Evolution and Eternity  Rupert Sheldrake   The twentieth-century revolution in cosmology threw science into a slow-moving crisis that is still unfolding. Before the Big Bang theory became orthodox after 1966, physicists used to think that they were studying an eternal universe, governed by timeless mathematical laws, consisting of a fixed amount of matter and energy that was preserved forever according to the principles of conservation of matter and energy. These fundamental realities of physics were not altered by anything that actually happened. The evolution of life on earth made no difference to them, nor would the extinction of all life on our planet. The laws of nature and the total amount of matter and energy would always be the same.   The idea that the universe was born