Light from the Depths of Time (Paperback)

Springer-Verlag. Fine. 1987. Soft Cover. 8vo 0387171193 Translator Storm Dunlop. English edition. Paperback: 262 pages. Light from the Depths of Time introduces one of the most exciting and rapidly developing fields of modern science: cosmology. It presents a picture of the universe as currently accepted by today's astrophysicists and explains the firm background of the latest cosmological speculations without recourse to mathematics. With the help of a brilliant presentation of astronomy in two-dimensional "Flatland", and of a galactic traveller, Herr Meyer, the author succeeds in making the "difficult" problems of space-time and the structure of the universe accessible to interested non-experts. From the contents: Cosmic Yardsticks - A Millionth of a Gramme of Light - Speeding Up the Milky Way - The Island Universe Debate - Are We in the Centre of the Universe? - When Did It-Begin? - The Big Bang in Flatland - A Two-Dimensional World's Astronomy - Ghosts from the Fourth Dimension - Which Curved Universe Do We Inhabit? -The Russian Balloonist and Einstein's Mistakes - The Realm of the Nebulae - Cannibalism Among Galaxies - The Story of Cygnus A - Are Quasars Really Distant? - The Problem of Superluminal Velocities - Cold Radiation from the Hot Big Bang - Where Is the Antimatter? - The Intelligent Universe. Rudolf Kippenhahn, born in 1926- in Barringen (Czechoslovakia), received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1951 and then switched to astrophysics. During his scientific career he has worked at several observatories, Princeton University and the Max-Planck-institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, before becoming a full professor at the University of Gottingen in 1965 and Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in 1975. Professor Kippenhahn, who has held visiting professorships at the University of California and at Ohio State University, is one of Germany's leading astrophysicists and an expert on the physics of stars and stellar models. He is a highly successful popularizer of astronomy and the author of the best-selling book Hundred Billion Suns (Basic Books, 1982). .