Like sex, Stephen Hawking was and is mainly a cheap way to obtain publicity. They still publish posthumously now to keep it going. The media feast on the occasion of his parting was not enough, sadly also here at Science2.0 by the usual suspects. I refused participation, because there is just nothing good to say, but the “he just dead, you can’t say that”-period has passed now, too. Let’s be scientific: Hawking’s main contribution was sitting in a wheelchair! The only science worth mentioning he did is applying Unruh temperature, the black body radiation experienced due to quantum effects when accelerating (see also here about whether it can be observed), to the acceleration near black holes, obtaining the expected result, which is since then called ‘Hawking temperature’ and ‘Hawking radiation’, because the guy sat in a wheelchair and spewed do-gooder idiotic comments on “diversity”. He did a semi-classical calculation, meaning not full quantum physics, but instead of trying harder to do it properly, he told the world that black holes break quantum physics!

Nobody serious took him seriously. Arriving late after his lecture at the Amsterdam string theory conference, I said out loud “Oh, I missed Hawking.” Two string theoreticians turned around, looked at me and scoffed “You missed nothing mate!” Yeah, of course I did not miss anything of scientific value, but I wanted to witness the ridiculous spectacle that the scientific community participates in for publicity, exploiting disability – every string theory conference had to invite Hawking – perhaps just because every string theoretician knew what then of course happened just before that Amsterdam conference: String theory black holes being quantum proving that Hawking is a guy in a wheelchair. Perhaps that is another reason for why physicists liked to pretend taking him seriously. He lost all his bets, such as that the Higgs boson would not be found.

Why write about it now? They now claim that Hawking had a “final theory” on Many Worlds (MW) and involving Virtual Reality (VR). I said it since forever, both, that MW is self-evident and how VR is important for physics, just recently again, but also basically since forever, because the VR angle is also a priori, self-evidently, fundamentally the same as describing our consciousness as being computed in a physicalist “closed” universe quantum computer or as quantum solipsism if you prefer – this is simply ‘description relativity’. So what now – sure hope they don’t copy my stuff and put Hawking’s name on it! Moreover, I had recently a breakthrough with my MW-EPR model, embedding quantum teleportation so that it resolves the problem of whether it kills all possible travelers in superposition every time (it does not) and more importantly, it shows the nature of quantum information as arrangement of parallel worlds visually intuitively, right there in a very simple but accurate geometrical model, thus clearly presenting the solution to the key question of quantum information theory and quantum cryptography, namely why quantum information cannot be copied, why quantum cryptography is secure: The information is not in any one world, but in the parallel worlds’ Einstein-Everett relativistic space-time geometrical topology, the arrangement of the worlds – there I said it - did Hawking perhaps scoop me here? I don’t even try to publish it in the scientific literature, because I am basically black listed for being a scientist who tells the truth and not sitting in a wheelchair sucking the establishment’s dick about “diversity”.

Hawking supposedly supported MW for a long time, which contradicts all that he said about black holes not being quantum (after which I never again looked at anything with his name on), but also saying that there is only “one reality”, which contradicts MW. Thus, you find people on quora asking “Why does Stephen Hawking strongly believe in the many worlds interpretation?” and the given answer is right away, first sentence: “Actually, he doesn’t.”

This inconsistency is consistent with that all his work was always mainly the work of others, him being invited to add a little tidbit to get his name on it for the publicity that the other guys then obtain, such as with Bekenstein entropy of black holes, now supposedly “Bekenstein-Hawking entropy” because Hawking was allowed to claim calculating the factor of 1/4 in the equation. One day he is the greatest supporter of MW, the next he is the greatest critic of MW. Whatever turns out to be important later on will anyway be presented as pioneered buy a guy in a wheelchair who supported “diversity”.

In summary – sorry folks, but there is once again basically nothing to the recent “news” about Hawking’s “final theory” supposedly proposing that the world is an holographic illusion – another old hat by now, namely the AdS-CFT correspondence, to which Hawking has contributed precisely nothing. It is just the usual mainstream news nowadays: Fake news, hyping of hype.

Here is what it is actually about – well done Thomas, you got your mediocre paper onto front pages by exploiting the guy in the wheelchair one last time: S. W. Hawking, Thomas Hertog: “A smooth exit from eternal inflation?” Journal of High Energy Physics, (2018); DOI:10.1007/JHEP04(2018)147