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The first one to address the problem of an infinite number of stars and the resulting heat in the Cosmos was Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th-century Greek monk from Alexandria, who states in his Topographia Christiana: "The crystal-made sky sustains the heat of the Sun, the moon, and the infinite number of stars; otherwise, it would have been full of fire, and it could melt or set on fire."
In February 1862, Lord Kelvin used the existence of the Sun and the stars as an empirical proof that the universe has not achieved thermodynamic equilibrium, as entropy production and free work are still possible, and there are temperature differences between objects. Helmholtz and Rankine expanded Kelvin's work soon after. [2]
The argument fails in the case that the universe might be shaped like the surface of a hypersphere or torus. (Consider a similar fallacious argument that the Earth's surface must be infinite in area: because otherwise one could go to the Earth's edge and throw a javelin, proving that the Earth's surface continued wherever the javelin hit the ...
The Indians [who?] believed in a cyclic universe related to three other beliefs: (i), time is endless and space has infinite extension; (ii), earth is not the center of the universe; and (iii), laws govern all development, including the creation and destruction of the universe. The Indians believed that there were three types of space ...
One thing that would not count as evidence for the anthropic principle is evidence that the Earth or the Solar System occupied a privileged position in the universe, in violation of the Copernican principle (for possible counterevidence to this principle, see Copernican principle), unless there was some reason to think that that position was a ...
The debate between the universe having either a beginning or eternal cycles can be traced to ancient Babylonia. [13] Hindu cosmology posits that time is infinite with a cyclic universe, where the current universe was preceded and will be followed by an infinite number of universes.
He added that Alan Guth, one of the co-authors of the theorem, disagrees with Vilenkin and believes that the universe had no beginning. [ 10 ] [ 11 ] Vilenkin argues that the Carroll–Chen model constructed by Carroll and Jennie Chen, and supported by Guth, to elude the BGV theorem's conclusions persists to indicate a singularity in the ...
In such systems the origin in the center of mass of the Earth, of the Earth–Moon system, of the Sun, of the Sun plus the major planets, or of the entire Solar System, can be selected. [165] Right ascension and declination are examples of geocentric coordinates, used in Earth-based observations, while the heliocentric latitude and longitude ...