See Stephen Hawking tour the multiverse in final science show
In what may be his last science video, the physicist attempts to explain everything while traversing time and space and getting trapped by some ancient AI.
- Finalist for the Nesta Tipping Point prize and a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Stephen Hawking's last science program features the late great cosmologist in some pretty far-out locales, starting with a blocky blockade set up by an ancient, super-smart artificial intelligence in a far-off galaxy and ending with a tour of the multiverse.
The third and final installment of the CuriosityStream series "Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places" was released after Hawking's death last week and can be streamed online for free through this Friday.
The final episode deals with some of the more speculative Hawking ideas, like his search for a "theory of everything" that led to his belief that our universe is but one of an infinite number of universes popping in and out of existence like bubbles, all floating around within the so-called multiverse.
It's mind-bending stuff, but unlike his final academic paper that addresses some of the same ideas, the 27-minute program is intended for a general audience.
It uses lots of computer-generated graphics and puts Hawking in his own imagined spaceship (warp-drive included) to try to make his theories possible for anyone to grasp. He even visits a different Earth in an alternate universe where humanity has moved off the planet and onto picturesque space stations.
Oddly, Hawking declares this other Earth an upgrade over our own, but as I pointed out in my tribute to Hawking, perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, somewhere in the infinite multiverse, Hawking is relaxing and getting a space tan in just such a dimension.
Check out the trailer above to see what our future A.I. overlords might look like and then head to CuriosityStream to watch all three episodes for free before Friday.
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