- Jan 28, 2003
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I have recently read, The End of Everything by leading astrophyicist Katie Mack. She writes:And that is why most cosmologists believe it started as a singularity.
The singularity is one hypothesis for what might have started everything off, but we can't really be sure...There might have been a singularity. [pg 32, 35]
Like all physicists, she thinks it began very, very small. But there is a question about whether it truly started at zero.
Also I found this on the web:
The Hawking Singularity Theorem added to this by stating that a space-like singularity can occur when matter is forcibly compressed to a point, causing the rules that govern matter to break down. Hawking traced this back in time to the Big Bang, which he claimed was a point of infinite density. However, Hawking later revised this to claim that general relativity breaks down at times prior to the Big Bang, and hence no singularity could be predicted by it.
Some more recent proposals also suggest that the Universe did not begin as a singularity. These includes theories like Loop Quantum Gravity, which attempts to unify the laws of quantum physics with gravity. This theory states that, due to quantum gravity effects, there is a minimum distance beyond which gravity no longer continues to increase, or that interpenetrating particle waves mask gravitational effects that would be felt at a distance. {source: What Is A Singularity? - Universe Today]
Some more recent proposals also suggest that the Universe did not begin as a singularity. These includes theories like Loop Quantum Gravity, which attempts to unify the laws of quantum physics with gravity. This theory states that, due to quantum gravity effects, there is a minimum distance beyond which gravity no longer continues to increase, or that interpenetrating particle waves mask gravitational effects that would be felt at a distance. {source: What Is A Singularity? - Universe Today]
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