This book presents the history of how the universe at large became the object of scientific understanding. Starting with the ancient creation myths, it offers an integrated and comprehensive account of cosmology that covers all major events from Aristotle's Earth-centred cosmos to the recent discovery of the accelearting universe.

The history of the theory of general relativity presents unique features. After its discovery, the theory was immediately confirmed and rapidly changed established notions of space and time. The further implications of general relativity, however, remained largely unexplored until the mid 1950s, when it came into focus as a physical theory and gradually returned to the mainstream of physics. This essay presents a historiographical framework for assessing the history of general relativity by taking into account in an integrated narrative intellectual (...) developments, epistemological problems, and technological advances; the characteristics of post–World War II and Cold War science; and newly emerging institutional settings. It argues that such a framework can help us understand this renaissance of general relativity as a result of two main factors: the recognition of the untapped potential of general relativity and an explicit effort at community building, which allowed this formerly disparate and dispersed field to benefit from the postwar changes in the scientific landscape. (shrink)

The story of the Hubble constant logically begins just where the Curtis-Shapley debate on the distance scale of the universe ended, with Hubble's discovery of Cepheid variables in several nebulae that we now recognized as galaxies within the Local Group, which settled the issue of the existence of external galaxies. Hubble's own value of H was in the range of 500-550 km s-1 Mpc-1. The "best buy" value shrank in several large steps beginning in 1952, each being predicated on the (...) recognition of some fundamental mistake in the previous distance scale calibrations. But it shrank more for some workers than for others, and by 1975 there was a clear polarization between a "long" and a "short" distance scale. On the theoretical side, important events were the recognition that general relativity permits, indeed nearly requires, an expanding universe; the gradual elimination of alternative explanations of redshift-distance relations; and the repelling of a late assault in the form of steady-state cosmology, within whose framework H0 is a well-defined, never-varying number of only moderate importance. (shrink)