be to assume that the stars had not been shining forever but had ‘turned on at some finite time in the past. In that case the absorbing matter might not have heated up yet or the light from distant stars ‘might not yet have reached us. And that brings us to the question cof what could have caused the stars to have turned on in the first place. The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed long before this. According to a number of carly cosmologies and the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant, time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have “First Cause” to explain the existence of the universe. (Within the universe, you always explained one event as being caused by some earlier event, but the existence of the universe itself could be explained in this way only if it had some beginning.) Another argument was put forward by St. Augustine in his book The City of God. He pointed out that civilization is progressing and we remember who performed this deed or developed that technique. Thus man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long. St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 8. for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 8, which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.) Aristotle, and most of the other Greck philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked to0 much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist, forever. The ancients had already considered the argument about progress described above, and answered it by saying that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly set the hhuman race right back to the beginning of civilization. ‘The questions of whether the universe had a beginning in time and whether it is limited in space were later extensively examined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his monumental (and very obscure) work, Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. He called these questions antinomies (that is, contradictions) of pure