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Quantized redshift anomaly
19 years 8 months ago #13595
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
(JMB)
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">INSIDE and OUTSIDE seem dark to me, unless they mean linear and nonlinear.
I hope to be more clear about the ZPE, to show that there is nothing mysterious with it. First, let me remind the theory of the electromagnetic modes:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<hr noshade size="1">
To be honest with you,I need more than reminding, it is better if you teach me the theory of electromagnetic modes. The extent of my knowledge of this is that the magnetic wave produces an electrostatic wave which then produces a magnetic wave and so on forever.
I was an electronic tech once, but never learned the math behind it all. I am just trying to make sense of science. Unfortunately, science is not pure anymore, and often is a kind of religion in effect itself. It is clear that there is scientific authority, and it is the science of the scientific authority that gets accepted. I am wondering if this is an American phenomenon. Used to be we Americans were noted for our inventiveness. Remember that? Seems that we have managed to get behind everyone else now. It is the Chinese who have mastered system principles, it is the Russians who are way ahead on alternative energies.
The Big Bang theory for example, is supported not by the evidence, but by the supporters. The Big Bang is, to Americanize your French, "a bag of hot air" The original Big Bang was falsified right away, and the alternative or Big Expansion involves fantastic remedies, faster than light expansion of space and matter from nowhere on top of it. And on top of it this energy capable of moving the Universe apart vanishes, and the Universe finds itself just moving along.
I have been reminded that Maxwell's equations "work." The question is what happened to his displacement currents? And what are the displacement currents? (Since I have found that "displacement" is supposed to mean "displaced currents...")
Well, this is interesting -- Maxwell believed in the Aether, and there have been claims made that those aspects of his equations wich reference the Aether have been deleted. The reason, I am told, is that Michelson and Morley couldn't detect it with their interferometer, and Einstein didn't use it in his equations.
Strange how when a science is beaten down, and then co-opted with new names, the important philosophical questions are left behind. The new science then finds itself in a curious position of havng no foundation, and that then becomes the new goal. Of course, when they finally get to that goal, they will say they are the ones who discovered it.
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">1908 - The Ether (Aether) of Space
and auxiliary files
by Lord Rayleigh and Sir Oliver Lodge
courtesy of Bruce L. Rosenberg
Friday, February 21, 1908
THE RIGHT HON. LORD RAYLEIGH,
O.M. P.C. M.A. D.C.L. LL.D. Sc.D. Pres.R.S., in the Chair
SIR OLIVER LODGE, LL.D. D.Sc. F.R.S. M.R.I
The Ether of Space
THIRTY years ago Clerk Maxwell gave in this place a remarkable address on "Action at a Distance." It is reported in your Journal, Vol. VII., and to it I would direct attention. Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible-in other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is.
The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer. For it can be argued on the hydrodynamic or vortex theory of matter, as well as on the electrical theory, that every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence.
The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space. And though a charge of opposite sign will curve and concentrate them, yet it is possible to deal with both charges, by the method of superposition, as if they each existed separately without the other. In that case, therefore, however far they reach, such nuclei clearly exert no "action at a distance" in the technical sense.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance; but, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity, and in denying action at a distance across empty space I am not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind-for although brain disturbance is certainly physical and is an essential concomitant of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety, yet we know from the case of heat that a material movement can be excited in one place at the expense of corresponding movement in another, without any similar kind of transmission or material connection between the two places: the thing that travels across vacuum is not heat.
In all cases where physical motion is involved, however, I would have a medium sought for; it may not be matter, but it must be something; there must be a connecting link of some kind, or the transference cannot occur. There can be no attraction across really empty space. And even when a material link exists, so that the connexion is obvious, the explanation is not complete-for when the mechanism of attraction is understood, it will be found that a body really only moves because it is pushed by something from behind.
( www.keelynet.com/osborn/rey7.htm )
Compare to modern physics ala Bohm:
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It was while writing Quantum Theory that Bohm came into conflict with McCarthyism. He was called upon to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee in order to testify against colleagues and associates. Ever a man of principle, he refused. The result was that when his contract at Princeton expired, he was unable to obtain a job in the USA. He moved first to Brazil, then to Israel, and finally to Britain in 1957, where he worked first at Bristol University and later as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, until his retirement in 1987. Bohm will be remembered above all for two radical scientific theories: the causal interpretation of quantum physics, and the theory of the implicate order and undivided wholeness.[<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
A remarkable feature of a hologram is that if a holographic film is cut into pieces, each piece produces an image of the whole object, though the smaller the piece the hazier the image. Clearly the form and structure of the entire object are encoded within each region of the photographic record.
Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing.
The quantum potential postulated in the causal interpretation corresponds to the implicate order. But Bohm suggests that the quantum potential is itself organized and guided by a superquantum potential, representing a second implicate order, or superimplicate order. Indeed he proposes that there may be an infinite series, and perhaps hierarchies, of implicate (or "generative") orders, some of which form relatively closed loops and some of which do not. Higher implicate orders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence the higher.
(Reprinted from Sunrise magazine, February/March 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Theosophical University Press)
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<hr noshade size="1">
(JMB)
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">INSIDE and OUTSIDE seem dark to me,<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
I came up with the notion of "INSIDE" long before I learned about the ZPE and the Implicate order and now the hyperdimension. I don't wonder if it is real or not. Today we talk about the Fifth dimension (Reinmann) but where is this Fifth dimension? They say it is a "higher" mathematical dimension, but what does that mean in reality? Is it a dimension that is "higher" than ours? Or is it a "lower" dimension?
Is the canvass a higher dimension than the painting drawn on it?
The Chinese talk about the great "VOID" but the voidness is in the mind, not the reality. The reality, they say is fulness. The "sound of one hand clapping" is something that is done with the mind, not something to be figured out. And once the outside mind is quiet, the inside mind speaks...
So I should not say that INSIDE is nonlinear or not. Potentially, as evidenced by reality, it can be and is both. If this does not compute in mathematical terms, well, how does mathematics deal with emergence? I can take One and Zero and make 10, can your mathematics do that? You can give me all the equations describing the black on this paper, and all the equations describing the white of the page, all those equations and you will not have said one iota about what these words mean.
I know that EMF is powered by energy from the INSIDE through the ZPE, It is your job to come up with adequate equations, not mine.
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">15. Objections
Anyone who has engaged in arguments with colleagues about the foundations of quantum mechanics, whatever his position, will likely agree with the following observation of Tolstoy:
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the highest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.( plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/#hist )
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">INSIDE and OUTSIDE seem dark to me, unless they mean linear and nonlinear.
I hope to be more clear about the ZPE, to show that there is nothing mysterious with it. First, let me remind the theory of the electromagnetic modes:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<hr noshade size="1">
To be honest with you,I need more than reminding, it is better if you teach me the theory of electromagnetic modes. The extent of my knowledge of this is that the magnetic wave produces an electrostatic wave which then produces a magnetic wave and so on forever.
I was an electronic tech once, but never learned the math behind it all. I am just trying to make sense of science. Unfortunately, science is not pure anymore, and often is a kind of religion in effect itself. It is clear that there is scientific authority, and it is the science of the scientific authority that gets accepted. I am wondering if this is an American phenomenon. Used to be we Americans were noted for our inventiveness. Remember that? Seems that we have managed to get behind everyone else now. It is the Chinese who have mastered system principles, it is the Russians who are way ahead on alternative energies.
The Big Bang theory for example, is supported not by the evidence, but by the supporters. The Big Bang is, to Americanize your French, "a bag of hot air" The original Big Bang was falsified right away, and the alternative or Big Expansion involves fantastic remedies, faster than light expansion of space and matter from nowhere on top of it. And on top of it this energy capable of moving the Universe apart vanishes, and the Universe finds itself just moving along.
I have been reminded that Maxwell's equations "work." The question is what happened to his displacement currents? And what are the displacement currents? (Since I have found that "displacement" is supposed to mean "displaced currents...")
Well, this is interesting -- Maxwell believed in the Aether, and there have been claims made that those aspects of his equations wich reference the Aether have been deleted. The reason, I am told, is that Michelson and Morley couldn't detect it with their interferometer, and Einstein didn't use it in his equations.
Strange how when a science is beaten down, and then co-opted with new names, the important philosophical questions are left behind. The new science then finds itself in a curious position of havng no foundation, and that then becomes the new goal. Of course, when they finally get to that goal, they will say they are the ones who discovered it.
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">1908 - The Ether (Aether) of Space
and auxiliary files
by Lord Rayleigh and Sir Oliver Lodge
courtesy of Bruce L. Rosenberg
Friday, February 21, 1908
THE RIGHT HON. LORD RAYLEIGH,
O.M. P.C. M.A. D.C.L. LL.D. Sc.D. Pres.R.S., in the Chair
SIR OLIVER LODGE, LL.D. D.Sc. F.R.S. M.R.I
The Ether of Space
THIRTY years ago Clerk Maxwell gave in this place a remarkable address on "Action at a Distance." It is reported in your Journal, Vol. VII., and to it I would direct attention. Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible-in other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is.
