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The occurrence of singularities in cosmology
Abstract
It is shown that singularities of space-time are inevitable if the Einstein equations hold, if matter has normal properties and if the universe satisfies certain reasonable global conditions. The singularities would be in the past and would, in principle, be observable. Observation to determine whether such singularities actually occurred would provide a powerful test of the Einstein equations in strong fields. The singularity would not necessarily constitute a beginning of the universe.
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Citations
Cited by
Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse
Hawking, S. W. (1976) · Physical Review D · doi:10.1103/physrevd.14.2460 · Cited by 2,554
Self-citationThe singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology
Hawking, S. W., & Penrose, R. (1970) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspa.1970.0021 · Cited by 2,100
Self-citationKilling Horizons and Orthogonally Transitive Groups in Space-Time
Carter, B. (1969) · Journal of Mathematical Physics · doi:10.1063/1.1664763 · Cited by 260
The 1965 Penrose singularity theorem
Senovilla, J. M. M., & Garfinkle, D. (2015) · Classical and Quantum Gravity · doi:10.1088/0264-9381/32/12/124008 · Cited by 248
Internal instability in a Reissner-Nordstr�m black hole
Simpson, M., & Penrose, R. (1973) · International Journal of Theoretical Physics · doi:10.1007/bf00792069 · Cited by 230
Metadata
- Authors
- Hawking, S. W.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 1966-10-18
- Volume
- 294
- Issue
- 1439
- Pages
- 511-521
- ISSN
- 0080-4630 (ISSN-L)
- 2053-9169
- OpenAlex
- W1969609740
- Cited by
- 269
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 3.30
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The occurrence of singularities in cosmology. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rspa.1966.0221
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- Hawking, S. W. (1966). The occurrence of singularities in cosmology. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1966.0221
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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.
