{"id":34011,"date":"2018-05-07T06:34:37","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T11:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34011"},"modified":"2018-05-07T06:34:37","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T11:34:37","slug":"stephen-hawkings-last-words-we-live-in-the-matrix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34011","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Hawking’s Last Words: We Live In ‘The Matrix’?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stephen Hawking’s Last Words: We Live In ‘The Matrix’?<\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Before he passed away in March, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking had published\u00a0more than 230 articles<\/a>\u00a0on the birth of the universe,\u00a0black holes<\/a>\u00a0and quantum mechanics. But, ten days before his death, Hawking finished his final theory on the origin of the universe<\/strong>\u00a0 – now published posthumously<\/em><\/a> – and it offers an interesting departure from earlier ideas about the nature of the “multiverse.”<\/p>\n

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As PBS reports,<\/em><\/a> the new report, co-authored by Belgian physicist Thomas Hertog, counters the longstanding idea that the universe will expand for eternity.<\/p>\n

If you asked an astrophysicist today to describe what happened after the Big Bang, he would likely start with the concept of \u201ccosmic inflation.\u201d <\/strong>Cosmic inflation argues that right after the Big Bang \u2014 we\u2019re talking after a teeny fraction of a second \u2014 the universe expanded at breakneck speed like dough in an oven.<\/p>\n

But this exponential expansion should create, due to quantum mechanics, regions where the universe continues to grow forever and regions where that growth stalls. <\/strong>The result would be a multiverse, a collection of bubblelike pockets, each defined by its own laws of physics.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe local laws of physics and chemistry can differ from one pocket universe to another, which together would form a multiverse,\u201d Hertog said in\u00a0a statement<\/a>. \u201cBut 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\u2019t be tested.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Along with being difficult to support, the multiverse theory, which was\u00a0co-developed by Hawking<\/a>\u00a0in 1983, doesn\u2019t jibe with classical physics, <\/strong>namely the contributions of Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity as they relate to the structure and dynamics of the universe.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a consequence, Einstein\u2019s theory breaks down in eternal inflation,\u201d Hertog said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Hawking’s Last Words: We Live In ‘The Matrix’? Before he passed away in March, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking had published\u00a0more than 230 articles\u00a0on the birth of the universe,\u00a0black holes\u00a0and quantum mechanics. But, ten days before his death, Hawking finished his final theory on the origin of the universe\u00a0 – now published posthumously – and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20057,20058,9737,13922,20056,20055,4318],"class_list":["post-34011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-big-bang","tag-multiverse","tag-stephen-hawking","tag-the-matrix","tag-thomas-hertog","tag-universe","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34012,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34011\/revisions\/34012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}