THE BIG BANG WINS
Hawking got off to a flying start with his doctoral thesis, written at a critical time when there was a heated debate between two rival cosmological theories: the Big Bang and steady-state. Both theories accepted that the universe is expanding, but in the first it expands from an ultra-compact, super-dense state at a finite time in the past, while the second assumes the universe has been expanding forever, with new matter always being created to maintain a constant density. In his thesis, Hawking showed that steady-state theory is mathematically self-contradictory. He argued instead that the universe began as an infinitely small, infinitely dense point called a singularity. Today, Hawking’s description is almost universally accepted among scientists.