When, that morning at breakfast, Mr Tompkins told the professor about his dream the previous night, the old man listened rather sceptically.

‘The collapse of the universe,’ said he, ‘would of course be a very dramatic ending, but I think that the velocities of mutual recession of galaxies are so high that present expansion will never turn into a collapse, and that the universe will continue to expand beyond any limit with the distribution of galaxies in space becoming more and more diluted. When all the stars forming the galaxies burn out because of the exhaustion of nuclear fuel, the universe will become a collection of cold and dark celestial aggregations dispersing into infinity.’

‘There are, however, some astronomers who think otherwise. They suggest the so-called steady state cosmology, according to which the universe remains unchanging in time: it has existed in about the same state as we see it today from infinity in the past, and will continue so to exist to infinity in the future. Of course it is in accordance with the good old principle of the British empire to preserve the status quo in the world, but I am not inclined to believe that this steady state theory is true. By the way, one of the originators of this new theory, a professor of theoretical astronomy at Cambridge University, wrote an opera on the subject which will have its premiere in Covent Garden next week.’