Stephen Hawking submitted a final scientific paper 2 weeks before he died — and it could lead to the discovery of a parallel universe

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image for Stephen Hawking submitted a final scientific paper 2 weeks before he died — and it could lead to the discovery of a parallel universe

Stephen Hawking announcing a space-exploration project in 2016. AP

Stephen Hawking is named as coauthor on a paper submitted March 4 — 10 days before he died.

It sets out a way of testing whether other universes are real.

Its mathematical theories could be tested with a deep-space probe.

Stephen Hawking submitted his final scientific paper just a week and a half before he died, and it lays the theoretical groundwork for discovering a parallel universe.

Hawking, who died Wednesday at 76, was coauthor to a mathematical paper that seeks proof of the "multiverse" theory, which posits the existence of many universes other than our own.

The paper, called "A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation," had its latest revisions approved March 4, 10 days before Hawking's death.

According to the Sunday Times newspaper, the paper is due to be published by an unnamed "leading journal" after a review is complete.

ArXiv.org, the Cornell University website that tracks scientific papers before they are published, has a record of the paper including the March 2018 update.

According to The Sunday Times, the paper sets out the mathematics necessary for a deep-space probe to collect evidence that might prove that other universes exist.

The highly theoretical work posits that evidence of the multiverse should be measurable in background radiation dating to the beginning of time. This in turn could be measured by a deep-space probe with the right sensors.

Thomas Hertog, a physics professor who coauthored the paper with Hawking, said the paper aimed "to transform the idea of a multiverse into a testable scientific framework."

Hertog, who works at KU Leuven University in Belgium, told The Sunday Times he met with Hawking in person to get final approval before submitting the paper.

The newspaper said that if such proof were ever found, it would make the scientists behind it likely candidates for a Nobel Prize.

However, since Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously, Hawking would be ineligible to receive it.

cantgetno197 on March 19th, 2018 at 09:53 UTC »

For Christ's sake, this is all over the place. They literally just took the last paper he published and decided they wanted to make it out as the most amazing paper ever despite having no knowledge of what it's even about or the fact that it seems a fairly typical paper for him:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/publications.html

It could have literally been a paper about the Price of Rice in China and schlocky "science" "news" outfits would make it out as "potentially" the most important work ever conducted by mankind (also, you know, potentially not).

That's not me taking a swipe at Hawking, just pointing out that when it comes to "science" "journalism" no journalism is too yellow and it's totally acceptable to just make shit up if you think it'll be a good story.

You can just imagine the tone-deaf, cynical conversation that produces these shitty headlines. "Henderson, people are really into Hawking right now, what was the last paper he published?", "I have no idea what it is, something about conformal field theories???", "Right, it say here multiverse, let's call it about that, alternate realities and stuff!", "I don't think that's right sir", "Shut it Henderson, people love this shit, we'll say it was Nobel Prize worthy! Brilliant disabled scientist had the answer to the universe but died too soon to tell us!", "But sir, he did publish it. Oh, and there's a co-author, Thomas Herlog, if we're going to arbitrarily decide, based on no knowledge of the content, that this paper is revolutionary, should we track him down and give him mention?", "What? Who the hell is Herlog? Isn't he a director? No, no one cares about Herzog, it's Hawking only and he saved the world with whatever it's about.", "conformal field theories, sir", "Right, conformed theories in fields".

Am I the only one who finds articles like this disgraceful?

ErikGryphon on March 19th, 2018 at 02:54 UTC »

Relax headline.

pingpong on March 19th, 2018 at 01:11 UTC »

From the paper:

This transforms the probability distribution for the amount of inflation and leads to the prediction that our universe emerged from a regime of eternal inflation [8,9].

So basically, we no longer need to build up speed for 12 hours.