A Brief History Of Cosmology

Cosmology is the study of the origin, evolution, composition and the structure of the universe. This is a recent scientific discipline which began in the early twentieth century. In early 1920s, Edwin Hubble made a startling discovery that the all the galaxies were moving away from us at incredible speeds. Later in 1929, he developed his now famous Hubble's law with the help of the Luminosity Period relationship of Cepheid Variable stars.

Theoretical science of cosmology started in the year 1915 with the publication of Eintein's theory of General Relativity. The theory of General Relativity is greatly successful in describing the geometry of the universe. It points toward the fact that the universe has a flat geometry and will consequently expand forever. This expansion is triggered by Dark Energy which is the most elusive form of energy. The density of the universe is less than the critical density, which can cause the universe to expand forever.

In 1927, Georges Lemaitre published a paper describing the evolution of a closed universe - it includes a reference to Friedmann's earliest papers and Hubble's then unpublished observational data. Later, George Gamow and his collaborators took Lemaitre's idea and essentially developed the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis which is very successful in explaining the Hydrogen-Helium abundance in the universe and among other things. Fred Hoyle's Steady-State Universe fell in favour with the serendipitous discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation by two radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965. This discovery provides one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the Big Bang theory.

Note: I've provided most of the necessary references to the best of my knowledge.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Big Bang Theory
• Cosmology
• Astronomy
• particle physics
• Edwin Hubble
• expansion of universe
• CMBR
• COBE probe
• Cepheid Variables
• Albert Einstein
• Alexander Friedmann
• Luminosity-Period Relationship
• standard candle

[freemindevolving]

fantastic!

[perduraboperurabo]

You did a good job!

[AmBotanischenGarten]

It was Ralph A. Alpher who did the early work on nucleosynthesis (his doctoral thesis), followed by the prediction of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) first published with colleague Robert Herman in 1948. Gamow was an opponent of the notion of the CMBR for 3 years, until finally accepting it and making his own calculations.

[gayasthedayislong]

This video is great! Very good job here. I hope you make more videos, cosmology is a very interesting subject right now. What with all the dark energy and the crazy theories ranging from multiverses to cyclis universes!

[riverdan4]

very nice!

(my science teacher sent me here)

[raraju99]

Awesome! nice work & informative.