Stephen Hawking ’s Last Paper Was Just Published. Here’s What He Says About the Cosmos

(NEW YORK) — Weeks after his death, physicist Stephen Hawking has delivered his last thoughts about the nature of the cosmos, and he says it may be simpler than often believed.
Well, simpler if you understand theoretical physics, anyway. It remains incomprehensible for the rest of us.
A paper that outlines his view, written with Thomas Hertog of the University of Leuven in Belgium before Hawking’s death in March, has been published by the Journal of High Energy Physics. Hertog had announced the new theory last year at a conference celebrating Hawking’s 75th birthday.
The University of Cambridge, where Hawking worked, announced the publication on Wednesday.

Here’s a very simplified version of what it says. First, some background.
Scientists believe our universe sprang into existence with the Big Bang, followed by an unimaginably rapid expansion known as inflation. Within our observable universe, inflation ended long ago.
But some ideas of inflation say it never stops, persisting in other regions of the cosmos forever. This eternal inflation produces a “multiverse,” a collection of pocket universes of which our own universe is just one.
There may be an infinite number of these pocket universes. If they’re all very different, then how typical is the universe we live in, where scientists make their observations?
That’s a key question for understanding the fundamental laws of nature, and finding a way to estimate what types of unive...

Source: TIME: Science - May 2, 2018 Category: Science Authors: Malcom Ritter / AP Tags: Uncategorized onetime Physics Stephen Hawking Source Type: news