Stephen Hawking's explosive new theory

Ok, I will take a stab to explain it.

There are comparing the current universe, to light. Light is both a particle and a wave, that means that photons exhibit both properties, and it all depends on how you observe it. The other interesting part of light, as it always chooses the path that takes the "shortest time". Not the shortest path, but shortest time.

Eg. If you shot a laser beam thru ice, the laser beam will reflect to a certain angle, b/c it is the quicker angle to get away from that material. Why does light choooses this path? In quantum theory, it seems that light explores ALL paths possible, (wave property), and we observe it in the shortest path (as a particle), as it is the most likely to occur.

So, basically the are claiming the Universe is like light, a big giant wave, with no beginning, and unlimited posibilities/paths, but we are observing only one, the most likeley one.

When a particle travels, from point a, to b. It has a distinct begining, you can pin-point it. That's the bing bang, if you thing of our universe as a particle.

But if something both wave/particle properties, there is no distinct beginning, as it is all around. You can observe it at certain points, but it also can be in other points simultanosly, but you just observe one at a time, but you can't pin-point it exactly.

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One interesting experiment, about the wave/particle property, is the double slit experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

Take mark of the last phrase: "Merely observing the particle, the observer collapse the wave function, and made the particle act as solid". So, we are the observers, the universe is the giant wave/particle thing, and by us existing and observing it, we are collapsing to a concrete thing (to us at least).

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"At first, they found that the most probable history of the cosmos had only undergone "a little bit of inflation at the beginning, contradicting the observations," said Prof Hertog. Now, after a correction to take account of how the data we have on inflation is based on only a view of a limited volume of the universe, they find that the wave function does indeed predict a long period of inflation."

In other word, let's fudge some math here, some there, and re-arrange some stuff there, to have the data to support our hypothesis. Unfortunately it is hard to know if this is right, b/c it is just one of the so many theories.

Is it OK to admit I don't get it?

Hard to tell from the article which kind of skimmed over stuff, from what I can tell, the theory posits we live in a large, isotropic, semi-classical world following a long (more than Plankian scale) epoch of inflation, because a large sub-set of vacuum states in the landscape of vacuum states in string theory are such that they will lead to long periods of inflation, thereby producing large, isotropic, semi-classical post-inflationary regions such as the one we observe. I suppose if one can demonstrate a large subset of the possible histories in string theory lead to alot of inflation, one can say it is "most probably" to find oneself in a history that has had a lot of inflation. I suppose earlier versions of the Hartle-Hawking "sum over histories" approach didn't take the string theory "landscape" into account, and this theory in the article is "new" in the sense that it is the same "sum over histories" approach, but attacked from the viewpoint of the string theory landscape, attempting to demonstrate how one can get inflation from some non-vanishing subset of histories associated with the string theory landscape. But I haven't seen the actual paper, so not quite sure if this is exactly what it is doing. Be interesting to see what if any refinements of current predictions this model could lead to. Specifically if any insights are given for say the cosmological constant driving the current cosmic acceleration.