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latentcorpse
Nov23-09, 03:40 PM
Singularities in GR are often associated with geodesic incompleteness.

My question is what does it actually mean for a geodesic to be incomplete?

jdwood983
Nov23-09, 05:57 PM
From my vague understanding, geodesic incompleteness is when we can't extrapolate the function over all of space & time.

latentcorpse
Nov24-09, 10:36 AM
yes but what about the t=0 big bang singularity. is this a singularity because we can only extrapolate geodesics as far back as to a time just after t=0 but we can't extend them to the t=0 region of spacetime itself and so the geodesics are incomplete?

jdwood983
Nov24-09, 11:48 AM
yes but what about the t=0 big bang singularity. is this a singularity because we can only extrapolate geodesics as far back as to a time just after t=0 but we can't extend them to the t=0 region of spacetime itself and so the geodesics are incomplete?

From what I understand of GR, yes.