Professor Stephen Hawking may be gone, but he’ll never be forgotten. Indeed, before his death on March 14, the cosmologist was still working on a few scientific papers.

One of those papers was just published, and its contents will ensure that Prof Hawking will be talked about for a loooong time.

As reported by The Telegraph, Hawking’s final theory, which was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, challenged previous theories of cosmic “inflation” and the “multiverse”.

Working together with Belgian colleague Professor Thomas Hertog, Hawking puts forward a crazy notion – the universe is just one big hologram.

Yep, friends. He did just say – well, write – that.

Scientists in general believe that for a mere fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded incredibly rapidly before settling into its present state (planets, solar systems and all). But another idea that’s been thrown around is that expansion is still going on, giving rise to a “multiverse”, or a number of different universes with their own laws of physics.

Hawking didn’t buy into that, though.

His new theory embraces the weird idea that the entire universe is a hologram, that our 3D reality is all but an illusion. The solid stuff that surrounds us? That’s projected from information stored on a flat 2D surface.

Speaking on behalf of himself and his dearly departed colleague, Hertog had this to say:

It’s a very precise mathematical notion of holography that has come out of string theory in the last few years, which is not fully understood but is mind-boggling and changes the scene completely.

Applied to inflation, Hawking’s theory concludes that time and the beginning of the universe arose holographically from an unknowable state outside the Big Bang.

Well, we can’t exactly argue with him, but the theory will ensure that others won’t see the world the same way again.

[source:telegraph]