C. THE UNIVERSE AND ITS DEVELOPMENT

In the future:

31. If the scientist turns his attention from the present state of the universe to the future, even the very remote future, he finds himself constrained to recognize, both in the macrocosm and in the microcosm, that the world is growing old. In the course of billions of years, even the apparently inexhaustible quantities of atomic nuclei lost utilizable energy and, so to speak, matter becomes like an extinct and scoriform volcano. And the thought comes spontaneously that if this present cosmos, today so pulsating with rhythm and life is, as we have seen, insufficient to explain itself, with still less reason, will any such explanation be forthcoming from the cosmos over which, in its own way, the shadow of death will have passed.

In the past:

32. Let us now turn our attention to the past. The farther back we go, the more matter presents itself as always more enriched with free energy, and as a theater of vast cosmic disturbances. Thus everything seems to indicate that the material universe had in finite times a mighty beginning, provided as it was with an indescribably vast abundance of energy reserves, in virture of which, at first rapidly and then with increasing slowness, it evolved into its present state.

33. This naturally brings to mind two questions:

Is science in a position to state when this mighty beginning of the cosmos took place? And, secondly, what was the initial or primitive state of the universe?

34. The most competent experts in atomic physics, in collaboration with astronomers and astrophysicists, have attempted to shed light on these two difficult but extremely interesting problems.