We’ve seen that previous attempts to prove a cosmological singularity at the beginning of the universe were based upon Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This made sense given the strongly intuitive basis of Hawking’s initial insight: if the universe is expanding, the density of mass and thus the curvature of the universe will eventually reach a limit in the reverse direction of time. Arguably, that insight and the mathematical arguments based on it remain strong indicators of a beginning, even if those arguments cannot conclusively prove the validity of extrapolating all the way back to
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