physicists have proposed scores of alternative models over the decades since Friedman and Lemaître’s work, and those that do not have an absolute beginning have been repeatedly shown to be unworkable. Put more positively, the only viable nonstandard models are those that involve an absolute beginning to the universe. That beginning may or may not involve a beginning point. But theories (such as Stephen Hawking’s “no boundary” proposal) that do not have a pointlike beginning still have a finite past. The universe has not existed forever, according to such theories, but came into existence, even
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