Stephen Hawking's modified string theory contains imaginary numbers which are completely self-serving and eliminate the need for a singular creation event. Replace the imaginary numbers with real numbers and the problem of needing a singular creation event "magically" reappears.
Why are they so "imaginary?"
There's nothing more imaginary about them then there is about the square root of two.
Singularities don't arise because of the real number line. To "get a solution" in general relativity, you need to contract a vector from the cotangent space in order to map the tangent space to the real numbers.
Hell, quantum mechanics requires the use of complex numbers and even maps directly to the complex plane instead of the real numbers....which doesn't matter because you still have to map to those complex numbers with the dual space....giving real number solutions.
Allowing the space-time manifold to include the complex plane isn't any kind of novel idea that Hawking has and it certainly isn't anything new in any form of string theory. Given the right scenarios, you can replace "imaginary numbers" with real numbers and cause the mathematics to blow up at every point of space-time, and vice versa.
What the hell does it even mean for imaginary numbers to be "self serving?"