The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer. For it can be argued on the hydrodynamic or vortex theory of matter, as well as on the electrical theory, that every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence.
The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space. And though a charge of opposite sign will curve and concentrate them, yet it is possible to deal with both charges, by the method of superposition, as if they each existed separately without the other. In that case, therefore, however far they reach, such nuclei clearly exert no "action at a distance" in the technical sense.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance; but, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity, and in denying action at a distance across empty space I am not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind-for although brain disturbance is certainly physical and is an essential concomitant of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety, yet we know from the case of heat that a material movement can be excited in one place at the expense of corresponding movement in another, without any similar kind of transmission or material connection between the two places: the thing that travels across vacuum is not heat.
In all cases where physical motion is involved, however, I would have a medium sought for; it may not be matter, but it must be something; there must be a connecting link of some kind, or the transference cannot occur. There can be no attraction across really empty space. And even when a material link exists, so that the connexion is obvious, the explanation is not complete-for when the mechanism of attraction is understood, it will be found that a body really only moves because it is pushed by something from behind.
( www.keelynet.com/osborn/rey7.htm )
Compare to modern physics ala Bohm:
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It was while writing Quantum Theory that Bohm came into conflict with McCarthyism. He was called upon to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee in order to testify against colleagues and associates. Ever a man of principle, he refused. The result was that when his contract at Princeton expired, he was unable to obtain a job in the USA. He moved first to Brazil, then to Israel, and finally to Britain in 1957, where he worked first at Bristol University and later as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, until his retirement in 1987. Bohm will be remembered above all for two radical scientific theories: the causal interpretation of quantum physics, and the theory of the implicate order and undivided wholeness.[<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
A remarkable feature of a hologram is that if a holographic film is cut into pieces, each piece produces an image of the whole object, though the smaller the piece the hazier the image. Clearly the form and structure of the entire object are encoded within each region of the photographic record.
Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing.
The quantum potential postulated in the causal interpretation corresponds to the implicate order. But Bohm suggests that the quantum potential is itself organized and guided by a superquantum potential, representing a second implicate order, or superimplicate order. Indeed he proposes that there may be an infinite series, and perhaps hierarchies, of implicate (or "generative") orders, some of which form relatively closed loops and some of which do not. Higher implicate orders organize the lower ones, which in turn influence the higher.
(Reprinted from Sunrise magazine, February/March 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Theosophical University Press)
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<hr noshade size="1">
(JMB)
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">INSIDE and OUTSIDE seem dark to me,<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
I came up with the notion of "INSIDE" long before I learned about the ZPE and the Implicate order and now the hyperdimension. I don't wonder if it is real or not. Today we talk about the Fifth dimension (Reinmann) but where is this Fifth dimension? They say it is a "higher" mathematical dimension, but what does that mean in reality? Is it a dimension that is "higher" than ours? Or is it a "lower" dimension?
Is the canvass a higher dimension than the painting drawn on it?
The Chinese talk about the great "VOID" but the voidness is in the mind, not the reality. The reality, they say is fulness. The "sound of one hand clapping" is something that is done with the mind, not something to be figured out. And once the outside mind is quiet, the inside mind speaks...
So I should not say that INSIDE is nonlinear or not. Potentially, as evidenced by reality, it can be and is both. If this does not compute in mathematical terms, well, how does mathematics deal with emergence? I can take One and Zero and make 10, can your mathematics do that? You can give me all the equations describing the black on this paper, and all the equations describing the white of the page, all those equations and you will not have said one iota about what these words mean.
I know that EMF is powered by energy from the INSIDE through the ZPE, It is your job to come up with adequate equations, not mine.
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">15. Objections
Anyone who has engaged in arguments with colleagues about the foundations of quantum mechanics, whatever his position, will likely agree with the following observation of Tolstoy:
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the highest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.( plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/#hist )
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19 years 8 months ago #13198
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
Tommy Gold, steady state theorist...
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">From: Cusp ® 25/06/2004 1:28:40 PM
Subject: Steady State takes another knock post id: 1146046
Sad news....
Thomas Gold (1920-2004)
Science loses a prominent maverick known for his wide range of expertise and refusal to compromise his beliefs.
by Jeremy McGovern
June 24, 2004
Thomas “Tommy” Gold died at the age of 84 in Ithica, New York, after a long battle with heart disease. An energetic, prominent figure in astronomy celebrated for going against conventional wisdom, Gold’s interests and fields of study were boundless.
Born in Vienna, Gold attended secondary school in Switzerland before relocating to England before WWII for study at Cambridge University. During the war he spent a year in a British internment camp. In 1969, Gold earned his doctorate from Cambridge, although he had served as professor of astronomy at Harvard and then Cornell before receiving the degree.
At Cornell, Gold became the head of the astronomy department and assistant vice president of research. Although he retired from Cornell in 1987, he continued to write and conduct research, more recently with theory that oil and gas are not formed from decaying organic matter, but are products of geological processes that frequently surface from deep underground.
Gold symbolized the image of Cornell as a bastion of unorthodox geniuses, according to Joesph Veverka, chairman of the university’s astronomy department and longtime colleague of Gold. Veverka feels that Gold’s flamboyant, energetic attitude was instrumental in the promotion of Cornell University.
Tommy was not shy, he was very confident, which made him an influential spokesman for Cornell. He was largely responsibly for making modern astronomy at Cornell the first-rate program it is today.”
Though Gold viewed himself as simply fulfilling the role of a scientist, he was labeled as a nonconformist for developing and supporting contrary theories that went against conventional wisdom. Sometimes he proved correct. For example, in 1968 Gold proposed that the newly discovered pulsars were rotating neutron stars, an idea that was initially disputed but which has since become the current model.
However, Gold was not always right. In the 1950s, he suggested that the lunar surface was coated with a deep layer of fine rock powder, warning that astronauts and landers would sink out of sight. The theory was opposed by many planetary scientists, but in part because of Gold’s reputation, NASA sent unmanned missions to test the strength of the lunar surface. Soil samples returned by Apollo 11 astronauts verified that the Moon’s upper surface is fine dust as Gold claimed, but it was only a few inches deep, and landers and astronauts were never in danger of vanishing into it.
Most famous, however, was Gold’s work, with astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi — who Gold met in the internment camp — in developing the “steady-state” theory in cosmology, which held that the universe was under constant construction with no beginning or end. Their theory was shattered in the 1960s with the discovery of microwave background radiation and quasars. Gold was disappointed, but not distraught over the failure of the “steady-state” theory and, characteristically unfazed, moved to his next idea.
Veverka shared one of his favorite moments with Gold from the early 1970s, just after Veverka arrived at Cornell. Hoyle was a visiting professor, lecturing a classroom on the arrow of time — which way time is going. Gold adamantly disagreed with Hoyle and came to the front of the classroom where the two battled it out on the chalkboard, vigorously writing equations and trading arguments.
“Tommy was exciting and had a real presence in a classroom — he relished the chance to share and explain his ideas."
Gold’s boundless energy transcended his professional life. He enjoyed a wide range of activities, including water-skiing, climbing, and even tightrope walking.
“Tommy will be remembered fondly by all of us for his incisive and provocative ideas, for his sincere dedication to his colleagues, as well as for his wide-ranging contributions to physics and astronomy extending over such varied topics as the steady-state theory of the universe, pulsars, the lunar regolith, and the geochemistry of the Earth’s mantle,” says Veverka.
p://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/001/764apepf.asp
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">From: Cusp ® 25/06/2004 1:28:40 PM
Subject: Steady State takes another knock post id: 1146046
Sad news....
Thomas Gold (1920-2004)
Science loses a prominent maverick known for his wide range of expertise and refusal to compromise his beliefs.
by Jeremy McGovern
June 24, 2004
Thomas “Tommy” Gold died at the age of 84 in Ithica, New York, after a long battle with heart disease. An energetic, prominent figure in astronomy celebrated for going against conventional wisdom, Gold’s interests and fields of study were boundless.
Born in Vienna, Gold attended secondary school in Switzerland before relocating to England before WWII for study at Cambridge University. During the war he spent a year in a British internment camp. In 1969, Gold earned his doctorate from Cambridge, although he had served as professor of astronomy at Harvard and then Cornell before receiving the degree.
At Cornell, Gold became the head of the astronomy department and assistant vice president of research. Although he retired from Cornell in 1987, he continued to write and conduct research, more recently with theory that oil and gas are not formed from decaying organic matter, but are products of geological processes that frequently surface from deep underground.
