Cosmos #10 Edge of Forever

Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
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"Current Scientific Story"

Internal motion of Galaxies

• Rotation
• Spiral Arms
• Doppler Effect

Mt. Wilson Telescope

• Closed 1985
• Milton Humanson and Edwin Hubble
• Mechanics of driving large telescopes
• Compensation for Earth's Rotation
• Galaxy too faint to see visually
• Red Shift - Expansion of Universe

"Curvature of Space"

• Flatland analogy - Edwin Abbott
• Tesseract

Expansion of Space

• privileged frame of reference
• Is our universe closed? (Black Hole?)
• What happened before Big Bang?
• Creation ex nihilo
• "Why not save a step?"
• "Questions once treated only in religion and myth"

Hindu cosmology

• Big Bang - Modern scientific creation myth?
• Cycles in Hindu belief
• Only major faith to guess at time Scale of universe

Ultimate fate of universe

• Expansion?
• Collapse?

Radio Astronomy

• Echo of big bang (cosmic background)
• Jocelyn Bell - first noticed the evidence for quasars
• Ours is first generation with chance to find some answers

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Created 13 January 1998, Last Update 13 January 1998

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