> It is interesting to note that for a long time, the Big Bang theory
> was proscribed in the Soviet Union, on the grounds that
> it was not consistent with Engels' philosophy of nature.
> Engels after all spoke of the universe as being infinite
> in both size and duration, and so the Big Bang was taken
> as being contrary to Engels. Nevertheless, I think that if
> Engels had the oppurtunity to have lived to see the emergence
> of this theory, he might have found much to approve of.
I may be misremembering things, but it seems to me there is a passage in "Dialectics of Nature" where Engels advances a dialectical account of the universe _despite_ the then universal acceptance of something like the steady-state theory. I've always had the impression that Engels saw the steady-state universe as someting his philosophy had a bit of difficulty explaining.
Now, I also seem to recall that "Dialectics of Nature" wasn't available until at least the 1930's, so it's hardly surprising that some enterprising scientist cum party hack (a Lysenko for physicists maybe), could just decide what was really Marxist science and what was heresy without reading it.
Scott Martens