Stephen Hawking's final paper revealed, showing professor's last statement on the universe before his death

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “The usual theory of eternal inflation predicts that globally our universe is like an infinite fractal, with a mosaic of different pocket universes, separated by an inflating ocean,” said Professor Hawking in an interview last autumn. “The problem with the usual account of eternal inflation is that it assumes an existing background universe that evolves according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity and treats the quantum effects as small fluctuations around this,” said Professor Hertog. “We are not down to a single, unique universe, but our findings imply a significant reduction of the multiverse, to a much smaller range of possible universes,” said Professor Hawking. Professor Hertog has suggested that by listening for primordial gravitational waves we might be able to hear proof of his and Mr Hawking's last finding: if the universe has really been expanding, those ripples in spacetime should be too big for us to hear, but if the final paper is correct then we should hear the proof as those disturbances go past.