The Journey from Black-Hole Singularities to a Cyclic Cosmology

The “singularity theorems” of the 1960s demonstrated that large enough celestial bodies, or collections of such bodies, would, collapse gravitationally, to “singularities”, where the equations and assumptions of Einstein’s general relativity cannot be mathematically continued. Such singularities are expected to lie deep within what we now call black holes. Similar arguments (largely by Stephen Hawking) apply also to the “Big-Bang” picture of the origin of the universe, but whose singularity h...