Word: spaced
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Back in the late '20s a discovery was made by California's Edwin Hubble and others (TIME, Feb. 9, 1948) that threw cosmology into a confusion from which it has not yet recovered. Hubble showed that the galaxies in far-off space, judged by spectroscopic analysis of their light, are rushing away from the solar system at speeds directly proportionate to their distances. The farther away they are, the faster they are moving. At an easily calculated-distance (about 2 billion light-years), the galaxies must be receding at the speed of light itself. No matter...
...Raymond Arthur Lyttleton, 25, of St. John's College, earned their livings (as they still do) by teaching mathematics to Cambridge undergraduates. After hours they planned their campaigns to explain the universe-not just the stars and the galaxies, but the whole vast mechanism, compounded of space and time, of mass and energy, which produces the "objects" seen by telescopes, as well as that oddity, the earth, and its curious inhabitant...
...modern scientific philosophy. It was, of course, also being attacked. Nothing so daring had appeared in the field of cosmology since the early '30s, when Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington led man's imagination out among the "island universes" in the depths of space...
...mostly hydrogen. The source of their energy was known: it is chiefly a nuclear reaction that turns hydrogen into helium. The stars-at least those within the telescope's field-had been measured, studied, divided into classes. The galaxies, those vast swirls of stars out in distant space, had also been measured and classified. There were new theories too, and good ones, but no general theory to knit things together. This was because (as Hoyle explains disarmingly) there was no one with enough knowledge imagination and daring to do the formidable...
Genesis of Galaxies. The Hoyle-Lyttleton-Bondi-Gold universe has no beginning and no end, no middle and no circumference in either time or space It is hard to start describing such an endless, begmnmgless object. One way is to imagine all of space filled uniformly with very thin hydrogen, simplest and lightest of the elements. Such a uniform gas is gravitationally unstable." Its atoms attract one another and gradually form into clouds, rather as a film of water on glass gathers into drops. The clouds, cruising through space for billions of years eventually crowd together in enormous gaseous masses...