Word: bondy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After the war both went back to Cambridge. There they found two kindred souls, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold Trinity College, also mathematicians, who had approached the problem of the universe from a more philosophical angle and were reaching similar conclusions. In eager discussions that sometimes developed into mathematical brawls, the four men began to hammer out their theories...
Genesis of Galaxies. The Hoyle-Lyttleton-Bondi-Gold universe has no beginning and no end, no middle and no circumference in either time or space It is hard to start describing such an endless, begmnmgless object. One way is to imagine all of space filled uniformly with very thin hydrogen, simplest and lightest of the elements. Such a uniform gas is gravitationally unstable." Its atoms attract one another and gradually form into clouds, rather as a film of water on glass gathers into drops. The clouds, cruising through space for billions of years eventually crowd together in enormous gaseous masses...
Hoyle's Cambridge colleagues, Bondi and Gold, approached the problem of the receding galaxies from an entirely different angle. They started with the assumption, based on philosophical-mathematical reasoning, that the universe must be in a "steady state," not blowing itself to nothing. Then they looked for something that was keeping it steady...
...Einstein's relativity, four-dimensional space (three dimensions plus time) is in a sense "curved," and its curvature and therefore its "size" depend on the amount of matter within it. If more matter were added, space would have to stretch, carrying the galaxies with it. Why not, asked Bondi and Gold, figure out how much matter would have to be added to make the galaxies recede at the observed rate? The answer, dragged from thickets of mathematics, came out very simple. One atom of hydrogen, they calculated, must be added to each quart of space every billion years...
...cubic inch. This gas is depleted, of course, when galaxies condense from it. But Hoyle was convinced that galaxies are forming continuously. So he calculated how much hydrogen must be supplied to keep up the formation of galaxies. His answer came out very close to the answer of Bondi and Gold. This check convinced both parties that the "continuous creation" of hydrogen in space is an actual fact...