POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

Writing for Discover, Nathaniel Scharping seems to do a very creditable job explaining “What Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper Says (And Doesn’t Say).” I say “seems to” not because I have any reason whatsoever to question what he writes but because I know relatively little about even basic physics and next to nothing at all about theoretical physics.

And yet I read this article with considerable fascination because it reminded me that amid the ridiculous tweets, the roulette wheel of firings and hirings, and the salacious revelations and unsettling accusations that now fill the cable news programs day in and day out, there are still a surprising number of people who put aside the day-to-day distractions more than most of us seem able to do so and focus their attention and energies on the “big questions.”

As an English professor, I might be tempted to suggest that there is a certain poetry in Hawkings’ theories. But, instead of settling for that cliché, I would like to suggest that there is actually a certain poetry in the intellectual processes that incrementally led him to those theories. In an age in which the phrase “the Ivory Tower” is very often used derisively to suggest a sense of privileged aloofness from real issues, it is worth remembering that without some degree of intellectual separation, it becomes almost impossible to think—never mind to entertain big ideas.

Here is an excerpt from Scharping’s article:

Stephen Hawking’s last paper is titled “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?” It tackles the idea of a multiverse, a vast collection of universes that exist simultaneously, though they’re spread out almost unimaginably far from each other. Multiverses arose, the theory goes, because of something called inflation. In the fractions of a second after our universe emerged, space-time expanded at an immense rate. As it did so, tiny quantum fluctuations expanded to become the large-scale features of the universe we observe today, and which serve as evidence that the theory might be true. 

Under a variation of the theory that Hawking and Hertog work with, called eternal inflation, this inflation continues forever in most places, but, in some patches, it stops. Where it stops, universes form—our own and others, in a repeating process that never ends. In these universes, the laws of physics all look different, meaning constants we take for granted like the speed of light would vary between them. . . . 

But an infinite number of universes presents a problem to physicists. . . . Determining the probability of our universe looking the way it does would help scientists get at the answer. Finding probabilities involving infinity is a useless exercise, though. 

What Hawking and Hertog have done, using a lot of complicated math, is to propose a way that we could define some boundaries on the kinds of universes that might exist. . . . 

The two rely on something called the holographic principle to conduct their work. It’s a way of reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity—the physics of the very large and the very small, as Mack, puts it. The holographic principle states that all of the information in a volume of space is contained in the boundary of the volume. In effect, it compresses a 3-D space into a 2-D space, and the end result is to make the calculations easier.

It’s something that many other researchers use in their work, and . . . Hawking and Hertog’s paper, while intriguing, is simply another entry in the field.

Scharping’s complete article is available at: blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/03/20/stephen-hawking-final-paper.