Re: [asa] What is exactly is a TE?

Gregory -

The phrase "cosmological evolution" is used pretty frequently, often by workers in scientific cosmology. (Of course the word "cosmology" has its own ambiguities.) Google will give you 157,000 hits on the phrase. I don't know of a lot of analysis of the term by cosmologists themselves. One is the concluding paragraph of G.C. McVittie's General Relativity and Cosmology, 2d ed. (U. of Illinois, 1965). (McVittie was an early worker in relativistic cosmology, a student of Eddington's.) He argues that it's appropriate to talk about stellar evolution (a common name for a well-established branch of astrophysics), evolution of interstelalr gas clouds &c. These, he says, are comparable with biological evolution on earth because, because they have to do with discrete objects. But he argues that this is not the case for the idealized cosmological models treated up to that time because there we have just a continuous "representative gas" whose density & pressure change with time. He concludes by saying "The treatment of an evolving universe in general relativity must await the solution of the formidable mathematical problems that arise when the discreteness of astronomical objects is taken into account."

You'll see that what he is saying is that the cosmological models up to 1965 are not evolutionary but he seems to admit tacitly that the real universe is evolving & that what is needed is better modelling of it. Of course that was 42 years ago: We now have models that take into account discreteness of the contents of the universe - & in fact McVittie has an earlier section (8.9) with a couple of simple examples pointing in that direction.

In any case, other cosmologists have had no scruples about the concept. In fact there's a book by I.D. Novikov with the title Evolution of the Universe (Cambridge, 1983). It's a translation of a Russian work with the title Evolyutsia Vselennoi (Nauka, Moscow, 1979).

Stephen Toulmin & June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (Harper & Row, 1965) deal with the issue on pp.130-133 & 250-254. The first of those treats the contribution of Kant, who the authors see as the founder of the modern scientific idea of an evolving cosmos.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Gregory Arago
  To: Don Nield
  Cc: American Scientific Affiliation
  Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 5:09 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] What is exactly is a TE?
  ....................
  What is particularly wrong with Teilhard's position and what is 'extreme' about it? If people care to read Teilhard they might find that most TE's actually depend more on Teilhard and also H. Bergson than they might imagine. I was actually just reading some of his "The Phenomenon of Man" today as well as "The Heart of the Matter." Let's open up this question of cosmological evolution then. Don says he accepts cosmological evolution; I do not. I accept biological evolution (as a non-biologist) but not cosmological evolution (as a human being). Are there any professional cosmologists around here to help us figure this one out? Who will quote an evolutionary cosmologist to show the way?
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Received on Fri Sep 7 17:20:29 2007