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He thrashed the discriminating practices contrary to other proposed models, both in publications and in the allocation of research budgets. Students who think outside the box of the Big Bang model have little chance of obtaining a research position, he therefore commented: “It may not be religious fundamentalism anymore, but I have coined the name ‘scientific fundamentalism’ for such a closed attitude.” The religious dimension may not be a stranger to that approach. The idea of a beginning of time and of the world was suggested by Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and part-time lec- turer at the University of Leuven. However, Buddhist thinking, for example, is apparently more capable of accepting a universe without beginning or end. The expansion of the universe was presented after Alexander Fried- mann and Lemaitre proved the existence of redshifts, the “official” translation of the recession velocity of a star or galaxy. The velocity sweeps them along in the expansion of the universe caused by the Big Bang; a so-called electromagnetic Doppler effect that consists in a fre- quency shift of the white light of stars towards the red spectrum caused solely by the relative movement of this star moving away from Earth. The measured apparent frequency is therefore lower than the real frequency. The Indian astrophysicist recognized the expansion of the universe without actually determining a beginning. These two sta- tuses are not incompatible. Narlikar explained: ““You should know that the expansion of the universe is only directly observed until redshifts of 4 or 5...which corresponds to a past era, where the density of the universe was only about two hundred times higher than the actual density, while a redshift of 10” corresponds to a density multiplied by a factor of 10°’! How do we verify the validity of our physical laws on such a high-density scale? This however, requires a gross extrapolation beyond known physics....” Please note that Fred Hoyle’s quasi-steady state model anticipated the appearance of new matter as recognized by high-energy physics. In fact, the Casimir effect clearly showed the spontaneous generation of particles in the vacuum. Narlikar, who sides with Hoyle, expected to see blueshifts of fainter galaxies to accredit the thesis of his model; the spectrum shift that the standard model could not explain. Moreover, he anticipated the existence of forty to fifty billion-year-old stars that would be at the origin of cosmic rays. Therefore, if the Big Bang never took place, the notion of cosmic time could be seriously challenged, because the history of the universe would not pivot on a beginning from which the temporal asymmetry What do the stars tell us about time? 147