Overview

This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. It was in antiquity that humankind first attempted to explain the universe often with the help of myths and legends. This book, however, focuses on the time when cosmology finally became a true science. As the reader will learn, this was a slow process, extending over a large part of the 20th century and involving many astronomers, cosmologists and theoretical physicists. The book explains how empirical astronomical data (e.g., Leavitt, Slipher and Hubble) were reconciled with Einstein's general relativity; a challenge which finally led Friedmann, De Sitter and Lemaître, and eventually Einstein himself, to a consistent understanding of the observational results.  The reader will realize the extraordinary implications of these achievements and howdeeply they changed our vision of the cosmos: From being small, static, immutable and eternal, it became vast and dynamical - originating from (almost) nothing, and yet now, nearly 14 billion years later, undergoing accelerated expansion. But, as always happens, as well as precious knowledge, new mysteries have also been created where previously absolute certainty had reigned.

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9783030806538

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Emilio Elizalde has been a professor at Barcelona University and visiting scholar at several world prestigious institutions. He is a recipient of two honorary professorships, and he is presently an emeritus research professor of the Spanish Higher Council for Scientific Research, having got four distinctions of merit in his years of service. Being a renowned specialist on zeta functions and their applications to quantum physics, he also works on theoretical cosmology and gravity theories.

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