I was interested to hear that Jim Peebles, at the age of 84, has won a half share of the 2019 Noble Prize for physics for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. Jim Peebles (1935-) Image from Wikimedia commons In the early 1960s Peebles and his colleague Robert Dicke had predicted the existence of the microwave… Continue reading Jim Peebles winner of the Noble Prize 2019
Tag: Cosmology
The anthropic principle.
In his 1988 book 'A Brief History of Time' the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkins (1942-2018) stated: 'The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. ... The… Continue reading The anthropic principle.
Copernicus
In this post I'll talk about Nicolas Copernicus (1473 - 1543) and the heliocentric theory. The move away from the prevailing Earth-centred theory of the Universe to the heliocentric theory represents one of the greatest advances in astronomy ever made. Nicolas Copernicus - Image from Wikimedia Commons Background - the need for a better theory… Continue reading Copernicus
Geocentric Cosmology
Today it is generally accepted as a scientific fact that the Earth is one of eight planets which revolve around the Sun, that the Sun is one of 400 billion or so stars in our Milky Way galaxy and that the Milky Way is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable Universe.… Continue reading Geocentric Cosmology
The cosmic microwave background part II
As discussed in my previous post, the accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson would prove to be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the early twentieth century. One of the first things it achieved was to provide confirmation of the big bang theory. The telescope… Continue reading The cosmic microwave background part II
