biNEW YORK TIMES iBESTSELLER - Stephen Hawking's closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar's final thoughts on the cosmos--a dramatic revision of the theory he put forward in iA Brief History of Timei.b pbThis superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos.--Lord Martin Reesb pPerhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. In order to solve this mystery, Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse--countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to 8203harbor life. p Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his friend and collaborator Thomas Hertog worked on this problem f