Gold symbolized the image of Cornell as a bastion of unorthodox geniuses, according to Joesph Veverka, chairman of the university’s astronomy department and longtime colleague of Gold. Veverka feels that Gold’s flamboyant, energetic attitude was instrumental in the promotion of Cornell University.
Tommy was not shy, he was very confident, which made him an influential spokesman for Cornell. He was largely responsibly for making modern astronomy at Cornell the first-rate program it is today.”
Though Gold viewed himself as simply fulfilling the role of a scientist, he was labeled as a nonconformist for developing and supporting contrary theories that went against conventional wisdom. Sometimes he proved correct. For example, in 1968 Gold proposed that the newly discovered pulsars were rotating neutron stars, an idea that was initially disputed but which has since become the current model.
However, Gold was not always right. In the 1950s, he suggested that the lunar surface was coated with a deep layer of fine rock powder, warning that astronauts and landers would sink out of sight. The theory was opposed by many planetary scientists, but in part because of Gold’s reputation, NASA sent unmanned missions to test the strength of the lunar surface. Soil samples returned by Apollo 11 astronauts verified that the Moon’s upper surface is fine dust as Gold claimed, but it was only a few inches deep, and landers and astronauts were never in danger of vanishing into it.
Most famous, however, was Gold’s work, with astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi — who Gold met in the internment camp — in developing the “steady-state” theory in cosmology, which held that the universe was under constant construction with no beginning or end. Their theory was shattered in the 1960s with the discovery of microwave background radiation and quasars. Gold was disappointed, but not distraught over the failure of the “steady-state” theory and, characteristically unfazed, moved to his next idea.
Veverka shared one of his favorite moments with Gold from the early 1970s, just after Veverka arrived at Cornell. Hoyle was a visiting professor, lecturing a classroom on the arrow of time — which way time is going. Gold adamantly disagreed with Hoyle and came to the front of the classroom where the two battled it out on the chalkboard, vigorously writing equations and trading arguments.
“Tommy was exciting and had a real presence in a classroom — he relished the chance to share and explain his ideas."
Gold’s boundless energy transcended his professional life. He enjoyed a wide range of activities, including water-skiing, climbing, and even tightrope walking.
“Tommy will be remembered fondly by all of us for his incisive and provocative ideas, for his sincere dedication to his colleagues, as well as for his wide-ranging contributions to physics and astronomy extending over such varied topics as the steady-state theory of the universe, pulsars, the lunar regolith, and the geochemistry of the Earth’s mantle,” says Veverka.
p://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/001/764apepf.asp
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
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19 years 8 months ago #13466
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
www.panspermia.org/whatsne14.htm
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">May 20: A Different Approach to Cosmology, by Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar, will appeal to professional cosmologists and astronomers, but non-specialists can also enjoy it. The presentation of their "quasi-steady state" theory — no longer just "steady state" — is undogmatic and includes several open questions. And their history of 20th century cosmology is more balanced and informative than the usual account.
There are heroes (Arp), villains (Ryle), and plenty of anecdotes. According to one, if Hoyle and Herman Bondi had acceded to Tommy Gold's opinion, they could easily have predicted a cosmic microwave background radiation temperature of 2.78 K in the decade before 1965 — and cosmology might look quite different today. In any case, their theory does account for this radiation, contrary to the common assertion that only the standard big bang does.
The book will not sway all doubters to the view that quasars are relatively nearby, with an intrinsic (non-cosmological) component increasing their redshifts. But what are the mainstream answers to several other questions they raise? For example, if rotary forces prevent the formation of black holes in galactic disks, why don't they do the same in galactic centers? They conclude with a list of questions which no existing theory answers. We think anyone seriously interested in cosmology would enjoy this book.
Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant V. Narlikar, A Different Approach to Cosmology: from a Static Universe throught the Big Bang towards Reality, Cambridge University Press, April 2000.
amazon.com: buying info, table of contents, reviews, etc.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">May 20: A Different Approach to Cosmology, by Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar, will appeal to professional cosmologists and astronomers, but non-specialists can also enjoy it. The presentation of their "quasi-steady state" theory — no longer just "steady state" — is undogmatic and includes several open questions. And their history of 20th century cosmology is more balanced and informative than the usual account.
There are heroes (Arp), villains (Ryle), and plenty of anecdotes. According to one, if Hoyle and Herman Bondi had acceded to Tommy Gold's opinion, they could easily have predicted a cosmic microwave background radiation temperature of 2.78 K in the decade before 1965 — and cosmology might look quite different today. In any case, their theory does account for this radiation, contrary to the common assertion that only the standard big bang does.
The book will not sway all doubters to the view that quasars are relatively nearby, with an intrinsic (non-cosmological) component increasing their redshifts. But what are the mainstream answers to several other questions they raise? For example, if rotary forces prevent the formation of black holes in galactic disks, why don't they do the same in galactic centers? They conclude with a list of questions which no existing theory answers. We think anyone seriously interested in cosmology would enjoy this book.
Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant V. Narlikar, A Different Approach to Cosmology: from a Static Universe throught the Big Bang towards Reality, Cambridge University Press, April 2000.
amazon.com: buying info, table of contents, reviews, etc.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
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19 years 8 months ago #13218
by Tommy
www.sepp.org/weekwas/2004/Aug.%2021.htm
Gold emerged from the cold comfort of this extended wartime seminar aware of a host of new problems in astrophysics and cosmology and much better equipped to investigate them. It turned out that the electron dynamics of the magnetron, at the heart of radar, has similarities to the dynamics of stellar accretion. Hence it related to the theory of matter dispersed throughout space, to gravitational accretion and to hypotheses put forward before the war by Hoyle and Raymond Lyttleton. But it was Gold who first suggested that, whatever the turbulence and violence of galaxies or stellar systems, the energy balance of the universe would remain stable if matter were being continuously created and destroyed in equal amounts.
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
www.sepp.org/weekwas/2004/Aug.%2021.htm
Gold emerged from the cold comfort of this extended wartime seminar aware of a host of new problems in astrophysics and cosmology and much better equipped to investigate them. It turned out that the electron dynamics of the magnetron, at the heart of radar, has similarities to the dynamics of stellar accretion. Hence it related to the theory of matter dispersed throughout space, to gravitational accretion and to hypotheses put forward before the war by Hoyle and Raymond Lyttleton. But it was Gold who first suggested that, whatever the turbulence and violence of galaxies or stellar systems, the energy balance of the universe would remain stable if matter were being continuously created and destroyed in equal amounts.
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19 years 8 months ago #13219
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
www.sepp.org/weekwas/2004/Aug.%2021.htm
Thomas Gold; died June 22 2004, aged 84. He was Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Cornell University; founder and for 20 years director of Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. . He was a Fellow, Royal Society (London) and Member, National Academy of Sciences (US). He never earned a PhD but was awarded Doctor of Science from Cambridge University and Honorary M.A. from Harvard University.
An obituary in the June 24 Guardian (UK) refers to him as science maverick who challenged establishment thinking - and quite often turned out to be right. It continues:
"Tommy" Gold was the initiator, the pragmatist and the persuader among the trio of young Cambridge scientists who turned cosmology upside down in the 1950s by proposing their controversial and comforting "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. This held centre stage for several years, with Fred Hoyle as its underpinning cosmological philosopher, Hermann Bondi in mathematical support, and Tommy Gold as its extrovert propagandist.
Gold could leap easily from engineering to physiology, from physiology to cosmology and on to almost any other speciality. Closed academic cliques feared him. Throughout his life he would dive into new territory to open up problems unseen by others - in biophysics, astrophysics, space engineering, or geophysics.
Controversy followed him everywhere. Possessing profound scientific intuition and open-minded rigour, he usually ended up challenging the cherished assumptions of others and, to the discomfiture of the scientific establishment, often found them wanting. His stature and influence were international.
The "steady state" trio were regarded as mavericks in the 1950s although, among other things, Bondi later became chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence. As a group they first worked together on Admiralty radar research in 1942. Before this, however, Gold had met and befriended Bondi in the internment camps in Britain and Canada where both had ended up - with many other highly expert and loyal academic refugees from Hitler - as "enemy aliens" during the 1940 panic about fifth columnists.
When internment came, Gold was studying engineering at Trinity College Cambridge, while Bondi was doing mathematics and physics. Both came from Vienna. Released from internment, he took his degree and, at the request of Hoyle and Bondi and with (eventual) official approval, joined them in secret Admiralty research into problems of radar ground clutter. .
Gold emerged from the cold comfort of this extended wartime seminar aware of a host of new problems in astrophysics and cosmology and much better equipped to investigate them. It turned out that the electron dynamics of the magnetron, at the heart of radar, has similarities to the dynamics of stellar accretion. Hence it related to the theory of matter dispersed throughout space, to gravitational accretion and to hypotheses put forward before the war by Hoyle and Raymond Lyttleton. But it was Gold who first suggested that, whatever the turbulence and violence of galaxies or stellar systems, the energy balance of the universe would remain stable if matter were being continuously created and destroyed in equal amounts.
