Hawking’s final theory – the universe is a hologram

STEPHEN HAWKING has revealed from beyond the grave his final scientific theory – that the universe is a hologram.

The physicist, who died on March 14, has challenged previous theories of cosmic “inflation” and the “multiverse” in a new paper, published in the Journal Of High Energy Physics,

Scientists generally believe that for a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded incredibly rapidly before settling into its present state, filled with stars and galaxies – the inflation theory.

But some have proposed that, on a grander global scale, inflation goes on forever, giving rise to a “multiverse” – a number of different universes with their own laws of physics.

Prof Hawking was always troubled by this idea, which at a fundamental level cannot be reconciled with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. In an interview last year he said: “I have never been a fan of the multiverse.”

Working with Prof Thomas Hertog, a Belgian colleague, Prof Hawking extended the notion of a holographic reality to explain how the universe came into being from the moment of the Big Bang. The new theory embraces the strange concept that the universe is like a vast and complex hologram.

In other words, 3D reality is an illusion, and that the apparently “solid” world around us – and the dimension of time – is projected from information stored on a 2D surface.

Prof Hertog, from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KT Leuven), said: “It’s a very precise mathematical notion of holography that has come out of string theory in the last few years which is not fully understood but is mind-boggling and changes the scene completely.”