In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking, who died in March at age 76, turned the physics world upside down when he announced that black holes aren’t so black after all, and that some light can in fact escape the singularity’s edge, called the event horizon.

That bombshell, which inspired a whole new way of looking at black holes through a quantum lens, would certainly not be the last time Hawking made shocking pronouncements about the nature of the cosmos.

For his final paper, submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics just 10 days before his death and published this week, Hawking and colleague Thomas Hertog at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium propose a new theory about what happened in the