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Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227713
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 515
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Book Description
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 Lemaître 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.
Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691005461
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 518
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Book Description
Between 1920 and 1970, cosmology became a branch of physics. This text 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.
Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227713
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 515
Get Book Here
Book Description
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 Lemaître 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.
Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192549979
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 627
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Book Description
Scientific and popular literature on modern cosmology is very extensive; however, scholarly works on the historical development of cosmology are few and scattered. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Modern Cosmology offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of the history of cosmology from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It provides historical background to what we know about the universe today, including not only the successes but also the many false starts. Big Bang theory features prominently, but so does the defunct steady state theory. The book starts with a chapter on the pre-Einstein period (1860-1910) and ends with chapters on modern developments such as inflation, dark energy and multiverse hypotheses. The chapters are organized chronologically, with some focusing on theory and others more on observations and technological advances. A few of the chapters discuss more general ideas, relating to larger contexts such as politics, economy, philosophy and world views.
Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191003344
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Throughout history, people have tried to construct 'theories of everything': highly ambitious attempts to understand nature in its totality. This account presents these theories in their historical contexts, from little-known hypotheses from the past to modern developments such as the theory of superstrings, the anthropic principle, and ideas of many universes, and uses them to problematize the limits of scientific knowledge. Do claims to theories of everything belong to science at all? Which are the epistemic standards on which an alleged scientific theory of the universe - or the multiverse - is to be judged? Such questions are currently being discussed by physicists and cosmologists, but rarely within a historical perspective. This book argues that these questions have a history and that knowledge of the historical development of 'higher speculations' may inform and qualify the current debate on the nature and limits of scientific explanation.
Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199209162
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
This book is a historical account of how natural philosophers and scientists have endeavoured to understand the universe at large, first in a mythical and later in a scientific context. Starting with the creation stories of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the book covers all the major events in theoretical and observational cosmology, from Aristotle's cosmos over the Copernican revolution to the discovery of the accelerating universe in the late 1990s. It presents cosmology as asubject including scientific as well as non-scientific dimensions, and tells the story of how it developed into a true science of the heavens. Contrary to most other books in the history of cosmology, it offers an integrated account of the development with emphasis on the modern Einsteinian andpost-Einsteinian period. Starting in the pre-literary era, it carries the story onwards to the early years of the 21st century.
Author: Hermann Bondi
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486474836
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Originally published: Cosmology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
Author: Helge Kragh
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691095523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
At the end of the nineteenth century, some physicists believed that the basic principles underlying their subject were already known, and that physics in the future would only consist of filling in the details. They could hardly have been more wrong. The past century has seen the rise of quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology, particle physics, and solid-state physics, among other fields. These subjects have fundamentally changed our understanding of space, time, and matter. They have also transformed daily life, inspiring a technological revolution that has included the development of radio, television, lasers, nuclear power, and computers. In Quantum Generations, Helge Kragh, one of the world's leading historians of physics, presents a sweeping account of these extraordinary achievements of the past one hundred years. The first comprehensive one-volume history of twentieth-century physics, the book takes us from the discovery of X rays in the mid-1890s to superstring theory in the 1990s. Unlike most previous histories of physics, written either from a scientific perspective or from a social and institutional perspective, Quantum Generations combines both approaches. Kragh writes about pure science with the expertise of a trained physicist, while keeping the content accessible to nonspecialists and paying careful attention to practical uses of science, ranging from compact disks to bombs. As a historian, Kragh skillfully outlines the social and economic contexts that have shaped the field in the twentieth century. He writes, for example, about the impact of the two world wars, the fate of physics under Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the role of military research, the emerging leadership of the United States, and the backlash against science that began in the 1960s. He also shows how the revolutionary discoveries of scientists ranging from Einstein, Planck, and Bohr to Stephen Hawking have been built on the great traditions of earlier centuries. Combining a mastery of detail with a sure sense of the broad contours of historical change, Kragh has written a fitting tribute to the scientists who have played such a decisive role in the making of the modern world.
Author: B. Bertotti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521372138
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
Modern cosmology aims to determine the origin, evolution, and ultimate fate of the Universe. This is an area of modern science that has engendered fierce debates which have captured public interest. This book recounts the development of modern cosmology, in chapters contributed by many of the leading protagonists. It is a fascinating account of physical and observational cosmology, the great cosmological debates, important observations and the riddle of dark matter. The enormous controversy surrounding the Big Bang theory is retold in personal recollections from H. Bondi, W. McCrea, and Fred Hoyle. This is followed by chapters on the discovery of cosmic radio waves and the contributions made by radio astronomers to current cosmology. The book concludes with a tribute to some of the pioneers of cosmology.
Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199919755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 141
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Book Description
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Author: Kirill A Bronnikov
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811233462
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 591
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Book Description
Assuming basic knowledge of special and general relativity, this book guides the reader to problems under consideration in modern research, concerning black holes, wormholes, cosmology, and extra dimensions. Its first part is devoted to local strong field configurations (black holes and wormholes) in general relativity and its most relevant extensions: scalar-tensor, f(R), and multidimensional theories. The second part discusses cosmology, including inflation and problems of a unified description of the whole evolution of the universe. The third part concerns multidimensional theories of gravity and contains a number of original results obtained by the authors. Expository work is conducted for a mechanism of symmetries and fundamental constants formation. The original approach to nonlinear multidimensional gravity that is able to construct a unique perspective describing different phenomena is highlighted.Much of the content was previously presented only in journal publications and is new for book contents, e.g., on regular black holes, various scalar field solutions, wormholes and their stability, inflation, clusters of primordial black holes, and multidimensional gravity. The last two topics are added in this new edition of the book. The other chapters are also updated to include new discoveries like the detection of gravitational waves.
