He completed his multiverse theory just two weeks before his death.
A research paper completed by Stephen Hawking just a fortnight before he passed away at his home in Cambridge reveals his prediction for how the world will end, and would have won him the Nobel Prize, according to his co-author.
Named “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation”, the paper was written with Thomas Herzog, who is professor for theoretical psychics at KU Leuven University in Belgium. Herzog is certain Hawking would have taken home the award for contributions to the advancement of science, telling the Sunday Times: “He would have won it. He was often nominated for the Nobel Prize and should have won it. Now he never can.”
The work details, through groundbreaking mathematics, how multiple universes could be discovered using a probe on a spaceship, and also reveals how Hawking believed that the universe would end – eventually fading into complete blackness as the stars run out of energy. Hawking believes that the multiverse’s creation has left background information permeating on our own universe, meaning it could be analysed with a detector.
Hawking was bothered by the question of the multiverse theory for a number of years, having detailed his ‘no boundary theory’ back in 1983 alongside James Hartle. This described how the earth came into being through the Big Bang, but also predicted that the event would have been accompanied by numerous other ‘Big Bangs’, therefore creating the multiverse.
Carlos Frenk, who is a professor of Cosmology at the University of Durham, has argued that the work is exactly “what cosmology needed”, stating that finding the evidence would completely change our perception of the cosmos. He also told the Sunday Times that the prospect of finding existence of another universe is “breathtaking” .
It is currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal and may well prove the astrophysicist’s most important scientific discovery, no small feat considering the remarkable body of work he has left behind.
