Philosophy and the Sciences

Transcript for Lecture 2.2 Part 1

A Very Brief History of Cosmology

John Peacock
So I'd like to summarize a few of the elements of modern cosmology. And
let's begin by saying that this is an incredibly recent story. No more than
100 years ago, our knowledge about the universe was little advanced from
the Stone Age. Whereas today, we have a feeling that almost, observational
study of the universe is converging in some sense.
How is this possible? Well, it's possible by the technology of telescopes.
Telescopes have shown us, different lines of sight into the universe. And we
know the universe consists primarily of the building blocks of galaxies. Just
like the Milky Way, each one, 10 billion stars. Throughout this universe of
galaxies, were able to see how things have changed with time, because the
beauty is that light travels at a finite time. So, the further away we're looking,
the further back in time we're seeing. So we're able to study the universe as
it was then and as it is in different directions. So we learned the universe of
galaxies is relatively uniform, so we can be confident that by studying part
of the universe, were learning something thats statistically representative
of the whole. And we're able to learn about the entire history of the
development of this as well, given a large enough telescope. Now, the most
important thing to know about the universe of galaxies is that it's
expanding. If that's a set of galaxies at some time, little bit later, the whole
distribution is more diffuse. Everythings moving apart, and this expansion
obeys Hubble's Law, which we can write the velocity, V, is a constant H
times a distance, D. This dates from 1929. How do we know that the
galaxies are in motion? The answer is the doppler shift that we can measure
through spectroscopy, if I have a galaxy emitting radiation. Now, if I move it
away, that radiation is stretched out. It becomes radiation of a longer
wavelength, a redder color. So we would say that the wavelength is
replaced by the wavelength times the correction, which is roughly the
recession of velocity times the speed of light. So if we observe in detail,
spectroscopic observations of the galaxies, we can measure this velocity.
Many people assume, that this is what was first done by Hubble. But
actually, the astronomer that deserves credit for beginning this work was V
M Slipher, who worked in Arizona. His first observations were made just

over a century ago in 1912, and really, for the next decade, he had the field
to himself. So he was the great pioneer who first revealed that all galaxies
were moving away from us.
Grasping what it means to say the universe is expanding isn't easy. First of
all, the distribution of galaxies in this cartoon might go on forever. So
there's no way of ever escaping and observing the expansion from the
outside. Its not as if material is flowing out to fill a pre-existing empty space.
Secondly, there's no centre. That is, although it seems to us that all galaxies
are moving away, from the point of view of this one it would be as if the
Milky Way was moving away. So, uniform expansion makes the expansion
democratic. Everyone sees material moving off in all directions. Finally, you
should not think of this, although it's a common analogy. People will say
that galaxies aren't moving apart, its just the space between them getting
bigger. The space here is not getting bigger. The universe as a whole gets
larger. But that's only on scales where space-time is curved, and thats not
an important phenomenon here in this room. So really, you should just
imagine the galaxies are moving in flat space, and thats a good description.
Now, to follow the evolution of an expanding universe, weve got to deal
with gravity. In many ways, we still use Newton's treatment. From the 17th
Century, that is, the inverse square law of attraction between two particles.
Halve the distance between them, the force goes up by a factor of four. But
this is replaced by general relativity in 1915 by Einstein, where he took the
view that you should think of this force as rising from a curvature of space
and time. Einstein addressed a question which really, Newton was unable to
answer, which is what happens in the case of a uniform mass distribution.
Newton thought that if you had a lot of particles of mass, that the whole
thing would be static. Because the gravitational attraction in this direction
would balance, and so thered be no net motion for any particle. Einstein
showed that even within Newtons gravity, that was wrong. You need to
modify the law of gravity itself. The change that Einstein made to the law of
gravity was to introduce the thing he called the cosmological constant. We
use different names today, for the same thing. Although it's still very much a
feature of modern cosmology. The most common one would be dark
energy, or sometimes vacuum energy. What this means is that you give
empty space itself some weight. A sphere of absolutely nothing of volume
V, contains a mass, which is the volume times a density of the vacuum. Well
discuss a little bit more later on how that's possible. But if we just accept it
for the moment, Einstein proved, a further strange consequence, which is
that such a system would exhibit anti-gravity properties. That is, the
effective mass inside the empty space would tend, rather than attracting
material around it, to push it away. So you could obtain a static universe by
balancing this repulsion with the inward attraction due to the matter inside.
Whereas today we believe that it was nearly right, but it's just that in the

present universe this is out of balance, and the anti-gravity from the
vacuum, in fact, dominates. So the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

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