Page 30 - A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking... Chapter 3
became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang
singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that
there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once
quantum effects are taken into account.

We have seen in this chapter how, in less than half a century, man’s view of the universe formed over millennia
has been transformed. Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding, and the realization of the
insignificance of our own planet in the vastness of the universe, were just the starting point. As experimental
and theoretical evidence mounted, it became more and more clear that the universe must have had a
beginning in time, until in 1970 this was finally proved by Penrose and myself, on the basis of Einstein’s general
theory of relativity. That proof showed that general relativity is only an incomplete theory: it cannot tell us how
the universe started off, because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the
beginning of the universe. However, general relativity claims to be only a partial theory, so what the singularity
theorems really show is that there must have been a time in the very early universe when the universe was so
small that one could no longer ignore the small-scale effects of the other great partial theory of the twentieth
century, quantum mechanics. At the start of the 1970s, then, we were forced to turn our search for an
understanding of the universe from our theory of the extraordinarily vast to our theory of the extraordinarily tiny.
That theory, quantum mechanics, will be described next, before we turn to the efforts to combine the two partial
theories into a single quantum theory of gravity.

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