From Henry Bodkin at the Telegraph:
A final theory explaining how mankind might detect parallel universes was completed by Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, it has emerged.
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. More.
This sounds a lot like grief talking but we’ll see.
See also: The Universe Hawking Created from Nothing Eric Anderson: Lennox’ analysis of Hawking’s absurd pronouncement isn’t Earth-shattering or particularly difficult to grasp in its own right. Indeed, it is the first impression many of us would have and is the conclusion that every highschooler enrolled in a basic logic course would come to. That is, if not for the fact that it was Hawking who made the absurd pronouncement.
and
Was Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) right to object to the Kalam cosmological argument? Rob Sheldon: This spherical spacetime is a pig, and whether it is eternal, temporal, finite or infinite doesn’t change the fact it is an ugly honker with no basis in reality or physics. It is right up there with multiverses in its metaphysical ontology, and no amount of adjectives like “quantum”, “imaginary”, or “eternal” can fix it.