It was many years before this comforting and rather God-like idea succumbed to the Big Bang, although the steady-state theory was still reverberating gently in 1980, when Cornell University held a world level symposium in Gold's honour, the contributions to which were later published as a collective festschrift.
In the introduction to the book, Professor Edwin Salpeter, who was studying electrodynamics at Cambridge in the late 1940s, recalls that at this time Gold had switched from the Cavendish Laboratory to the Medical Research Council's physiology laboratory, where he was working on a resonance hypothesis for human hearing.
In the 1950s, Gold switched back to astronomy, becoming chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where he raised a host of uncomfortable questions about stellar dynamics and produced a complex mathematical model, which became known as the "Gold-Hoyle hot universe".
In 1956, he was offered and took the chair of astronomy at Harvard and never looked back. He made an extraordinary series of contributions across the spectrum of planetary and astronomical sciences, being swept on to various US national committees and becoming a much sought-after NASA consultant. In 1959, he took the directorship of a new centre for radio-physics and space research at Cornell University, a context within which his extrovert originality had great freedom and where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming emeritus in 1981.
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of his genius was the speed and rigour with which, in 1968-69, he showed that the "pulsars", just discovered by the radio astronomers Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell, working under Sir Martin Ryle in Cambridge, must contain rotating neutron stars. This revealed huge new vistas of possibility, for if neutron stars exist in a galaxy, then, as Dennis Sciama later wrote, it is only a short step to accepting that black holes also exist. Gold opened the door for Hawking.
He also generated many controversies. In the 60s, on the run-up to the manned space programme and a possible lunar landing, there was much confused debate about the nature of the surface of the moon. Was it hard rock or was there a deep layer of fine dust? If the moon lander and its astronauts had to cope with dust layers that were metres thick, then designers needed to know, and know quickly.
Then, in the late 70s and early 80s, when the world was taking serious stock of its energy resources, Gold pointed out that some old, deep and theoretically exhausted gas boreholes were still producing methane at a low but constant rate. Isotopic dating suggested that a large proportion of this gas was very old.
Gold suggested that we might be seeing primeval methane, trapped during the formation of the planet, but continuously rising from the deep interior of the earth. His calculations suggested that the volume might be prodigious and hence of extreme importance. Further, this rising gas could be routed to - and trapped in - major fault structures, and therefore a factor that could both trigger earthquakes and render them predictable.
These hypotheses, cutting directly across the received wisdoms of narrow fields of science in which Gold had no recognised expertise, infuriated some. Small, deep, experimental boreholes, put down in the 80s by the Swedish government to test Gold's deep gas hypothesis, yielded only a small volume of gas, but it seemed to be ancient methane and it continues to flow. Gold later altered his hypothesis to propose a "deep, hot biosphere" of methane-producing organisms and has been proved resoundingly right.
Cosmology may be full of eternal question marks, he once said, but life is here and now. That was Tommy Gold. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<hr noshade size="1">
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">"But it was Gold who first suggested that, whatever the turbulence and violence of galaxies or stellar systems, the energy balance of the universe would remain stable if matter were being continuously created and destroyed in equal amounts." <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
This is getting more than just interesting. I like Tommy Gold's ideas. Tommy's conjecture was that if matter were created "here and now" as well as being destroyed (or packed away) then the Universe would be stable and we wouldn't need an expansion at superluminal rates with only one tenth the calculated mass.
So, to make this work we need to create energy here and now. Is there a way to create effective energy? Oh, I do not mean create energy from nothing, displace energy is more like it...
Let's see
Thomas Gold; died June 22 2004, aged 84. He was Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Cornell University; founder and for 20 years director of Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. . He was a Fellow, Royal Society (London) and Member, National Academy of Sciences (US). He never earned a PhD but was awarded Doctor of Science from Cambridge University and Honorary M.A. from Harvard University.
An obituary in the June 24 Guardian (UK) refers to him as science maverick who challenged establishment thinking - and quite often turned out to be right. It continues:
"Tommy" Gold was the initiator, the pragmatist and the persuader among the trio of young Cambridge scientists who turned cosmology upside down in the 1950s by proposing their controversial and comforting "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. This held centre stage for several years, with Fred Hoyle as its underpinning cosmological philosopher, Hermann Bondi in mathematical support, and Tommy Gold as its extrovert propagandist.
Gold could leap easily from engineering to physiology, from physiology to cosmology and on to almost any other speciality. Closed academic cliques feared him. Throughout his life he would dive into new territory to open up problems unseen by others - in biophysics, astrophysics, space engineering, or geophysics.
Controversy followed him everywhere. Possessing profound scientific intuition and open-minded rigour, he usually ended up challenging the cherished assumptions of others and, to the discomfiture of the scientific establishment, often found them wanting. His stature and influence were international.
The "steady state" trio were regarded as mavericks in the 1950s although, among other things, Bondi later became chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence. As a group they first worked together on Admiralty radar research in 1942. Before this, however, Gold had met and befriended Bondi in the internment camps in Britain and Canada where both had ended up - with many other highly expert and loyal academic refugees from Hitler - as "enemy aliens" during the 1940 panic about fifth columnists.
When internment came, Gold was studying engineering at Trinity College Cambridge, while Bondi was doing mathematics and physics. Both came from Vienna. Released from internment, he took his degree and, at the request of Hoyle and Bondi and with (eventual) official approval, joined them in secret Admiralty research into problems of radar ground clutter. .
Gold emerged from the cold comfort of this extended wartime seminar aware of a host of new problems in astrophysics and cosmology and much better equipped to investigate them. It turned out that the electron dynamics of the magnetron, at the heart of radar, has similarities to the dynamics of stellar accretion. Hence it related to the theory of matter dispersed throughout space, to gravitational accretion and to hypotheses put forward before the war by Hoyle and Raymond Lyttleton. But it was Gold who first suggested that, whatever the turbulence and violence of galaxies or stellar systems, the energy balance of the universe would remain stable if matter were being continuously created and destroyed in equal amounts.
It was many years before this comforting and rather God-like idea succumbed to the Big Bang, although the steady-state theory was still reverberating gently in 1980, when Cornell University held a world level symposium in Gold's honour, the contributions to which were later published as a collective festschrift.
In the introduction to the book, Professor Edwin Salpeter, who was studying electrodynamics at Cambridge in the late 1940s, recalls that at this time Gold had switched from the Cavendish Laboratory to the Medical Research Council's physiology laboratory, where he was working on a resonance hypothesis for human hearing.
In the 1950s, Gold switched back to astronomy, becoming chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where he raised a host of uncomfortable questions about stellar dynamics and produced a complex mathematical model, which became known as the "Gold-Hoyle hot universe".
In 1956, he was offered and took the chair of astronomy at Harvard and never looked back. He made an extraordinary series of contributions across the spectrum of planetary and astronomical sciences, being swept on to various US national committees and becoming a much sought-after NASA consultant. In 1959, he took the directorship of a new centre for radio-physics and space research at Cornell University, a context within which his extrovert originality had great freedom and where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming emeritus in 1981.
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of his genius was the speed and rigour with which, in 1968-69, he showed that the "pulsars", just discovered by the radio astronomers Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell, working under Sir Martin Ryle in Cambridge, must contain rotating neutron stars. This revealed huge new vistas of possibility, for if neutron stars exist in a galaxy, then, as Dennis Sciama later wrote, it is only a short step to accepting that black holes also exist. Gold opened the door for Hawking.
He also generated many controversies. In the 60s, on the run-up to the manned space programme and a possible lunar landing, there was much confused debate about the nature of the surface of the moon. Was it hard rock or was there a deep layer of fine dust? If the moon lander and its astronauts had to cope with dust layers that were metres thick, then designers needed to know, and know quickly.
Then, in the late 70s and early 80s, when the world was taking serious stock of its energy resources, Gold pointed out that some old, deep and theoretically exhausted gas boreholes were still producing methane at a low but constant rate. Isotopic dating suggested that a large proportion of this gas was very old.
Gold suggested that we might be seeing primeval methane, trapped during the formation of the planet, but continuously rising from the deep interior of the earth. His calculations suggested that the volume might be prodigious and hence of extreme importance. Further, this rising gas could be routed to - and trapped in - major fault structures, and therefore a factor that could both trigger earthquakes and render them predictable.
These hypotheses, cutting directly across the received wisdoms of narrow fields of science in which Gold had no recognised expertise, infuriated some. Small, deep, experimental boreholes, put down in the 80s by the Swedish government to test Gold's deep gas hypothesis, yielded only a small volume of gas, but it seemed to be ancient methane and it continues to flow. Gold later altered his hypothesis to propose a "deep, hot biosphere" of methane-producing organisms and has been proved resoundingly right.
