On Jan 28, 2010, at 7:00 PM, John Thornton wrote:
>>
>>> Hawking has more than once publicly claimed he wished he had never
>>> proposed the idea of a singularity as the beginning of the universe.
>
> I thought perhaps Shane misunderstood Hawking's reversal on the idea
> of a singularity as a reversal on the idea of a big bang...
It was and is none of my concern what Hawking chooses to call his pre- big-bang state-of-things. The point simply is that, call it "singularity" or not, that pre-big-bang state-of-things was not part of the universe whose observed and mathematically formulated regularities ("laws") suggested to Hawking that before it existed there was a state-of-things that somehow big-banged and became the present universe. But the theory (apart from its inconsistency with the observed world) is flawed--it has no way to bridge the gap between there and here. That is its "myth of origins" nature.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos