Hawking pursued his work in physics: in 1993 he co-edited a book on Euclidean quantum

gravity with Gary Gibbons and published a collected edition of his own articles on black
holes and the Big Bang.[157] In 1994 at Cambridge's Newton Institute, Hawking
and Penrose delivered a series of six lectures, which were published in 1996 as "The Nature
of Space and Time".[158] In 1997 he conceded a 1991 public scientific wager made with Kip
Thorne and John Preskill of Caltech. Hawking had bet that Penrose's proposal of a "cosmic
censorship conjecture"that there could be no "naked singularities" unclothed within a
horizonwas correct.[159] After discovering his concession might have been premature, a
new, more refined, wager was made. This specified that such singularities would occur
without extra conditions.[160] The same year, Thorne, Hawking and Preskill made another bet,
this time concerning the black hole information paradox.[161][162] Thorne and Hawking argued
that since general relativity made it impossible for black holes to radiate and lose
information, the mass-energy and information carried by Hawking radiation must be "new",
and not from inside the black hole event horizon. Since this contradicted the quantum
mechanics of microcausality, quantum mechanics theory would need to be rewritten. Preskill
argued the opposite, that since quantum mechanics suggests that the information emitted by
a black hole relates to information that fell in at an earlier time, the concept of black holes
given by general relativity must be modified in some way.[163]
Hawking also maintained his public profile, including bringing science to a wider audience. A
film version of A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris and produced by Steven
Spielberg, premiered in 1992. Hawking had wanted the film to be scientific rather than
biographical, but he was persuaded otherwise. The film, while a critical success, was
however not widely released.[164] A popular-level collection of essays, interviews and talk
titled Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays was published in 1993[165]and six-
part television series Stephen Hawking's Universe and companion book appeared in 1997.
As Hawking insisted, this time the focus was entirely on science.[166][167]
2000present

Stephen Hawking at the Bibliothque nationale de France to inaugurate the Laboratory of Astronomy
and Particles in Paris, and the French release of his work God Created the Integers, 5 May 2006.

Hawking continued his writings for a popular audience, publishing The Universe in a
Nutshell in 2001,[168] and A Briefer History of Time which he wrote in 2005 with Leonard
Mlodinow to update his earlier works to make them accessible to a wider audience, and God
Created the Integers, which appeared in 2006.[169] Along with Thomas Hertog at CERN and
Jim Hartle, from 2006 on Hawking developed a theory of "top-down cosmology", which says
that the universe had not one unique initial state but many different ones, and therefore that
it is inappropriate to formulate a theory that predicts the universe's current configuration from
one particular initial state.[170] Top-down cosmology posits that the present "selects" the past
from a superposition of many possible histories. In doing so, the theory suggests a possible
resolution of the fine-tuning question.[171][172]
Hawking continued to travel widely, including trips to Chile, Easter Island, South Africa,
Spain (to receive the Fonseca Prize in 2008),[173][174]Canada,[175] and multiple trips to the
United States.[176] For practical reasons related to his disability, Hawking increasingly
travelled by private jet, and by 2011 that had become his only mode of international travel.[177]

Hawking with University of Oxford librarian Richard Ovenden (left) and naturalist David
Attenborough (right) at the opening of the Weston Library, Oxford in March 2015. Ovenden awarded
the Bodley Medal to Hawking and Attenborough at the ceremony

By 2003, consensus among physicists was growing that Hawking was wrong about the loss
of information in a black hole.[178] In a 2004 lecture in Dublin, he conceded his 1997 bet with
Preskill, but described his own, somewhat controversial solution, to the information paradox
problem, involving the possibility that black holes have more than one topology.[179][163] In the
2005 paper he published on the subject, he argued that the information paradox was
explained by examining all the alternative histories of universes, with the information loss in
those with black holes being cancelled out by those without.[162][180] In January 2014 he called
the alleged loss of information in black holes his "biggest blunder".[181]