But should we interpret the Hawking-Penrose-Ellis cosmological singularity as a realistic depiction of the spatial geometry of the universe all the way back to a temporal beginning? Hawking and Ellis themselves addressed this question in their 1973 work. They recognized that proofs of the spacetime singularity apply to our universe only if certain conditions are met. First, all singularity theorems presuppose general relativity as our best theory of gravity. And, indeed, numerous experimental confirmations of the predictions of general relativity have given physicists a high degree of
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