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Author : Hubble Edwin
Title : The observational approach to cosmology
Year : 1937

Link download : Hubble_Edwin_-_The_observational_approach_to_cosmology.zip

Preface. This book contains the Rhodes Memorial Lectures delivered at Oxford in the Autumn of 1936, under the general title, 'The Observational Approach to Cosmology'. The observable region of space, the region that can be explored with existing instruments, is a sample of the universe. If the sample is fair, its observed characteristics should furnish important information concerning the universe at large. The lectures describe the general features now known, and discuss the nature of the inferences to which they lead. The features, however, include the phenomena of red-shifts whose significance is still uncertain. Alternative interpretations are possible, and, while they introduce only minor differences in the picture of the observable region, they lead to totally different conceptions of the universe itself. One conception, at the moment, seems less plausible than the other, but this dubious world, the expanding universe of relativistic cosmology, is derived from the more likely of the two interpretations of red-shifts. Thus the discussion ends in a dilemma, and the resolution must await improved observations or improved theory or both. ...