Abstract
Cosmology, the science of the universe at large, is of course very different from geology, a science that in its traditional meaning deals with only a single object in the vast universe, a planet called Earth. Yet the two sciences have interesting and often surprising interconnections that today are cultivated by a growing number of researchers. Both sciences—cosmology and the earth sciences—have changed drastically since the days of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, each in its own way and at different paces. In order to evaluate the events that occurred in the post-World War II period it will be useful to survey some of the earlier developments in a broad historical perspective. The survey in this chapter is meant to be an introduction only. It covers various attempts in the period up to the mid-1930s to think about the Earth in a cosmological perspective or otherwise to establish bridges between the science of the universe and that of the Earth. Until varying gravity entered the picture the two sciences had in common only the chronological problem, namely, the age of the Earth as related to the age of the universe.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Laudan (1987) and Oldroyd (1996).
- 2.
The case is detailed in Greenberg (1995) and Terrall (2002).
- 3.
Cohen (1999), p. 815.
- 4.
Lyell (1830), p. 4. Available online as http://www.esp.org/books/lyell/principles/facsimile/
- 5.
On the perfect cosmological principle and its history, see Balashov (1994) and Kragh (1996), pp. 182–183. See also Toulmin (1962) for an interesting case of a late-eighteenth-century geological author adopting a version of the perfect cosmological principle. More about the steady-state theory of the universe follows in Sect. 4.1.
- 6.
- 7.
ter Haar (1950), p. 132.
- 8.
Clerke (1890), p. 368. Of course, cosmology was not absent from pre-Einstein astronomy. For reviews, see North (1965) and Kragh (2007b).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Croll (1889), p. 37.
- 12.
See Kragh (2008) for details and sources concerning the “entropic creation” argument.
- 13.
In his autobiography published in 1887, five years after his death, Darwin referred to “the view now held by most physicists, namely, that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life.” He further reflected on “the mystery of the beginning of all things” but decided that it was “insoluble by us.” Quoted in Kragh (2008), p. 108. The autobiography is available online at http://darwin-online.org.uk
- 14.
Birkeland’s cosmological ideas, sometimes taken to be anticipations of modern “plasma cosmology,” are dealt with in Kragh (2013).
- 15.
Brush (1996c), pp. 22–67, Fleming (2000).
- 16.
Quoted in MacMillan (1929), p. 4. As the Chicago astronomer William MacMillan remarked in his obituary of Chamberlin, the cosmogonical Chamberlin–Moulton hypothesis “furnished a foundation for the geologists, which is in harmony with the evidences of their own science.”
- 17.
Joly (1909), p. 212.
- 18.
Holmes (1913), p. 121.
- 19.
Eddington (1923).
- 20.
See Kragh (2007a) for the early use of radioactive decay as a cosmic clock and generally the role of radioactivity in astrophysics and cosmology in the period between 1910 and the early 1930s.
- 21.
Lemaître (1949), p. 452.
- 22.
On the notorious time-scale problem, see Kragh (1996), pp. 73–79 and Brush (2001). The problem could be avoided if a positive cosmological constant was admitted, but this was a solution that few astronomers and physicists found appealing. In the period from about 1930 to the 1990s it was generally believed that Λ = 0.
- 23.
Dehm (1949) is a useful review of the troubled situation at a time when the Hubble time was still believed to be of the order of 2 billion years.
- 24.
See Schröder and Treder (1997), according to whom “Albert Einstein initiated geophysical research with his works and contributed to studies that were often interdisciplinary in character.”
- 25.
For the Einstein–Hapgood connection and other aspects of Einstein’s interest in the earth sciences, see Martinez-Frias et al. (2006).
- 26.
On Einstein’s hypothesis and some other suggestions of charge inequality in a cosmological context, see Kragh (1997). Around 1960 Raymond Lyttleton, Hermann Bondi and Fred Hoyle developed an “electrical universe” model on this basis, arguing that it amounted to strong support of a steady-state universe. At the time neither of them drew geophysical consequences from cosmological theory, but they would do so about a decade later (see Sect. 4.1).
- 27.
See the historical bibliography in http://www.aip.org/history/climate/bibdate.htm
- 28.
- 29.
On Goldschmidt’s research programme and the transition from geochemistry to cosmochemistry, see Kragh (2001).
- 30.
Rankama and Sahama (1950), p. 70.
- 31.
On Halm’s life and work, see Glass (2014).
- 32.
Halm (1935a), p. 14.
- 33.
Carey (1988), p. 140.
- 34.
See Halm (1935b), which is reprinted in Kragh (2015d). The first tired-light hypothesis accounting for Hubble’s redshift-distance relation was proposed by Fritz Zwicky as early as August 1929, before the idea of an expanding universe was generally known.
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Kragh, H. (2016). Introductory Issues. In: Varying Gravity. Science Networks. Historical Studies, vol 54. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24379-5_1
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