Cosmology may be full of eternal question marks, he once said, but life is here and now. That was Tommy Gold. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
<hr noshade size="1">
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">"But it was Gold who first suggested that, whatever the turbulence and violence of galaxies or stellar systems, the energy balance of the universe would remain stable if matter were being continuously created and destroyed in equal amounts." <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
This is getting more than just interesting. I like Tommy Gold's ideas. Tommy's conjecture was that if matter were created "here and now" as well as being destroyed (or packed away) then the Universe would be stable and we wouldn't need an expansion at superluminal rates with only one tenth the calculated mass.
So, to make this work we need to create energy here and now. Is there a way to create effective energy? Oh, I do not mean create energy from nothing, displace energy is more like it...
Let's see
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19 years 7 months ago #13223
by Tommy
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
<center>GENERAL ARTICLES CURRENT SCIENCE,
VOL. 78, NO. 9, 10 MAY 2000
Cosmology: Past, present and future*
Jayant V. Narlikar</center>
This is a broad-brush review of the development of cosmology during the twentieth century. The ‘past’ deals with the first nine decades of the century while the ‘present’ deals with the last decade. Although technological achievements have helped the astronomer in better viewing the universe, a ‘final’ understanding still eludes the search for the correct cosmological model. The article ends with a list of unsolved questions which the ‘future’ may eventually answer...
Towards the end of this talk I will mention a few outstanding issues that hopefully will be resolved in the future years.To be more specific, I will make the following break up of the past, present and future: Past: 1901–1990; Present:1991–2000; Future: 2001– . . . .I will deal with these time zones in that order.
Expanse of the universe:
This century saw a remarkable turn around in the views of scientists about how vast our universe is. Two major views held sacrosanct by the majority of the astronomical community over the nineteenth century, fell by the wayside as the horizons of observational astronomy expanded and theorists became bolder in pushing their extrapolations of laboratory physics to larger systems. Here is a timetable of important highlights.
Observational developments
1900–1915: The first belief to go was that the solar system is at the centre of the Milky Way as originally claimed by William Herschel (see Figure 1). Thanks to more accurate measurements of distances of stars and globular clusters, Harlow Shapley was able to show that the Galactic Centre is considerably farther from the Sun. The currently estimated distance is around 30,000 light years.
1900–1920: A change of viewpoint from the Milky Way-based universe to Kant’s island universe hypothesis took place. This was the second of the two long-held beliefs to go. Immannuel Kant (1724–1804) had argued that our Milky Way was just one of the innumerable galaxies populating the universe, all distributed like islands in a vast ocean. This notion was violently resisted by most astronomers, who believed that everything that they observed was part of our Milky Way Galaxy. An example of how the community still resisted the Kantian view-point at the turn of the century can be seen from the following quote from a popular book of astronomy of the time:‘. . . "The question whether nebulae are external galaxies hardly any longer needs discussion. It has been answered by the progress of research. <b>No competent thinker</b>, with the whole of the available evidence before him, can now, it is safe to say, maintain any single nebula to be a star system of co-ordinate rank with the Milky Way . . .’ (Agnes Clerke,The System of the Stars, 1905, p. 349).
These nebulae were diffuse, cloud-like in appearance and were widely believed to be systems in our own Galaxy. There was considerable debate between Shapley and Curtis, with Shapley this time on the conservative side.*Based on a talk delivered at a Seminar on ‘Physics in the 20th Century and Trends for the New Millennium’ Indian Physics Association.J. V. Narlikar is at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune 411 007, India. Figure 1. Herschel’s map of the Milky Way with the sun (S)shown at the centre.His view is summarized in the following quote:‘. . . Observation and discussion of the radial velocities,internal motions, and distribution of spiral nebulae, of real and apparent brightness of novae, of the maximum luminosity of galactic and cluster stars, and finally of the dimensions of our galactic system, all seem definitely to oppose the “island universe” hypothesis of the spiral nebulae . . .’. (H. Shapley, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 1919, 31, 261).
One reason for the conservative viewpoint to be maintained was the considerable observational work by the senior astronomer Van Maanen who reported significant transverse angular motion of these nebulae. This meant that if the nebulae were really distant, then their physical velocities would be too enormous to be real. And so Van Maanen’s measurements of transverse motions implied that nebulae could not be extra galactic. However, eventually astronomers came to discount these measurements, as they could not be verified by any subsequent observations.
1920–1930: Starting with the early spectroscopic measurements of Slipher, and others and the detection of spectral shifts, mostly towards the red end of the spectrum, culminating in the work of Humason and Hubble, the extragalactic nature of nebulae became accepted. The spectral shifts, interpreted as Doppler shifts led to the picture that most of these nebulae are receding from us. Hubble gradually established that these nebulae are galaxies of stars, just like the Milky Way, thus confirming the Kantian hypothesis.1929: Hubble’s Law relating the radial velocity (V ) to distance (D) of a typical galaxy was put forward for the first time. Written today as V = HD, the constant H is called‘Hubble’s constant’ (see Figure 2).1930: The concept of the Expanding Universe was established and this was to form the basis for future development of cosmology.
Theoretical developments 1917: Einstein proposed in 1915 his general theory of relativity and in 1917 he applied the theory to construct a mathematical model describing a static, finite but also un-bounded universe. He then required a non-zero cosmological constant (?). He had hoped this to emerge as a unique model of the universe. However, within a few months, DeSitter showed that an empty but expanding universe was also a solution of Einstein’s modified field equations. Whereas Einstein’s solution had matter without motion, DeSitter’s universe had motion without matter!
1922–1924: Alexander Friedmann produced expanding non-empty world models, but these were ignored as mathematical curiosities by Einstein and others. In these models,the space was taken to be of constant curvature, positive,zero or negative. In modern terminology we denote these by a curvature parameter k which takes values+ 1, 0 , – 1.
1927: Abbe’ Lemaitre from Belgium produced similar theoretical solutions, being unaware of Friedmann’s work.1932: Realizing that in the context of Hubble’s discovery, a static model was no longer relevant, Einstein abandoned the cosmological constant and in a joint paper with De Sitter, favoured the flat space expanding model from Friedmann’s solutions. Therefore this model is often called the Einstein–De Sitter model. This model is the simplest of all Friedmann models and has ?= 0, as well as the curvature parameter k = 0.
1933–1936: Eddington and Lemaitre, however, continued working with models having non-zero cosmological constant as they felt that a larger parameter space will be helpful to account for all the observed features including the formation of galaxies. A range of Friedmann models with or without ?is shown in Figure 3. Can observations help choose the right Friedmann model? The next three decades were used by cosmologists to extend their observations to test cosmological models, with the hope that observations would single out a specific model as the model of the universe. The time table of some Figure 2. Hubble’s plot for the fifth brightest member in clusters of galaxies. The photographic magnitude can be related to distance on the logarithmic scale, while the recessional velocity is obtained by multiplying the observed redshift by the velocity of light c.
specific developments is given next.
1935–1940: Hubble hoped to determine the correct model by counting galaxies up to increasing level of faintness, as it gave a radius–volume relation, that could be compared with the model-dependent theoretical relation. This project was doomed to failure as the number of galaxies to be counted up to distances where curvature differences are noticeable, was too large.
1940–1945: The Palomar Telescope of 200 inch aperture was built for the above key project. However, by the time the telescope was completed, it became clear that the project was unworkable.
1945–1955: The emerging science of radio astronomy went through an early period when radio astronomers thought that all radio sources are stars in the Galaxy. Tommy Gold had argued that a large population of the radio sources may be extragalactic, a conclusion that was violently resisted by the Cambridge radio astronomer Martin Ryle. A few years after the Gold–Ryle controversy, it was realized that a majority of sources was indeed extragalactic and this led to optimism that one could solve the cosmoogical problem by counting radio sources instead of galaxies. (Radio sources are not as numerous as galaxies.)
1955–1965: Radio source counts were used by Ryle as a disproof of the Steady State Cosmology (SSC). The SSCwas proposed in 1948 by Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold and by Fred Hoyle as a reaction to the apparent shortcomings of the Friedmann Cosmology, namely:
(i) A singular origin: The model had a beginning in a primordial event often called the Big Bang, a name due to Hoyle himself. We shall refer to the various Friedmann models as part of the Standard Big Bang Cosmology (SBBC). The big bang itself is a physically undefinable and mathematically singular event. That is, all theoretical machinery breaks down at this instant, labelled by the time coordinate at t = 0. In a physical theory such an event is therefore indicative of some serious shortcoming of basic formalism.
(ii) The age problem: Counting the time since the above epoch of ‘beginning’, the age of the universe at present can be determined for any model in terms of the measured value of Hubble’s constant. The answer came out smaller than the ages of many of the oldest stars.
