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The Nature of Space and Time
Open accessAbstract
Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein's general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all of physics, be united into a single quantum theory of gravity? Can quantum and cosmos ever be combined? In The Nature of Space and Time , two of the world’s most famous physicists—Stephen Hawking ( A Brief History of Time ) and Roger Penrose ( The Road to Reality )—debate these questions. The authors outline how their positions have further diverged on a number of key issues, including the spatial geometry of the universe, inflationary versus cyclic theories of the cosmos, and the black-hole information-loss paradox. Though much progress has been made, Hawking and Penrose stress that physicists still have further to go in their quest for a quantum theory of gravity.
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Citations
Cited by
A Measurement Theory for Time Geography
Miller, H. J. (2005) · Geographical Analysis · doi:10.1111/j.1538-4632.2005.00575.x · Cited by 532
On the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics
Dowker, F., & Kent, A. (1996) · Journal of Statistical Physics · doi:10.1007/bf02183396 · Cited by 364
Scheme to probe the decoherence of a macroscopic object
Bose, S., Jacobs, K., & Knight, P. L. (1999) · Physical Review A · doi:10.1103/physreva.59.3204 · Cited by 281
Can the Universe create itself?
Gott, J. R., & Li, L.-X. (1998) · Physical Review D · doi:10.1103/physrevd.58.023501 · Cited by 127
Inflation without a beginning: A null boundary proposal
Aguirre, A., & Gratton, S. (2003) · Physical Review D · doi:10.1103/physrevd.67.083515 · Cited by 73
Metadata
- Authors
- Hawking, S. W., & Penrose, R.
- Venue
- Scientific American
- Published
- 1996-07
- Volume
- 275
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 60-65
- ISSN
- 0036-8733 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2082217691
- Cited by
- 424
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 11.13
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Nature of Space and Time. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/scientificamerican0796-60
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- Hawking, S. W., & Penrose, R. (1996). The Nature of Space and Time. Scientific American. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0796-60
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
