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The Creation of the Universe (Dover Science Books): George Gamow

Book Description:

This lively and authoritative survey by an internationally famous physicist offers captivating perspectives on the origins of the galaxies, stars, chemical elements, and planetary systems. Illustrated with diagrams and the author's own drawings, it explains complex concepts in a simple manner. "Fascinating." — San Francisco Chronicle. 40 figures.1961 edition.

From the Introduction:

The problems of cosmogony that is, the theory of the origin of the world--have perplexed the human mind ever since the dawn of history. Among the ancients, the origin of the world was necessarily assodated with a creative act by some deity, who separated light from darkness, raised and fixed the heavens high above the surface of the earth, and fashioned all the other features that characterized the highly limited world picture of early man.

As the centuries rolled by and men gradually accumulated knowledge about the various phenomena taking place in the world that formed their environment, the theories of cosmogony took a more scientific shape. The names of Buffon, Kant, and Laplace characterize the scientific era when the first attempts were made to understand the origin of the world exclusively as the result of natural causes. The theories of that time, which were limited essentially to the origin of our solar system, later underwent a process of multiple evolution; culmlnating in a reasonably complete and consistent theory of planetary formation recenfiy developed by Carl yon Weizsacker and Gerard P. Kuiper.

In the meantime the progress of observational astronomy opened entirely new horizons of knowledge of the u iverse and reduced the old fiddle of the birth of plane to a minor incident within a much broader picture of the evolution of the universe. The main problem of cosmogony today is to explain the origin and evolution of the giant stellar families, known as galaxies, which are scattered through the vast expanses of the universe as far as can be seen with the strongest telescopes. The key factor for the understanding of this large-scale cosmic evolution was provided about a quarter-century ago by a discovery of the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble. Hubble found that the galaxies populating the space of the universe are in a state of rapid dispersion ("expanding universe"). This implies that once upon a time all the matter of the universe must have been n ifonnly squeezed into a continuous mass of hot gas. The close correlation between the observed phenomenon of expansion and certain mathematical consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity was first recognized by an imaginative Belgian scientist, Abbe Georges Edouard Lemaitre who formulated an ambitious program for explaining the highly complex structure of the universe known to us today as the result of successive stages of differentiation which must have taken place as a concomitant of the expansion of the originally homogeneous primordial material. If and when such a program is carried through in all details, we shall have a complete system of cosmogony that will satisfy the principal aim of science by reducing the observed complexity of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of initial assumptions. Although such a program is far from completion as of today, considerable progress has been made on various parts of it, and the end seems to be already in sight.

It must be remarked here that at present there still exist rather fundamental differences between the points of view accepted by varius scientists working in this field. Many of them (inclodln the author o the present book) believe that the present state of the universe resulted from a continuous evolutionary process, which started in a highly compressed homogeneous materlal a few billion years ago, the hypothesis of ``beginning." Others prefer to consider the universe as existing in about the same state throughout eternity - the hypothesis of a "steady-state universe." One of the proponents of the latter view in the field d stellar evohtion is the noted Russian astronomer Vorontzoff-Velyaminov, who was apparently forced by the philosophy of dialectic materialism to accept this hypothesis. In a rather different form, and certainly for an entirely different reason, similar views are held by the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, who attempted to explain the alleged steady state of the universe by introducing a hypothesis of continuous creation of matter in intergalactic space.

It is probably too early to say which of the two points of view will ultimately prove to be correct. The main purpose of this book is to present the arguments in favor of the hypothesis Of "beginning" and to analyze critically the claims of the proponents of a steady-state universe.

It is hoped that this book will constitute an adequate survey of the subject for scientists in various fields, and at the same time be of service to hymen interested in the problems of modern cosmogony.

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