Universe Without a Beginning: Quantum Cosmology Confirms Hawking's Idea express
The birth of the Universe is usually associated with the Big Bang — a point of infinite density. But at that point, the laws of physics break down, which bothers scientists. Stephen Hawking and James Hartle back in the 1980s proposed a different view: time has no boundary, like the surface of a globe. The Universe simply exists, and the question 'what was before the beginning' loses its meaning.
For a long time, probability calculations in this model were incomplete. The rules of the quantum world require not just enumerating possible outcomes, but correctly summing their chances, avoiding illusions. When physicists finally carried out these correct computations, it turned out: almost any closed world has no beginning. The probability of finding ourselves in such a universe is almost 100%.
Moreover, under a special statistical approach, this probability becomes exactly one. Such a result naturally explains the rapid expansion at the dawn of existence — inflation arises without fine-tuning.
Hawking liked to compare the question 'what was before the Big Bang' to 'what is south of the South Pole.' If time is closed, both are meaningless.