless) and the journey (time-full).
Put together, the story runs like this. The basic furniture of reality is mathematical and inexhaustible. Our universe is one realized path through that furniture. Early on, the path runs through a region where anything that can happen, does—fuzzily. As patterns settle and can be copied, the world turns classical and the laws we know “lock in.” Observers arise inside this stabilized world. They read records, build models, and, with science and math, manage to say an astonishing amount about their corner of the library, even while a final, complete encyclopedia remains out of reach.
So the picture is simple, if large. A timeless library of possibilities; a path that becomes our world; laws that harden as patterns settle; observers who climb from raw records to science; and a reminder from Gödel that there will always be more shelves left to explore.