Hartle–Hawking state
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History
According to the Hartle–Hawking proposal, the universe has no origin as we would understand it: before the Big Bang, which happened about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was a singularity in both space and time. Hartle and Hawking suggest that if we could travel backwards in time towards the beginning of the universe, we would note that quite near what might have been the beginning, time gives way to space so that there is only space and no time.
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Technical explanation
More precisely, the Hartle-Hawking state is a hypothetical vector in the Hilbert space of a theory of quantum gravity that describes the wave function of the universe.
It is a functional of the metric tensor defined at a (D − 1)-dimensional compact surface, the universe, where D is the spacetime dimension. The precise form of the Hartle–Hawking state is the path integral over all D-dimensional geometries that have the required induced metric on their boundary. According to the theory, time, as it is currently observed, diverged from a three-state dimension after the universe was in the age of the Planck time.
Such a wave function of the universe can be shown to satisfy, approximately, the Wheeler–DeWitt equation.