Stephen Hawking's closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar's final thoughts on the cosmos-a dramatic revision of the theory he put forward in A Brief History of Time.

"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."-Lord Martin Rees

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 harbor life.

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 harbor life.

On the Origin of Time offers a striking new vision of the universe's birth that will profoundly transform the way we think about our place in the order of the cosmos and may ultimately prove to be Hawking's greatest legacy.