The Hawking-Hartle Proposal for the Early Universe
There is very substantial agreement as to the development of the universe
from the first 10-43 second on:
Traditional Big Bang cosmology allowed the space-time diagram to arise from
a point, like an ice-cream cone:
This point was then a so-called ‘singularity’ at which values such as the
density of the universe would go to infinity and the laws of physics could not
hold.
The Hawking-Hartle proposal allows the time dimension, the vertical axis of
the diagram, to ‘fade away’, to be subsumed into the space dimensions. The
diagram therefore originates not from a point but from a curved surface with no
boundary or edge, like the surface of the Earth at one of the poles:
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Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the
Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
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