(iii) The origin of matter not explained: The epoch of big bang represents creation of the universe. At this epoch the law of conservation of matter and energy breaks down and so the most fundamental of the cosmological issues, viz. the origin of all the matter we see today, is notaddressed.The Hoyle–Ryle controversy of 1961 on source counts and their interpretation marked a major confrontation between the attackers and defenders of the SSC. Eventually, Hoyle’s approach turned out to be closer to reality, although not so realized at the time. The SSC, however, made several useful contributions to cosmology:
(i) Ideas on matter creation and baryon non-conservation: The theory sought to explain matter creation in the form of baryons, through the agency of a scalar field. At the time a scalar field was not popular with the field theorists, nor could they stomach the idea of the baryon number not being conserved. On both these counts today’s theoretical physicists have changed and come round closer to what the SSC had said in the 1950s and 1960s.
(ii) Massive collapsed objects in galactic nuclei: One frequently hears of the discovery of collapsed massive objects (glamorized as black holes) in the nuclei of galaxies.The idea was in fact first proposed by Fred Hoyle and the author in 1966, at which point the notion was considered bizarre.
(iii) Super clustering of galaxies: The hot universe model of Gold and Hoyle in 1958 had shown that structure formation in the SSC would take place through thermal pressure gradients, resulting in typical units of size 50–100 Mpc, characteristic of super clustering of galaxies. Hoyle and the author had used inhomogeneity on this scale to explain Ryle’s source counts. In the early 1960s, inhomogeneities on this scale were not considered likely; today they are an accepted part of reality. Can all nuclei of elements be made in a primordial process just after the big bang?
Parallel to the development of the SSC, a new direction was being provided to the SBBC by George Gamow who at-tempted to show that nuclei of all chemical elements were formed in the first few minutes after the big bang. The land-marks in this branch of physical cosmology were as follows.Figure 3. Expanding world models for different values of ? and a positive curvature parameter. de Sitter, George Gamow initiated work on this problem with his student Ralph Alpher and later joined by another, Robert Hermann.
1948: Affirmative answer by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow to the question as to whether atomic nuclei could be synthesized in the early hot era. This work became known as thea–ß–? (alpha–beta–gamma) theory, after its authors! A modern version of this calculation yields abundances shown in Figure 4. Only light nuclei can be made this way.For all heavier nuclei the appropriate location is inside stars.
1948: Prediction of relic black body radiation background in microwaves was made by Alpher and Herman. This radiation of the early hot era was expected to cool down as the universe expanded: Alpher and Hermann guessed the present temperature of the background as 5 K.As physicists five decades ago did not take cosmology seriously (nor did the astronomers!) this important prediction was largely ignored both by theorists andobservers.What is the significance of the cosmic microwave background radiation?The microwave background today is considered the strong-est evidence for the SBBC. Here, however is a time table of how information about this important component of the universe was put together piece by piece.
1941: McKeller found that CN–molecular transitions imply a radiation background of 2.3 K. This result was, how-ever, largely ignored, partly because of the wartime preoccupations and partly because it was published in an obscure journal.
1948: Prediction by Alpher and Herman came up as reported earlier.
1955: Bondi, Gold and Hoyle estimated the energy density of stellar radiation in the SSC, assuming all helium found in the universe to be of stellar origin. They found that if thermalized, that energy density would be like a black body radiation of temperature 3 K. However, they did not press this point further, partly because they did not see an obvious process of thermalization.
1965: Penzias and Wilson serendipitously found the CMBR of temperature 3.5 K. Their observation was of course at a single wavelength of around 7 cm. But the uniformity of the background was taken to identify it with the relic radiation of the SBBC.
1965–1990: Various surveys culminating in COBE in 1990 subsequently confirmed a black body spectrum of the CMBR with a temperature of 2.7 K. The COBE spectrum is shown in Figure 5.
1977: Dipole anisotropy in the radiation background was discovered and interpreted as arising from the earth’s motion against the isotropic background.
1992: First detection (by COBE) of small-scale inhomogeneities in the CMBR generated considerable excitement and euphoria in the big bang community as these were perceived as the indicators left on the background by the process of structure formation. Can surveys of the universe to high redshifts determine the correct world model?Figure 4. Primordial abundances of light nuclei plotted as a function of baryon density ?= ?(T/109)3, with T measured on absolute scale.
Figure 5. COBE measurements of CMBR spectrum. The continuous curve describes a 2.73 K black body curve passing through error rectangles.
1950–1980: Two groups, Sandage et al. and de Vaucouleurs et al., continued to improve the determination of Hubble’s constant, but also continued to differ by a factor 2,with Sandage and co-workers advocating a lower value.
1960–1980: Sandage carried on measurements of the Hubble relation to high redshifts with the hope of measuring the deceleration parameter, i.e. how fast the universe was slowing down; but systematic errors and evolutionary corrections proved insurmountable. Thus the goal of determining the correct model still eluded observers.
1960–1990: The angular diameter–redshift relation also was beset with many uncertainties and evolutionary effects and could not settle the cosmological problem.Thus the improvement of observational techniques only served to remind the observer that several pitfalls lie between observations and interpretation. Even the counts of galaxies obtained by computerized reading of plates for a large number of galactic images made it clear that a clear-cut conclusion of the kind expected by Hubble fifty years earlier is still not possible. Can high energy physics usefully interact with the SBBC to resolve mutual problems?
1968: The electroweak unification raised hopes of a grand unified theory (GUT), but particle physicists needed a high energy laboratory where such a theory could be tested.
1977: The only such laboratory was provided by the SBBC if one could confidently extrapolate close to the big bang. Thus particle physicists teamed up with cosmologists.
1980–1981: Out of such wedlock was born the idea of inflation first suggested by Kazanas, Guth and Sato independently; and it has played a key role in the agenda of theSBBC.
1970–1990: Astronomical observations indicated existence of a large quantity of dark matter which the SBBC required to be largely non-baryonic
and hence cosmologists began to get inputs from various ideas in particle physics, ideas like
GUT, super-symmetry, strings, etc. for candidates for such matter.This now brings me to the present decade. Thrust areas in cosmology in the last decade of the 20th century The present work in cosmology is mainly in the following areas:
Structure formation: Given the primordial seeds in the preinflationary era, attempts are made to see how they would grow and lead to the presently observed galaxy ? cluster ? super cluster format of large-scale structure, together with their peculiar motions as well as their imprints on the CMBR. This is a multi-parameter exercise which folds in such items as the nature of dark matter, biasing, N-body simulations, etc.
Redshift surveys: These will tell us how matter is distributed around us out to greater distances so as to know about structural hierarchy. Universe at large redshifts: Observations of discrete source populations at redshifts going up to z 5 tell us about how the universe has evolved in the last few Giga-years and thus put constraints on cosmological theories.
Baryogenesis: A fundamental issue has been to under-stand how baryons, etc. formed in the early universe. A particularly interesting issue still to be understood is the apparent predominance of matter over anti-matter, and the overall dominance of radiation as exemplified by the large photon to baryon number ratio.
Alternative cosmologies: As the present observational constraints are already proving severe for the SBBC, it is worth exploring alternative cosmologies.In 1993, Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar proposed an alter-native cosmology called the Quasi-Steady State Cosmology (QSSC) which has the following positive features:
1. It explains creation of matter in non-singular mini bangs in a universe without a beginning, and without violating any conservation laws. The mini bangs essentially‘drive’ the universe which has a long-term exponential expansion superposed with short-term oscillations. The oscillations are generated by the on/off switching of mini-creation events. A typical oscillation lasts for 50 Gyr while 20 oscillations take place in one e-folding time of the long-term expansion. (see Figure 6)
2. It accounts for the origin of the CMBR along with its observed temperature as thermalized relic starlight. Stars are born and burn out during one oscillation.Thus there is relic starlight from all previous cycles.
3. It explains dark matter as relic stars of earlier generations.
4. It accounts for light nuclei as created in minibangs and in stars, with abundances consistent with observations.
5. It is consistent with large redshift observations of discrete source populations. 6. It seems to have a viable theory of structure formation through minibangs. Naturally this cosmology needs to be further investigated for conformity with all the available data about the universe.
Issues for the future I now end with a few issues that will need attention in the coming years. Future work will tell us many new facts about the universe, and hopefully answer some outstanding questions of the present, for example:
1. What, if anything do minute-scale inhomogeneities of the CMBR tell us about how large-scale structure formed?
2. Did an inflationary phase occur in the very early universe?
3. Is a cosmological constant necessary? If so, how did it originate?
4. How did the universe develop an asymmetry between matter and antimatter?
5. Is the Hubble interpretation of redshift universally applicable to all extragalactic redshifts? The cases of anomalous redshifts, redshift periodicities, etc. reported by Arp, Tifft and others are growing in number. These are difficult to fit within the framework of Hubble’s law.
