Some of the things I overheard at Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday conference did make me wonder whether I hadn't got the wrong building and stumbled in on a sci-fi convention. "The state of the multiverse". "The Universe is simple but strange". "The future for intelligent life is potentially infinite". And — excuse me — "the Big Bang was just the decay of our parent vacuum"?!
This is the second part of the lecture given by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at Stephen Hawking's birthday symposium.
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for a discovery that proved Einstein wrong and right at the same time.