Robert Dicke, a leading Princeton University physicist during the 1950s and 1960s, later explained why a finite universe elicited such knee-jerk philosophical opposition among so many scientists. An infinitely old universe “would relieve us,” he said, “of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.”32 A finite universe, by contrast, would force scientists to confront uncomfortable questions about the ultimate beginning of the material universe itself.
