Of course there are people who think of "heaven" as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race.

But in the Bible "heaven" isn't "the place where people go when they die." In the Bible heaven is God's space while earth - or, if you like, "the cosmos" or "creation" - is our space.

And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, the persons of Christians because they, too, were "temples" of God's own spirit.

Hawking is working with a very low-grade and sub-biblical view of "going to heaven." Of course, if faced with the fully Christian two-stage view of what happens after death - first, a time "with Christ" in "heaven" or "paradise," and then, when God renews the whole creation, bodily resurrection - he would no doubt dismiss that as incredible.

But I wonder if he has ever even stopped to look properly, with his high-octane intellect, at the evidence for Jesus and the resurrection? I doubt it - most people in England haven't. Until he has, his opinion about all this is worth about the same as mine on nuclear physics - namely, not much.

Continue reading about what stephen Hawking doesn't understand about Heaven

"It's a big deal. It's like finding a needle in a haystack—the sense of discovery is hugely exciting" said Dr. Bond, who led the team of researchers from Massey, Auckland, Canterbury and Victoria Universities, as well as from Japan and the United States. "It has profound implications and opens a new chapter in the history of the Milky Way."

On May 18 in in the same paper, the famous physicist Stephen Hawkings declared he finds no room for heaven in his vision of the cosmos. Comparing the human brain to a computer he said "there is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers."

It seems that the universe is growing bigger with escalating and exciting possibilities while Hawking's vision has stalled, for isn't this the man who asked the famous question: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?", says Catherine Hannan

Read about Ian Bond's discovery

Image: Flickyr

Hawking, diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease at 21, is now aged 69.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he told the Guardian newspaper. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Hawking's comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, "The Grand Design" which provoked a backlash from religious leaders for arguing there was no need for a divine force to explain the creation of the universe.

Hawking joined others including the chancellor, George Osborne, and the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, at the Google Zeitgeist London event where he addressed the question: "Why are we here?"

His talk was focussed on M-theory, a broad mathematical framework that encompasses string theory, which is regarded by many physicists as the best hope yet of developing a theory of everything.

M-theory demands a universe with 11 dimensions, including a dimension of time and the three familiar spatial dimensions. The rest are curled up too small for us to see.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: Sound on Sight

Nuance and a Hawking sentence are, by necessity, strangers, says Adam Clarke Eastes in his critique of what he calls "yet another 'very rare' interview with the world famous physicist." Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, and can communicate only by twitching his right cheek to produce of a computer generated voice.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

Read:

• Ian Sample -The Guardian: Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story
• Adam Clark Estes -The Atlantic Wire: Stephen Hawking's Annual Assault on Religion