For some reason, BBC fed me an
April interview with Hertog about his new book,
On the Origin of Time. The article was very shallow, so I looked for other reviews and introductions to this theory and found a few good ones:
Vinita Srivastava's article in The Conversation and
a 2018 editorial on phys.org about the
Hertog-Hawking "A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?" recent paper on this new
top-down cosmology theory. The editorial even hints that new theory might be
falsifiable (not an easy feat for grand cosmological theories).
While digging around Stephen Hawking's thinking evolution from his
A Brief History of Time to the new theory, I found out that Hawking thought that philosophy is dead (since scientists make it obsolete). I found this idea of his highly ironic and unnecessary given that most scientists are mere cogs and only few of the governors of the scientific machinery get glimpses at the true nature of things (and then philosophize about it since they rarely propose truly 100% falsifiable theories).