BEIJING, XINHUA: Is the universe eternal, or did it have a beginning?
World-renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking gave his answer to a large
audience in Beijing on Monday.
He gave a
multimedia presentation on the occasion of the International Conference on
String Theory 2006, which traced the development of theories on cosmic origins.
He described
how the theory of general relativity and the discovery of the expansion of the
universe provoked conceptual changes, which meant the idea of an ever-existing,
ever-lasting universe was no longer tenable.
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Hawking has
done ground breaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe,
proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end. The image he drew of this process was
that of bubbles appearing and bursting, corresponding to mini
universes that expand and collapse. Only those which grew to a certain
size would be safe from collapse and would continue to expand at an
ever increasing rate.
The theorem
which he and Prof Roger Penrose developed in 1970 said general relativity
predicated that the universe and time itself would begin with the big bang
and that time would come to an end in black holes. “One can get rid of the
problem of time having a beginning in a similar way in which we got rid of the
edge of the world.”
Likening
the beginning of the universe to the South Pole, with degrees of latitude
playing the role of time, he said the universe would start as a point
at the South Pole. “As one moves north, the circles of constant
latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. To ask
what happened before the beginning of the universe would become a meaningless question because there is nothing south of the South
Pole,” Hawking said.
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