For over three millennia, most people could understand the
universe only in terms of myth, religion, and philosophy. Between
1920 and 1970, cosmology transformed into a branch of physics. With
this remarkably rapid change came a theory that would finally lend
empirical support to many long-held beliefs about the origins and
development of the entire universe: the theory of the big bang. In
this book, Helge Kragh presents the development of scientific
cosmology for the first time as a historical event, one that
embroiled many famous scientists in a controversy over the very
notion of an evolving universe with a beginning in time. In rich
detail he examines how the big-bang theory drew inspiration from
and eventually triumphed over rival views, mainly the steady-state
theory and its concept of a stationary universe of infinite
age.
In the 1920s, Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaitre showed
that Einstein's general relativity equations possessed solutions
for a universe expanding in time. Kragh follows the story from
here, showing how the big-bang theory evolved, from Edwin Hubble's
observation that most galaxies are receding from us, to the
discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Sir Fred
Hoyle proposed instead the steady-state theory, a model of dynamic
equilibrium involving the continuous creation of matter throughout
the universe. Although today it is generally accepted that the
universe started some ten billion years ago in a big bang, many
readers may not fully realize that this standard view owed much of
its formation to the steady-state theory. By exploring the
similarities and tensions between the theories, Kragh provides the
reader with indispensable background for understanding much of
today's commentary about our universe."
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