of the world at the North Pole. At the North Pole, there is no direction north, and every direction points south. But this is simply due to the geometry of the curved surface of the Earth. In the same way, at the Big Bang there was no past, and all times lay in the future. And this is simply due to the geometry of curved space-time. The whole package of space and time, matter and energy, is completely self-contained.

A rather nice way to understand what is going on is to imagine you are standing a little way from the North Pole and start to walk due north. Even though you keep walking in a straight line, you will soon find that you are walking due south. In the same way, if you had a working time machine and started traveling backward in time from some moment just after the Big Bang, you would soon find that you were traveling forward in time, even though you had not altered the controls of the time machine. You just cannot get back to a time before the Big Bang (strictly speaking, before the Planck time) because there simply is no “before.”

In A Brief History of Time, Hawking spelled out the implications for religion. He leaves his colleagues in no doubt that he is, at the very least, an agnostic and finds strong support for this belief in his cosmological studies:

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?¹

But even without a creator there were still problems to be solved. Already, in 1981, the attention of Hawking and other theorists was focusing on the next question—how did a tiny seed of a Universe get blown up to the enormous size that we see today?