A Brief History of Relativity (Cont.)

Part 7 Black Holes & The Big Bang

      With the thought of Einstein's faults with the cosmological constant in mind, it is important to realize that even general relativity can predict the that the universe itself was created by the big bang. In all actuality, this proven by the author himself, Stephen Hawking as well as his counterpart Roger Penrose, so this is pretty recent in discovery. This is why Einstein had his worries about his theories. He was aware that the theory implies time to have a beginning, which he was unhappy with from the beginning. Also, he was even more reluctant to recognize that general relativity also predicts the time of death for massive stars, and this when the star reached the end of its life, no longer able to produce or generate enough heat to balance its own gravity, which inevitably made it smaller. The reason Einstein was so displeased by this was because he believed that stars broke down into some final state, but unfortunately for him we now know this is not true because stars have no final state configuration. They simply continue to shrink until they become "black holes", which are regions in space that are so warped within the realm of space time, that not even light can escape it.

    What happens to form such powerful region in space is that when a massive star of any sort, loses its nuclear fuel, it will in turn lose heat and contract. This thus warps space and time so greatly that the black hole will appear which prevents any light from escaping it. As a result of all this, time itself, will come to an end within it. As I mentioned before, Penrose and Hawking proved this, and so this means that time ends for stars. However, this does not help Einstein's theory of relativity because both the beginning and end of time still cannot be defined.  As a result of that, we still cannot predict what emerged as a result of the big bang, besides what we theorize.