文档介绍：Global Knowledge Foundation
THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Stephen Hawking
The following is a summary of Stephen Hawking's talk as printed by The Bulletin of the University of
Toronto.
On April 29, 1980, I gave my inaugural lecture as the Lucasian Professor
of mathematics at Cambridge. My title was, Is the End in Sight for
Theoretical Physics? I described the progress we had already made in the
last hundred years in understanding the universe and asked what the
chances were that we would find plete unified theory of everything
by the end of the century. Well, the end of the century is almost here.
Although we e a long way, particularly in the last three years, it
doesn’t look as if we are going to quite make it.
In my 1980 lecture I described how we had broken down the problem of finding a theory of
everything into a number of more manageable parts. First of all we had divided the
description of the universe around us into two parts. One part is a set of local laws that tell us
how each region of the universe evolves in time, if we know its initial state, and how it is
affected by other regions. The other part is a set of what are called boundary conditions.
These specify what happens at the edge of space and time. They determine how the universe
begins and, maybe, how it ends. Many people, including probably a majority of physicists,
feel that the task