Abstract
The fundamental force keeping solar systems, binary stars, and galaxies together is the force of gravity (as opposed to electric, magnetic, and nuclear forces), and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the force governing the large-scale motions of the entire universe is primarily gravitational. If there is some other force governing these motions, there has to date been no evidence for it, neither in the solar system, nor in the observable galaxies. By the universe we mean all detectable components in the sky: stars, galaxies, constellations, pulsars, quasars, as well as such things as cosmic rays and background radiation. If this directly observable universe is part of a much grander system of universe-within-universes (C.V.I. Charlier’s hypothesis1) then there is little we can say.
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References
See Charlier, 1922.
See Penzias and Wilson, 1965.
See Ohanian and Ruffini, 1994, p. 532.
See Winget et al., 1987.
See Friedmann, 1922; Robertson, 1935 and 1936; and Walker, 1936.
See, for example, Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, 1973, §27.6, in particular Box 27.2.
See, for example, Weinberg, 1972, Chap. 14, and Ohanian, 1989, Chap. 9.
See Stuckey, 1992.
See Hoyle, 1948, and Bondi and Gold, 1948.
See Penzias and Wilson, 1965.
There have been articles—too numerous to list here—by physicists H. Alfven, E.J. Lerner, and others, and astronomers such as H. Arp and J.V.Narlikar, which query big-bang cosmologies. The bases for many of these arguments involve paucity of observational evidence, ongoing lack of an exact value for H, difficulties with relative abundances of hydrogen and helium, large-scale inhomogeneities in the universe’s structure in conflict with the uniformity of the cosmic background radiation, and so on. See Horgan, 1987, for a review of some of these dissident views.
See Narlikar and Padmanabhan, 1991.
See Guth, 1981.
See, for example, Landau and Lifshitz, 1987, §2.
See Bondi, 1960, §9.3.
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Foster, J., Nightingale, J.D. (2006). Elements of cosmology. In: A Short Course in General Relativity. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-27583-3_7
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