This Week’s Science News from SWTG

Ammonia Power & A Cosmological Crisis

My Take On Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory

Stephen Hawking died in 2018. It wasn’t long afterwards that news broke about his supposedly groundbreaking “final theory,” posthumously published by his collaborator Thomas Hertog. Since then, Hertog has given countless interviews, appeared on podcasts, and has written a book. And every couple of weeks someone asks me, “What’s with Hawking’s final theory?” So here we go.

Stephen Hawking made several important contributions to theoretical physics. He did some early work on gravitational waves. His most influential work was, without doubt, his calculation that showed that black holes emit radiation. After that his interests seem to have moved from astrophysics to cosmology.

Hawking’s last theory is about cosmology, the study of our universe in its entirety. It seems that in his later life Hawking became convinced that science can explain why our universe is the way it is, and that God doesn’t exist.

I was never quite sure how much of this he actually believed and how much he just said because he knew that the media would love it. More than once I have heard other physicists say that he needed the money that his public appearances made to cover his medical bills. True or not, I think this was why physicists didn’t publicly criticise Hawking’s stranger proclamations, such as that black holes don’t exist.

His last theory is a type of multiverse based on an idea called eternal inflation. This idea has it that our universe isn’t the only one. Instead, there are constantly, and eternally new universes being bubbling out of a rapidly expanding, infinite sea of quantum fluctuations. This rapidly expanding quantum sea is the “eternal inflation” and you can test it for yourself at home if you put a hand-wash detergent into the dishwasher as I once did.

Eternal inflation and other multiverse ideas are popular among physics who have totally lost touch with reality. They think that if they can write down equations for other universes, then the other universes exist. By that logic, my grocery list should have manifested a fully stocked fridge by now.