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What's Stephen Hawking doing lately? Also how should he be rated as a physicist? He's probably the most well-known physicist today, and I'm sure that he's made a great contribution to physics, but compared to big names like, say, ... Newton, Einstein and Feynman, how should his work be evaluated?

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I'm not sure what he's doing these days. He certainly should be up there as far as a substantial contributor to the world of physics. Unfortunatly his disease has interfered a lot with his work and research.

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"Matter tells space how to bend, space tells matter how to move." - John Wheeler

I started watching 'BBC Stephen Hawking's Universe'. Hopefully, by the time I finish watching this, I'll have a pretty good idea of what exactly he did.

Did he do any work in String Theory? I watched a documentary on it recently, but his name was never mentioned.

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He gave a talk for TED a few days ago: TED2008: Stephen Hawking answers the big questions

The other day, I was thinking about who really came up with the Big Bang theory. Did Hawking play a role in that?

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Hawking is currently working on proving the multiverse theory. I know Hawking's ultimate goal is to combine the Special theory of relativity and quantum physics into one single theory that he is going to call The Everything theory or Theory of Everything or something along those lines, but I might be mistaken about that. If he is able to prove his theory it would be the answer to everything.

This is where I am confused.

1. Multiverse is same as parallel universes?

2. String theory or rather M-theory would essentially unify Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. No? But is Hawking researching String theory / M-theory ...???

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some info -

http://www.hawking.org.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/html/home.html

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Yes Multiverse and parallel universes are one in the same. Multiverse states that there are many possibly infinite parallel univeres.

String Theory and M-theory are different things. M-theory is a theory that would unite the five superstring theories and the mutliverse theory. String theory is a theory that says the universe is made up of strings and not particles. The two are in fact very similiar though. Its just that there are different kinds of string theory and M-theory is trying to combine the all of the string theories.

Hawking's ultimate goal is M-theory which is the answer to everything.

But didn't Edward Witten come up with M-theory ...???

(I'd better spend more time studying this stuff ... I'm pretty confused.)

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