True Story of Modern Cosmology

This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicatedobservers andpioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. Itwas in antiquity that humankind first attempted to explain the universeoften with the help of myths and legends. This book, however, focuses onthe time when cosmology finally becamea true science. As the reader will learn, this was a slow process,extending over a large part of the 20th century and involving manyastronomers,cosmologists and theoretical physicists. The book explains how empiricalastronomicaldata (e.g., Leavitt, Slipher and Hubble) were reconciled with Einstein'sgeneral relativity; a challenge which finally led Friedmann, De Sitter andLemaître, and eventually Einstein himself, to a consistent understandingof the observational results. The reader will realize the extraordinary implications of these achievementsand howdeeply they changed our vision of the cosmos: From being small,static, immutableand eternal, it became vast and dynamical - originating from (almost)nothing, and yetnow, nearly 14 billion years later, undergoing accelerated expansion. But,as always happens, as well as precious knowledge, new mysteries have alsobeen created where previously absolute certainty had reigned.