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The Hunt for a Fundamental Theory of Quantum Gravity
Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists must go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.
Stephen Hawking soon extended Penrose’s argument to the early universe, proving that a cosmos described by general relativity must have sprung from a singular point during the Big Bang. Physicists who are developing bounce theories often work in the second layer of the onion, using semiclassical physics that exploits negative-energy quantum effects to get around the singularity required by the Penrose and Hawking theorems. Bousso and like-minded physicists, however, suspect that a highly quantum arena with no notion of area is tantamount to a dead-end for a light ray, and therefore that something Penrose would recognize as a singularity should persist in the core theory and in our universe.
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