Abstract
Conversely to Chap. 9, Chap. 10 describes the exploration of the extremely large and far away. We now know that our sun is just one of billions of stars within a galaxy, which is one of billions of others. The exploration of the universe at distances of billions of light years is equivalent to the investigation of its history since it began billions of years ago. To fully comprehend what these distances mean, it is sufficient to recall that the distance of the sun from the earth is a trifling eight light minutes.
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Notes
- 1.
Actually, this paradox, in one form or another, had been considered since at least a couple of centuries before Olbers, who formulated it in 1823.
- 2.
Hubble’s law had been anticipated a couple of years earlier by Georges Lemaître, while analysing the implications of his expanding universe.
- 3.
The Steady State Theory received a new incarnation in the Quasi-steady state cosmology (QSS) proposed in 1993 by Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbridge, and Jayant V. Narlikar. It was intended to explain additional features unaccounted for in the initial proposal, but ran into further difficulties and is not generally accepted.
- 4.
The light our telescopes receive from distant objects has taken a long time to reach us. What we see is the situation as it was when the light was emitted, and not as it is now. Our telescopes are therefore “looking back in time.”
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Einstein to Lemaitre, 26 September 1947, Einstein Archives Doc. 15 085. Kragh, Helge, Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p 54
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Barrett, R., Delsanto, P.P. (2021). How the World Began. In: Don't Be Afraid of Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63409-4_10
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