A Hawking-eye View of the Universe

In the world of Newton and Galileo, space and time were the flat, featureless canvas on which were painted the then-known celestial objects. Einstein's canvas was curved and it had bumps and wiggles caused by the presence of matter. During the past few decades, it is the canvas itself that has increasingly become the focus of study, as the dimensionality, shape, and nature of space and time have become intertwined with subatomic particles, black holes, and superstrings in a unified quest by physicists and cosmologists to understand the laws of physics and how the Universe came to be.