Stephen Hawking's final paper may discover parallel universes
New Delhi : Stephen Hawking’s final research paper has just been published and within a very short time it has become a must-talk topic among science lovers across the globe. It is believed that his research could help experts to find the evidence for parallel universes. His final paper has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
Hawking’s paper predicts there are not infinite parallel universes in the multiverse, but instead a limited number. It also explains how we might be able to see proof of this theory and find evidence for parallel universes by finding gravitational waves.
The late scientist has submitted a final paper for publication ten days before he died. The paper - titled "A smooth exit from eternal inflation?" - has now been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. In the study, Hawking and co-author Thomas Hertog mentioned a theory on the origin of the universe that might settle a few enduring questions
One popular understanding of the Big Bang suggests that the universe is one in a "multiverse" of infinite parallel universes. The paper indicates that the other universes also follow the same laws of physics that is applicable in our universe. This possibility make the possible universes much more manageable and testable, since all of them have depends on similar underlying rules of physics and chemistry.
"We are not down to a single, unique universe, but our findings imply a significant reduction of the multiverse, to a much smaller range of possible universes," Hawking said in a statement last fall.
Stephen’s paper also implies that it might be possible to test this theory. Physicists could find the evidence of other universes using tools designed to measure ripples in spacetime which is also known as primordial gravitational waves. It would have been generated by the universe's initial expansion from the Big Bang.
Hawking study has helped develop the theory that led to the idea of infinite parallel universes.
The concept depends on the term "eternal inflation." The thinking is that after the Big Bang, the universe or all the universes started to expand, but that process never stopped in some places. Our universe is just one pocket where that exponential inflation stopped and stars and galaxies formed.
The huge section of the Milky Way galaxy is a mosaic of images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
"The usual theory of eternal inflation predicts that globally our universe is like an infinite fractal, with a mosaic of different pocket universes, separated by an inflating ocean," Hawking said in an interview last autumn, according to the University of Cambridge. "The local laws of physics and chemistry can differ from one pocket universe to another, which together would form a multiverse. But I have never been a fan of the multiverse. If the scale of different universes in the multiverse is large or infinite, the theory can't be tested."
Hertog told Cambridge that the physics that would account for infinite parallel universes break down when applied to the theory of eternal inflation.
Hawking and Hertog's paper relies on string theory, a branch of physics that tries to reunite quantum physics with gravity and Einstein's theory of relativity. They evoked with a new idea of eternal inflation that relies on a boundary at the beginning of time.
"When we trace the evolution of our universe backwards in time, at some point we arrive at the threshold of eternal inflation, where our familiar notion of time ceases to have any meaning," Hertog told Cambridge.
