hawking RECANTS!!
sorry pbs a bit a slow on this (meanwhile, back in the royal shrewsbury hospital mid-week, it wz reported in the papers so mark s had to explain it to a recuperating mum s) (here is he told her, tho preposterous has simplified a bit for his readership obv)
mark s: “the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state”
mum s: “bah that’s what i sed all along”