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Einstein, Albert - Curved space time
Identifier
002427
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
from A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
A second feature that we believe must be part of any ultimate theory is Einstein’s idea that the gravitational field is represented by curved space-time; particles try to follow the nearest thing to a straight path in curved space, but because space time is not flat their paths appear to be bent, as if by a gravitational field. When we apply Feynman’s sum over histories to Einstein’s view of gravity, the analogue of the history of a particle is now a complete curved space-time that represents the history of the whole universe
………………………………The history of the universe in real time, however, would look very different. At about 10 or 20 thousand million years ago, it would have a minimum size, which was equal to the maximum radius of the history in imaginary time. At later real times, the universe would expand like the chaotic inflationary model proposed by Linde (but one would now have to assume the universe was somehow created in the right sort of state). The universe would expand to a very large size and eventually it would collapse again into what looks like a singularity in real time.