Stephen Hawking had completed new multiverse theory just before dying

Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) was an inspiration to countless people, didn't shy away from speaking against imperialism and, of course, expanded the limits of human knowledge. To cement this latter part of his legacy, it has now been reported that he had finalized a new theoretical paper—entitled A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?—a mere couple of weeks before his death. The co-author of this new work, Leuven University's Prof. Thomas Hertog, has been quoted by The Sunday Times saying this work could have very well earned Hawking a Nobel Prize.

The new paper deals with the process of cosmological "inflation," a period occurring, and lasting for, fractions of a second after the Big Bang, where the universe expanded at an epic exponential rate before slowing down to its current rate of expansion. But that is not all, an hypothetical "eternal inflation" model predicts that in a weird quantum fashion, inflation is actually eternal in most of the universe and that an infinite number of parallel universes would emerge, making our universe part of a multiverse.

Eternal inflation not only remains a hypothesis, but you would have been hard-pressed to find anybody claiming to have a good way of actually testing it, no matter how consistent the math behind it... that is until the new Hawking-Hertog paper which is currently undergoing peer review. In it, the scientists hypothesize that eternal inflation does not necessarily produce an infinite multiverse, but rather a finite one and that evidence of the multiverse could be obtained with a space probe.

The reduction in the number of possible universes has implications for the anthropic principle, a philosophical view attempting to explain the apparent "fine-tuning" of the universe to human life. The idea is that if there are infinite universes with varying fundamental constants, then it stands to reason that at least some of the universes would be compatible with the evolution of human life, and that those humans would look at their universe and wonder at how fine-tuned it is for them... when in fact their universe is just one possibility among, ostensibly, an infinite number. In other words, any creature evolving in any particular universe would wonder how their universe is "fine-tuned" to the emergence of their own particular biology.

Read more here:

"Stephen Hawking's 'breathtaking' final multiverse theory completed two weeks before he died" at The Telegraph

"Stephen Hawking’s parting shot is multi-cosmic" at The Sunday Times [BEHIND PAYWALL]

Original scientific article (still under peer review as of March 19th, 2018) here:

A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation? at arXiv