Books of The Times; Making the Big Bang Almost Understandable - The New York Times: "As Mr. Hawking points out, the 20th century has already witnessed breakthroughs that forever destroyed our notions of an unchanging cosmos. The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time, while quantum mechanics (and the uncertainty principle, which says it is impossible to predict precisely both the location and the momentum of a particle at a given moment) introduced a new element of randomness into the dream of perfect science. What's more, observations made by the astronomer Edwin Hubble in the 1920's showed that our own Milky Way is not the only galaxy, and they further suggested that the universe itself is not static or eternal but dynamic and expanding. Yet if such developments have resulted in a more precarious sense of man's condition, it is also important to remember, Mr. Hawking notes, that ''the whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner,'' that they instead ''reflect a certain underlying order.''
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