Chapter 18: And in the Beginning?

When we think of the beginning, we think of it as the start of a series of chronological events. In the context of the Universe, the beginning refers to the origin of space and time. The beginning is dependent on time. Without time, we cannot have a beginning. Cosmology only started to make sense when people began to understand space-time as a living and evolving thing. Time is simply part of the Universe, and it must be considered when we analyze its existence.

In the early 1970s, English physicists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose postulated that the Universe did, in fact, have a beginning. Hawking and Penrose postulated that if the evolution of the Universe could be described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and it is composed of energy content that we are familiar with, then it had to have a beginning. Based on their observations, it is impossible to discern the actual beginning of space-time to a specific point. This theorem is known as the singularity theorem.