Hawking’s final theory finished just two weeks before he died
STEPHEN HAWKING had completed a final theory, explaining how man might detect parallel universes, just two weeks before he died, it has emerged.
Colleagues have revealed the renowned theoretical physicist’s final academic work was to set out the ground-breaking mathematics needed for a spaceship to find traces of multiple big bangs.
Currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal, the paper, A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation, may turn out to be Hawking’s most important scientific legacy. It seeks to resolve an issue thrown up by his 1983 “no-boundary” theory, which described how the Universe burst into existence with the Big Bang.
It also theorises an infinite number of big bangs, each creating their own universe, a “multiverse”, which presents a mathematical paradox because it is seemingly impossible to measure.
Carlos Frenk, professor of cosmology at Durham University, told The Sunday Times: “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.
“These ideas offer the breathtaking prospect of finding evidence for the existence of other universes.”
Prof Thomas Hertog, from KU Leuven University, in Belgium, worked with Hawking on the theory and met him two weeks ago to discuss its final approval. “This was Stephen: to boldly go where Star Trek fears to tread,” he said. “He has often been nominated for the Nobel and should have won it. Now he never can.”
Hawking’s final work also has the depressing prediction that the Universe will ultimately fade into blackness as stars simply run out of energy.
Hawking died last Wednesday in Cambridge at the age of 76, having suffered from a rare form of motor neurone disease since 1964.