The considerable difficulties encountered in forging a full account of gravitational effects in a quantum theory – creating a theory of quantum gravity – may be resolved only when the conflicting demands of the status of the observer are resolved.

[Q]uantum theory is rife with conceptual problems and contradictions.

Only an exceptional initial condition could have led to the present order. That is the puzzle.

The conventional Big Bang model held to a picture of the Universe in which it expanded from some initial state at a finite time in the past. This [conventional] expansion is forever decelerating after the start because of the retarding pull of gravity.

The nature of time is one of those baffling problems that physicists have debated for centuries, but have made depressingly meagre progress in unravelling.