STEPHEN HAWKING'S FIRST PUBLISHED PAPER

HAWKING, S. W.

Occurrence of Singularities in Open Universes.

(New York), American physical Society, 1965.

Lex8vo. In the original printed blue wrappers. In "Physical Review Letters", Volume 15, No. 17, November 15, 1965. Small white paperlabel pasted on to top to back wrapper. Small blue line in ballpoint pen to back wrapper, not affecting text. A nice and clean copy externally as well as internally. P. 689. [Entire issue: Pp. 687-720].

Rare first appearance of Hawking's first published paper, published a year before his Ph.D. was approved. It signposted the beginning of the area of research in black holes and singularities in general. Shortly after the present paper was published, Hawking followed up with three other seminal papers, in which he applied the Penrose-singularity (that a gravitationally collapsing star will inevitably end in a space-time singularity) to the whole universe. This resulted in his famous conclusion that: "Yes, a universe governed by the classical (i.e., nonquantum) general theory of relativity must necessarily have started in a space-time singularity" (Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy).

When Hawking began his graduate studies, there was much debate in the physics community about the prevailing theories of the creation of the universe: the Big Bang and Steady State theories. Inspired by Roger Penrose's theorem of a spacetime singularity in the centre of black holes, Hawking applied the same thinking to the entire universe and during 1965, he wrote his thesis and the present paper on this topic.

"Hawking [in the present paper] realized that closed trapped surfaces, in its past version, will be present in any expanding Universe close to be spatially homogeneous and isotropic. This started a series of papers by him, Ellis, Geroch and others on the question of the inevitability of an initial singularity in our past if GR is assumed to hold and some reasonable conditions are met." (Senovilla, The 1965 Penrose singularity theorem)

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