A final theory developed by master theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking just two weeks prior to his death has been revealed. Hawking’s last piece of academic work outlined revolutionary mathematics required for a spacecraft to locate traces of multiple big bangs. Using special probes attached to spaceships, scientists could find alternate universes, enabling us to further understand our own universe.
The new research unravels the issue raised by Hawking’s 1983 ‘no-boundary’ theory, which detailed how the big bang led to the creation of the universe. It also suggested that there were a number of big bangs, each of which created their own universe, referred to in sum as a ‘multiverse’. This multiverse proved impossible to measure, however, presenting a mathematical paradox.
Professor of Cosmology at Durham University, Carlos Frenk, explains the importance of Hawking’s latest discovery. “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”, The Telegraph reports. “These ideas offer the breathtaking prospect of finding evidence for the existence of another universe.”
Worryingly, Hawking’s final research also predicted that the stars will eventually run out of energy and disappear, causing the universe to end. The paper, named ‘A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation’ is currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal and could turn out to be Hawking’s greatest scientific discovery ever.
Hawking, who suffered from a rare form of motor neurone disease since 1964, passed away last Wednesday at the age of 76.