Hawking legacy could end doubts of multiverse

STEPHEN Hawking’s final research paper has been revealed – and it could hold the key to proving the existence of multiple universes.

Experts say the study may be the scientist’s most important legacy and would have put him in the running for a Nobel Prize had he lived.

The paper, which was completed on his deathbed, describes how we might detect the other universes that make up what he called the “multiverse”.

It was submitted two weeks ago and sets out the maths needed for a space probe to find experimental evidence for the theory that our universe is only one of many. Until now, scientists have never been able to test the theory.

Thomas Hertog, professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven University in Belgium, who co-wrote the paper, said yesterday: “This was Stephen: to boldly go where Star Trek fears to tread.”

The paper examines an issue that had puzzled Prof Hawking (right) since he jointly devised his 1983 “no-boundary” theory, which describes how the universe instantaneously exploded into existence with the Big Bang, through a process known as inflation. The problem for Prof Hawking was that the theory also predicted that “our” Big Bang was accompanied by an infinite number of others, each producing a separate universe.

“We wanted to transform the idea of a multiverse into a testable scientific framework,” Prof Hertog said. He met Prof Hawking shortly before his death last week to get final approval for the paper, A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation.

Carlos Frenk, professor of cosmology at Durham University, said: “The intriguing idea in Hawking’s paper is that (the multiverse) left its imprint on the background radiation permeating our universe and we could measure it with a detector on a spaceship.” He suggested the ship could be called the The Hawking Cosmic Probe.