BOOK OF THE MONTH: JULY 2015

                                                  
Title        : A Different Approach to Cosmology
Authors   : Hoyle, Burbidge, Jayanth Vishnu Narlikar
Pages      : 372
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN       : 10: 0521019265
 
2015 is the birth centenary of Fred Hoyle was arguably the most imaginative astrophysicist of the 20th century. He contributed very original ideas to astronomy and astrophysics in topics ranging from the solar system to cosmology and fundamental physics. His studies on exobiology evoked the most opposition from the establishment because their implications were so far reaching. The book 'A Different Approach to Cosmology' presents glimpses of the work of this multifaceted personality who is also an accomplished writer of science fiction.
 
We now come to cosmology, an area in which Fred Hoyle's contributions are considered controversial. We will demonstrate, however, that many of the ideas he proposed were controversial at the time they were proposed; but in later years they got assimilated into mainstream physics or cosmology. We will refer to the mainstream cosmology as `the standard cosmology' and it will be taken to mean that the universe was created in an enormous explosion (referred to as the `Big Bang') and it is today seen as expanding in all directions.
 
Thus the distance between any two galaxies is increasing, i.e., seen from any galaxy, the rest appear to move away. Moreover, it is found that the relative speed of recession between any two galaxies is proportional to the distance separating them. First discovered in 1929 by Edwin Hubble, this result is known as Hubble's law. The simplest explanation of this large-scale behaviour of the universe was given by Einstein's general relativity and it leads to the conclusion that such an expanding universe originated in a Big Bang.
 
In 1948, Hermann Bondi, Tommy Gold and Fred Hoyle proposed a serious alternative to the standard Big Bang cosmology. They conceived of a universe whose largescale physical properties do not change with epoch. Such a universe is without a beginning and without an end, in which the large-scale behaviour of matter and radiation is always the same. Bondi and Gold enunciated a `Perfect Cosmological Principle' (PCP) which guarantees that the universe on the large scale is unchanging in space and time. This is why the model of the universe is called the `Steady-State Model' (SSM).
 
As per the authors, the astronomical community is wrongly interpreting cosmological data by using the standard Big Bang Model. In this highly controversial volume, three distinguished cosmologists argue this premise with persuasion and conviction. Starting with the beginnings of modern cosmology, they conduct a deep and wide review of the observations made from 1945 to the present, explaining what they regard as the defects and inconsistencies that exist within the interpretation of cosmological data.
 
This is followed by an extensive presentation of the authors' own alternative view of the status of observations. Along the way, the book touches on the most fundamental questions, including the origin, age, structure, and properties of the Universe. Writing from the heart, with passion and punch, Hoyle, Burbidge, and Narlikar, make a powerful case for viewing the universe in a different light, which will be of great interest to graduate students, researchers, and professionals in astronomy, cosmology, and physics.
 
Full Text: http://catdir.loc.gov