Word: hydrogen
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...interstellar matter." They look like black holes punched in the Milky Way. With a telescope the astronomer can see long dark filaments and great round blobs, some so huge that it takes light 100 years (at 186,000 miles per second) to flash across their diameters. Made chiefly of hydrogen, mixed in places with dust of heavier elements, they are thinner than the finest laboratory "vacuum " but they outweigh all the stars scattered through and among them...
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...
...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...
Hoyle, working on the same problem, approached it from the other end. In calculating how galaxies form, he assumed that all of space is filled with very thin hydrogen, about one atom per 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...
...people the very idea seems startling or even shocking. Hoyle and his colleagues do not consider it so. It should not be more difficult to accept, they argue, than the common belief that the universe was created all at once in the distant past. In their own words, the hydrogen "just appears." Where it comes from they do not know, or if it comes from "anywhere" in the ordinary sense. Perhaps, they admit, man will never know. In any case, they leave to the theologians the capitalized word Creation to explain the genesis of the whole physical system that their...