Excerpt from The Universe In A Nutshell by Stephen Hawking, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

General relativity combines the time dimension with the three dimensions of space to form what is called spacetime. The theory incorporates the effect of gravity by saying that the distribution of matter and energy in the universe warps and distorts spacetime, so that it is not flat. Objects in this spacetime try to move in straight lines, but because spacetime is curved, their paths appear bent. They move as if affected by a gravitational field.

As a rough analogy, not to be taken too literally, imagine a sheet of rubber. One can place a large ball on the sheet to represent the Sun. The weight of the ball will depress the sheet and cause it to be curved near the Sun. If one now rolls little ball bearings on the sheet, they won't roll straight across to the other side but instead will go around the heavy weight, like planets orbiting the Sun.

The analogy is incomplete because in it only a two-dimensional section of space (the surface of the rubber sheet) is curved, and time is left undisturbed, as it is in Newtonian theory. However, in the theory of relativity, which agrees with a large number of experiments, time and space are inextricably tangled up. One cannot curve space without involving time as well. Thus time has a shape. By curving space and time, general relativity changes them from being a passive background against which events take place to being active, dynamic participants in what happens. In Newtonian theory, where time existed independently of anything else, one could ask: What did God do before He created the universe? As Saint Augustine said, one should not joke about this, as did a man who said, "He was preparing Hell for those who pry too deep." It is a serious question that people have pondered down the ages. According to Saint Augustine, before God made heaven and earth, He did not make anything at all. In fact, this is very close to modern ideas.

In general relativity, on the other hand, time and space do not exist independently of the universe or of each other. They are defined by measurements within the universe, such as the number of vibrations of a quartz crystal in a clock or the length of a ruler. It is quite conceivable that time defined in this way, within the universe, should have a minimum or maximum value—in other words, a beginning or an end. It would make no sense to ask what happened before the beginning or after the end, because such times would not be defined.

It was clearly important to decide whether the mathematical model of general relativity predicted that the universe, and time itself, should have a beginning or end. The general prejudice among theoretical physicists, including Einstein, held that time should be infinite in both directions. Otherwise, there were awkward questions about the creation of the universe, which seemed to be outside the realm of science. Solutions of the Einstein equations were known in which time had a beginning or end, but these were all very special, with a large amount of symmetry. It was thought that in a real body, collapsing under its own gravity, pressure or sideways velocities would prevent all the matter falling together to the same point, where the density would be infinite. Similarly, if one traced the expansion of the universe back in time, one would find that the matter of the universe didn't all emerge from a point of infinite density. Such a point of infinite density was called a singularity and would be a beginning or an end of time.

In 1963, two Russian scientists, Evgenii Lifshitz and Isaac Khalatnikov, claimed to have proved that solutions of the Einstein equations with a singularity all had a special arrangement of matter and velocities. The chances that the solution representing the universe would have this special arrangement were practically zero. Almost all solutions that could represent the universe would avoid having a singularity of infinite density:

Excerpted from The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking Copyright 2001 by Stephen Hawking. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.