6. Will the SBBC survive with minimal modifications, or will we need radically different alternatives like the QSSC for our understanding of the universe?
Perhaps, for those cosmologists who think that they have everything settled and worked out about the universe, I should end with a cautionary remark of J. B. S. Haldane:‘ The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.’ Received 30 December 1999; revised accepted 7 January 2000<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
<center>GENERAL ARTICLES CURRENT SCIENCE,
VOL. 78, NO. 9, 10 MAY 2000
Cosmology: Past, present and future*
Jayant V. Narlikar</center>
This is a broad-brush review of the development of cosmology during the twentieth century. The ‘past’ deals with the first nine decades of the century while the ‘present’ deals with the last decade. Although technological achievements have helped the astronomer in better viewing the universe, a ‘final’ understanding still eludes the search for the correct cosmological model. The article ends with a list of unsolved questions which the ‘future’ may eventually answer...
Towards the end of this talk I will mention a few outstanding issues that hopefully will be resolved in the future years.To be more specific, I will make the following break up of the past, present and future: Past: 1901–1990; Present:1991–2000; Future: 2001– . . . .I will deal with these time zones in that order.
Expanse of the universe:
This century saw a remarkable turn around in the views of scientists about how vast our universe is. Two major views held sacrosanct by the majority of the astronomical community over the nineteenth century, fell by the wayside as the horizons of observational astronomy expanded and theorists became bolder in pushing their extrapolations of laboratory physics to larger systems. Here is a timetable of important highlights.
Observational developments
1900–1915: The first belief to go was that the solar system is at the centre of the Milky Way as originally claimed by William Herschel (see Figure 1). Thanks to more accurate measurements of distances of stars and globular clusters, Harlow Shapley was able to show that the Galactic Centre is considerably farther from the Sun. The currently estimated distance is around 30,000 light years.
1900–1920: A change of viewpoint from the Milky Way-based universe to Kant’s island universe hypothesis took place. This was the second of the two long-held beliefs to go. Immannuel Kant (1724–1804) had argued that our Milky Way was just one of the innumerable galaxies populating the universe, all distributed like islands in a vast ocean. This notion was violently resisted by most astronomers, who believed that everything that they observed was part of our Milky Way Galaxy. An example of how the community still resisted the Kantian view-point at the turn of the century can be seen from the following quote from a popular book of astronomy of the time:‘. . . "The question whether nebulae are external galaxies hardly any longer needs discussion. It has been answered by the progress of research. <b>No competent thinker</b>, with the whole of the available evidence before him, can now, it is safe to say, maintain any single nebula to be a star system of co-ordinate rank with the Milky Way . . .’ (Agnes Clerke,The System of the Stars, 1905, p. 349).
These nebulae were diffuse, cloud-like in appearance and were widely believed to be systems in our own Galaxy. There was considerable debate between Shapley and Curtis, with Shapley this time on the conservative side.*Based on a talk delivered at a Seminar on ‘Physics in the 20th Century and Trends for the New Millennium’ Indian Physics Association.J. V. Narlikar is at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, Pune 411 007, India. Figure 1. Herschel’s map of the Milky Way with the sun (S)shown at the centre.His view is summarized in the following quote:‘. . . Observation and discussion of the radial velocities,internal motions, and distribution of spiral nebulae, of real and apparent brightness of novae, of the maximum luminosity of galactic and cluster stars, and finally of the dimensions of our galactic system, all seem definitely to oppose the “island universe” hypothesis of the spiral nebulae . . .’. (H. Shapley, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 1919, 31, 261).
One reason for the conservative viewpoint to be maintained was the considerable observational work by the senior astronomer Van Maanen who reported significant transverse angular motion of these nebulae. This meant that if the nebulae were really distant, then their physical velocities would be too enormous to be real. And so Van Maanen’s measurements of transverse motions implied that nebulae could not be extra galactic. However, eventually astronomers came to discount these measurements, as they could not be verified by any subsequent observations.
1920–1930: Starting with the early spectroscopic measurements of Slipher, and others and the detection of spectral shifts, mostly towards the red end of the spectrum, culminating in the work of Humason and Hubble, the extragalactic nature of nebulae became accepted. The spectral shifts, interpreted as Doppler shifts led to the picture that most of these nebulae are receding from us. Hubble gradually established that these nebulae are galaxies of stars, just like the Milky Way, thus confirming the Kantian hypothesis.1929: Hubble’s Law relating the radial velocity (V ) to distance (D) of a typical galaxy was put forward for the first time. Written today as V = HD, the constant H is called‘Hubble’s constant’ (see Figure 2).1930: The concept of the Expanding Universe was established and this was to form the basis for future development of cosmology.
Theoretical developments 1917: Einstein proposed in 1915 his general theory of relativity and in 1917 he applied the theory to construct a mathematical model describing a static, finite but also un-bounded universe. He then required a non-zero cosmological constant (?). He had hoped this to emerge as a unique model of the universe. However, within a few months, DeSitter showed that an empty but expanding universe was also a solution of Einstein’s modified field equations. Whereas Einstein’s solution had matter without motion, DeSitter’s universe had motion without matter!
1922–1924: Alexander Friedmann produced expanding non-empty world models, but these were ignored as mathematical curiosities by Einstein and others. In these models,the space was taken to be of constant curvature, positive,zero or negative. In modern terminology we denote these by a curvature parameter k which takes values+ 1, 0 , – 1.
1927: Abbe’ Lemaitre from Belgium produced similar theoretical solutions, being unaware of Friedmann’s work.1932: Realizing that in the context of Hubble’s discovery, a static model was no longer relevant, Einstein abandoned the cosmological constant and in a joint paper with De Sitter, favoured the flat space expanding model from Friedmann’s solutions. Therefore this model is often called the Einstein–De Sitter model. This model is the simplest of all Friedmann models and has ?= 0, as well as the curvature parameter k = 0.
1933–1936: Eddington and Lemaitre, however, continued working with models having non-zero cosmological constant as they felt that a larger parameter space will be helpful to account for all the observed features including the formation of galaxies. A range of Friedmann models with or without ?is shown in Figure 3. Can observations help choose the right Friedmann model? The next three decades were used by cosmologists to extend their observations to test cosmological models, with the hope that observations would single out a specific model as the model of the universe. The time table of some Figure 2. Hubble’s plot for the fifth brightest member in clusters of galaxies. The photographic magnitude can be related to distance on the logarithmic scale, while the recessional velocity is obtained by multiplying the observed redshift by the velocity of light c.
specific developments is given next.
1935–1940: Hubble hoped to determine the correct model by counting galaxies up to increasing level of faintness, as it gave a radius–volume relation, that could be compared with the model-dependent theoretical relation. This project was doomed to failure as the number of galaxies to be counted up to distances where curvature differences are noticeable, was too large.
1940–1945: The Palomar Telescope of 200 inch aperture was built for the above key project. However, by the time the telescope was completed, it became clear that the project was unworkable.
1945–1955: The emerging science of radio astronomy went through an early period when radio astronomers thought that all radio sources are stars in the Galaxy. Tommy Gold had argued that a large population of the radio sources may be extragalactic, a conclusion that was violently resisted by the Cambridge radio astronomer Martin Ryle. A few years after the Gold–Ryle controversy, it was realized that a majority of sources was indeed extragalactic and this led to optimism that one could solve the cosmoogical problem by counting radio sources instead of galaxies. (Radio sources are not as numerous as galaxies.)
1955–1965: Radio source counts were used by Ryle as a disproof of the Steady State Cosmology (SSC). The SSCwas proposed in 1948 by Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold and by Fred Hoyle as a reaction to the apparent shortcomings of the Friedmann Cosmology, namely:
(i) A singular origin: The model had a beginning in a primordial event often called the Big Bang, a name due to Hoyle himself. We shall refer to the various Friedmann models as part of the Standard Big Bang Cosmology (SBBC). The big bang itself is a physically undefinable and mathematically singular event. That is, all theoretical machinery breaks down at this instant, labelled by the time coordinate at t = 0. In a physical theory such an event is therefore indicative of some serious shortcoming of basic formalism.
(ii) The age problem: Counting the time since the above epoch of ‘beginning’, the age of the universe at present can be determined for any model in terms of the measured value of Hubble’s constant. The answer came out smaller than the ages of many of the oldest stars.
