Stephen Hawking Leaves Earth Behind

Stephen Hawking’s last words have come through his last contribution to the scientific community. The entire world mourns the loss of such an amazing man. He died last Wednesday in Cambridge at the age of 76, having suffered from a rare form of motor neurone disease since 1964. He eventually became confined to a wheelchair and dependent on a computerised voice system for communication.

Colleagues have revealed the renowned theoretical physicist’s final academic work was to set out the groundbreaking mathematics needed for a spacecraft to find traces of multiple big bangs. Currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal, the paper, named A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation, may turn out to be Hawking’s most important scientific legacy.

Fellow researchers have said that if the evidence which the new theory promises had been discovered before Hawking died last week, it may have secured the Nobel Prize which had eluded him for so long.

The new paper seeks to resolve an issue thrown up by Hawking’s 1983 “no-boundary” theory, which described how the universe burst into existence with the big bang. According to that account, the universe instantaneously expanded from a tiny point into a prototype of what we live in today, a process known as inflation.

Despite the hopeful promise of Hawking’s final work, it also comes with the depressing prediction that, ultimately, the universe will fade into blackness as stars simply run out of energy.