Harking back to the far-off days when he was a grad student, physicist Stephen Hawking recalls how physicists bristled at the idea of a big bang, with its echoes of the biblical Genesis story.
"One would have to appeal to religion – an act of God – to determine how the universe started off," is how he describes the objectors' attitude. In those days, the very question of whether the universe actually had a beginning was a controversial one, he adds.
Hawking, now aged 68, was speaking on Sunday at the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, as he begins a six-week stint there.
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