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A Century of IdeasFifty Years of Cosmology

A Century of Ideas: Fifty Years of Cosmology [The worrying situation at that time in cosmology, as it seemed, turned out to be a relatively minor matter, namely the choice of suitable coordinates. Even the best-known cosmologists – de Sitter, Eddington and Lemaitre – had chosen coordinates appropriate to localities in the universe rather than the whole. This produced a sense of mystery that was more apparent than real as to what happened at the boundary of a locality. It is one of the features of Einstein's general relativity that when you choose coordinate systems with special properties you can mistakenly come to think of the properties as physical instead of as mathematical artefacts. Early workers on gravitational waves thought they were investigating physical waves when in fact the waves were in their coordinate system, and a similar situation existed in cosmology. It was also in 1935–36 that this situation was put right, by H.P. Robertson in the United States and A.E. Walker in Britain and the resulting choice of coordinates later became known as the Robertson-Walker line element. Then in 1937 Robertson published an important article on cosmology in the Reviews of Modern Physics, which unfortunately I didn't read at that time because my research interests were in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Century of IdeasFifty Years of Cosmology

Part of the Fundamental Theories of Physics Book Series (volume 149)
Editors: Sidharth, B. G.
Hoyle, Fred
A Century of Ideas — Jan 1, 2008
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Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Copyright
© Springer Netherlands 2008
ISBN
978-1-4020-4359-8
Pages
1 –12
DOI
10.1007/978-1-4020-4360-4_1
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The worrying situation at that time in cosmology, as it seemed, turned out to be a relatively minor matter, namely the choice of suitable coordinates. Even the best-known cosmologists – de Sitter, Eddington and Lemaitre – had chosen coordinates appropriate to localities in the universe rather than the whole. This produced a sense of mystery that was more apparent than real as to what happened at the boundary of a locality. It is one of the features of Einstein's general relativity that when you choose coordinate systems with special properties you can mistakenly come to think of the properties as physical instead of as mathematical artefacts. Early workers on gravitational waves thought they were investigating physical waves when in fact the waves were in their coordinate system, and a similar situation existed in cosmology. It was also in 1935–36 that this situation was put right, by H.P. Robertson in the United States and A.E. Walker in Britain and the resulting choice of coordinates later became known as the Robertson-Walker line element. Then in 1937 Robertson published an important article on cosmology in the Reviews of Modern Physics, which unfortunately I didn't read at that time because my research interests were in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.]

Published: Jan 1, 2008

Keywords: Royal Astronomical Society; Friedmann Model; Steady State Theory; Ordinary Solution; Emmanuel College

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