But it is also almost certainly the beginning of that theory's undoing, and its replacement by something better.

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Kempton's theory is beginning to win applause from some car and utility folks, but daunting technical and economic obstacles make it a tough sell.

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And a theory of its beginning, known as inflation, is correct.

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As happens every so often in asset protection planning, this theory has gone around so much that it is beginning to be accepted as gospel by some planners.

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One of his great achievements since then, together with mathematician Roger Penrose, has been to prove that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity means space and time has a beginning in the "Big Bang" and ends in black holes.

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Moreover, many governments that provide medical care for their citizens (including America, if Barack Obama's health proposals become law) are beginning to demand that drugs firms prove the effectiveness of expensive new pills in practice as well as in theory.

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With a quantum theory of gravity, we may be able to trace the Big Bang expansion back to its very beginning, and understand precisely how our universe arose, presumably from nothing.

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