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Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang
By studying the geometry of model space-times, researchers offer alternative views of the universe’s first moments.
The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments, the universe went through a brief period of extraordinarily fast expansion called inflation before settling into a lower gear. But there’s not actually anything physically special about suburban London: You could easily redefine zero longitude to pass through some other place on Earth, and then your function would behave perfectly normally when approaching the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Researchers already knew that in a universe with so-called dark energy, but without matter, the start of inflation identified in the BGV theorem is a coordinate singularity that can be eliminated.
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