(iii) The origin of matter not explained: The epoch of big bang represents creation of the universe. At this epoch the law of conservation of matter and energy breaks down and so the most fundamental of the cosmological issues, viz. the origin of all the matter we see today, is notaddressed.The Hoyle–Ryle controversy of 1961 on source counts and their interpretation marked a major confrontation between the attackers and defenders of the SSC. Eventually, Hoyle’s approach turned out to be closer to reality, although not so realized at the time. The SSC, however, made several useful contributions to cosmology:
(i) Ideas on matter creation and baryon non-conservation: The theory sought to explain matter creation in the form of baryons, through the agency of a scalar field. At the time a scalar field was not popular with the field theorists, nor could they stomach the idea of the baryon number not being conserved. On both these counts today’s theoretical physicists have changed and come round closer to what the SSC had said in the 1950s and 1960s.
(ii) Massive collapsed objects in galactic nuclei: One frequently hears of the discovery of collapsed massive objects (glamorized as black holes) in the nuclei of galaxies.The idea was in fact first proposed by Fred Hoyle and the author in 1966, at which point the notion was considered bizarre.
(iii) Super clustering of galaxies: The hot universe model of Gold and Hoyle in 1958 had shown that structure formation in the SSC would take place through thermal pressure gradients, resulting in typical units of size 50–100 Mpc, characteristic of super clustering of galaxies. Hoyle and the author had used inhomogeneity on this scale to explain Ryle’s source counts. In the early 1960s, inhomogeneities on this scale were not considered likely; today they are an accepted part of reality. Can all nuclei of elements be made in a primordial process just after the big bang?
Parallel to the development of the SSC, a new direction was being provided to the SBBC by George Gamow who at-tempted to show that nuclei of all chemical elements were formed in the first few minutes after the big bang. The land-marks in this branch of physical cosmology were as follows.Figure 3. Expanding world models for different values of ? and a positive curvature parameter. de Sitter, George Gamow initiated work on this problem with his student Ralph Alpher and later joined by another, Robert Hermann.
1948: Affirmative answer by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow to the question as to whether atomic nuclei could be synthesized in the early hot era. This work became known as thea–ß–? (alpha–beta–gamma) theory, after its authors! A modern version of this calculation yields abundances shown in Figure 4. Only light nuclei can be made this way.For all heavier nuclei the appropriate location is inside stars.
1948: Prediction of relic black body radiation background in microwaves was made by Alpher and Herman. This radiation of the early hot era was expected to cool down as the universe expanded: Alpher and Hermann guessed the present temperature of the background as 5 K.As physicists five decades ago did not take cosmology seriously (nor did the astronomers!) this important prediction was largely ignored both by theorists andobservers.What is the significance of the cosmic microwave background radiation?The microwave background today is considered the strong-est evidence for the SBBC. Here, however is a time table of how information about this important component of the universe was put together piece by piece.
1941: McKeller found that CN–molecular transitions imply a radiation background of 2.3 K. This result was, how-ever, largely ignored, partly because of the wartime preoccupations and partly because it was published in an obscure journal.
1948: Prediction by Alpher and Herman came up as reported earlier.
1955: Bondi, Gold and Hoyle estimated the energy density of stellar radiation in the SSC, assuming all helium found in the universe to be of stellar origin. They found that if thermalized, that energy density would be like a black body radiation of temperature 3 K. However, they did not press this point further, partly because they did not see an obvious process of thermalization.
1965: Penzias and Wilson serendipitously found the CMBR of temperature 3.5 K. Their observation was of course at a single wavelength of around 7 cm. But the uniformity of the background was taken to identify it with the relic radiation of the SBBC.
1965–1990: Various surveys culminating in COBE in 1990 subsequently confirmed a black body spectrum of the CMBR with a temperature of 2.7 K. The COBE spectrum is shown in Figure 5.
1977: Dipole anisotropy in the radiation background was discovered and interpreted as arising from the earth’s motion against the isotropic background.
1992: First detection (by COBE) of small-scale inhomogeneities in the CMBR generated considerable excitement and euphoria in the big bang community as these were perceived as the indicators left on the background by the process of structure formation. Can surveys of the universe to high redshifts determine the correct world model?Figure 4. Primordial abundances of light nuclei plotted as a function of baryon density ?= ?(T/109)3, with T measured on absolute scale.
Figure 5. COBE measurements of CMBR spectrum. The continuous curve describes a 2.73 K black body curve passing through error rectangles.
1950–1980: Two groups, Sandage et al. and de Vaucouleurs et al., continued to improve the determination of Hubble’s constant, but also continued to differ by a factor 2,with Sandage and co-workers advocating a lower value.
1960–1980: Sandage carried on measurements of the Hubble relation to high redshifts with the hope of measuring the deceleration parameter, i.e. how fast the universe was slowing down; but systematic errors and evolutionary corrections proved insurmountable. Thus the goal of determining the correct model still eluded observers.
1960–1990: The angular diameter–redshift relation also was beset with many uncertainties and evolutionary effects and could not settle the cosmological problem.Thus the improvement of observational techniques only served to remind the observer that several pitfalls lie between observations and interpretation. Even the counts of galaxies obtained by computerized reading of plates for a large number of galactic images made it clear that a clear-cut conclusion of the kind expected by Hubble fifty years earlier is still not possible. Can high energy physics usefully interact with the SBBC to resolve mutual problems?
1968: The electroweak unification raised hopes of a grand unified theory (GUT), but particle physicists needed a high energy laboratory where such a theory could be tested.
1977: The only such laboratory was provided by the SBBC if one could confidently extrapolate close to the big bang. Thus particle physicists teamed up with cosmologists.
1980–1981: Out of such wedlock was born the idea of inflation first suggested by Kazanas, Guth and Sato independently; and it has played a key role in the agenda of theSBBC.
1970–1990: Astronomical observations indicated existence of a large quantity of dark matter which the SBBC required to be largely non-baryonic
and hence cosmologists began to get inputs from various ideas in particle physics, ideas like
GUT, super-symmetry, strings, etc. for candidates for such matter.This now brings me to the present decade. Thrust areas in cosmology in the last decade of the 20th century The present work in cosmology is mainly in the following areas:
Structure formation: Given the primordial seeds in the preinflationary era, attempts are made to see how they would grow and lead to the presently observed galaxy ? cluster ? super cluster format of large-scale structure, together with their peculiar motions as well as their imprints on the CMBR. This is a multi-parameter exercise which folds in such items as the nature of dark matter, biasing, N-body simulations, etc.
Redshift surveys: These will tell us how matter is distributed around us out to greater distances so as to know about structural hierarchy. Universe at large redshifts: Observations of discrete source populations at redshifts going up to z 5 tell us about how the universe has evolved in the last few Giga-years and thus put constraints on cosmological theories.
Baryogenesis: A fundamental issue has been to under-stand how baryons, etc. formed in the early universe. A particularly interesting issue still to be understood is the apparent predominance of matter over anti-matter, and the overall dominance of radiation as exemplified by the large photon to baryon number ratio.
Alternative cosmologies: As the present observational constraints are already proving severe for the SBBC, it is worth exploring alternative cosmologies.In 1993, Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar proposed an alter-native cosmology called the Quasi-Steady State Cosmology (QSSC) which has the following positive features:
1. It explains creation of matter in non-singular mini bangs in a universe without a beginning, and without violating any conservation laws. The mini bangs essentially‘drive’ the universe which has a long-term exponential expansion superposed with short-term oscillations. The oscillations are generated by the on/off switching of mini-creation events. A typical oscillation lasts for 50 Gyr while 20 oscillations take place in one e-folding time of the long-term expansion. (see Figure 6)
2. It accounts for the origin of the CMBR along with its observed temperature as thermalized relic starlight. Stars are born and burn out during one oscillation.Thus there is relic starlight from all previous cycles.
3. It explains dark matter as relic stars of earlier generations.
4. It accounts for light nuclei as created in minibangs and in stars, with abundances consistent with observations.
5. It is consistent with large redshift observations of discrete source populations. 6. It seems to have a viable theory of structure formation through minibangs. Naturally this cosmology needs to be further investigated for conformity with all the available data about the universe.
Issues for the future I now end with a few issues that will need attention in the coming years. Future work will tell us many new facts about the universe, and hopefully answer some outstanding questions of the present, for example:
1. What, if anything do minute-scale inhomogeneities of the CMBR tell us about how large-scale structure formed?
2. Did an inflationary phase occur in the very early universe?
3. Is a cosmological constant necessary? If so, how did it originate?
4. How did the universe develop an asymmetry between matter and antimatter?
5. Is the Hubble interpretation of redshift universally applicable to all extragalactic redshifts? The cases of anomalous redshifts, redshift periodicities, etc. reported by Arp, Tifft and others are growing in number. These are difficult to fit within the framework of Hubble’s law.
6. Will the SBBC survive with minimal modifications, or will we need radically different alternatives like the QSSC for our understanding of the universe?
Perhaps, for those cosmologists who think that they have everything settled and worked out about the universe, I should end with a cautionary remark of J. B. S. Haldane:‘ The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.’ Received 30 December 1999; revised accepted 7 January 2000<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
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