The concept or idea of a multiverse fascinates physicists’ as much as sci-fi fans, but if science was able to prove it exists, could every type of universe within it actually be predicted? The late Stephen Hawking believed there was a way to shed light on this strangest cosmic mystery.
Hawking’s final paper, published in the journal High-Energy Physics revisits one of his earlier (and no less mind-blowing) theories. The “no-boundary proposal” considers Einstein’s suggestion that the pre-Big Bang universe was a singularity, an extremely dense and hot micro-speck of matter where the laws of physics didn’t apply. Hawking speculated that time as we know it was nonexistent in this singularity, which had no beginning and no end—infinite and spherical rather than finite and linear. The embryonic universe is thought to have expanded rapidly and spawned parallel worlds during a period known as cosmic inflation.
