At the moment, it is not yet certain whether the explosive phenomena which could have occurred with the big bang belong to the sphere of 'reproducible' or 'unreproducible' time. Prigogine and Stengers suspect that the hypothesis of the uniqueness of the cosmological beginning, according to which there must have been a ‘zero time', is to be abandoned. They suggest instead that the universe could have arisen, in a kind of ‘gratuitous action', from fluctuations of the vacuum, from the motions of mass and energy which together amount to zero. In the beginning, there would therefore have been no unique event, but a transition between states of entropy stemming from a fluctuation – a fluctuation not unlike that between chaos and order.
Recently, another physicist, Stephen W. Hawking, has likewise suggested abandoning the hypothesis of the uniqueness of the big bang. Uniqueness would be the state in which the space-time continuum has shrunk to an infinitely dense, infinitely small point, a state which cannot be described in terms of physics and in which time has no significance. Among other things, he tries to answer the question why at least three arrows of time point from the past into the future, even though the laws of physics do not distinguish between the directions pointing forwards and those pointing backwards: the thermodynamic arrow of time, according to which disorder is increasing; the psychological arrow of time, according to which the past but not the future remains in the memory; and the cosmological arrow, according to which the universe is expanding and not shrinking. Hawking now hopes that a new, yet to be discovered, great, uniform theory (quantum gravitation) could lead to the conclusion that the spacetime continuum does not represent a 'line' which begins with the big bang and ends with the great collapse, but is a 'loop' without beginning and end. According to his proposal, the space-time continuum would admittedly be boundless, but not infinite, just as the earth appears boundless to a stroller, even though it is finitely vast. But human beings, and hence knowledge of the universe and time, could only exist in the expanding phase. They represent a tiny fraction of order within an increasingly disorderly universe³4 – enough, however, to lead the social matrix back into nature.
The Longing for the Moment
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