In 1965 I read about Penrose’s theorem that any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a singularity. I soon realized that if one reversed the direction of time in Penrose’s theorem, so that the collapse became an expansion, the conditions of his theorem would still hold, provided the universe were roughly like a Friedmann model on large scales at the present time. Penrose’s theorem had shown that any collapsing star must end in a singularity; the time-reversed argument showed that any Friedmann-like expanding universe must have begun with a singularity. For technical reasons, Penrose’s theorem required that the universe be infinite in space. So I could in fact, use it to prove that there should be a singularity only if the universe was expanding fast enough to avoid collapsing again (since only those Friedmann models were infinite in space).
During the next few years I developed new mathematical techniques to remove this and other technical conditions from the theorems that proved that singularities must occur. The final result was a joint paper by Penrose and myself in 1970,which at last proved that there must have been a big bang singularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe. There was a lot of opposition to our work, partly from the Russians because of their Marxist belief in scientific determinism, and partly from people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was repugnant and spoiled the beauty of Einstein’s theory.
However, one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.
So in the end our work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe - as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account.
Penrose’s theorem 彭羅斯定理
Quantum 量子論
1965年，我讀到彭羅斯關於任何物體受到引力坍縮必須最終形成一個點的定理。我很快意識到，如果人們將彭羅斯定理中的時間方向顛倒以使坍縮變成膨脹，假定現在宇宙在大尺度上大體類似弗利德曼模型，這定理的條件仍然成立。彭羅斯定理指出，任何坍縮必須終結於一個點；其時間顛倒的論斷則是，任何類弗利德曼膨脹模型必須從一個點開始。為了技巧上的原因，彭羅斯定理需要以宇宙在空間上是無限的為條件。所以事實上，我能用它來證明，只有當宇宙膨脹得快到足夠以避免重新坍縮時（因為只有那些弗利德曼模型才是空間無限的），必須存在一個點。
以後的幾年中，我發展了新的數學技巧，從證明性必須發生的定理中除去了這個和其他技術上的條件。最後的結果是1970年彭羅斯和我的合作論文。那篇論文最後證明了，假定廣義相對論是正確的，宇宙包含著我們觀測到的這麼多物質，則過去必須有一大爆炸點。我們的工作遭到許許多多的反對，部分來自蘇聯人，由於他們對科學宿命論的信仰；另一部分來自某些人，他們不喜歡整個點的觀念，並認為這糟蹋了愛因斯坦理論的完美。然而，人實在不能辯贏數學定理。所以最終我們的工作被廣泛接受，現在幾乎每個人都假定宇宙是從一個大爆炸點開始的。頗具諷刺意味的是，現在我改變了想法，試圖去說服其他物理學家，事實上在宇宙的開端並沒有點——正如我們將看到的，只要考慮了量子效應，性則會消失。
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