Cosmic evolution

The development in celestial mechanics after Newton was largely in the hands of the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). The stability of the solar system was the major unsolved problem. Neither Kepler s laws nor Newton s mechanics could be applied successfully to more than a single orbit at a time. The imiversal law of gravitation must clearly apply to any pair of celestial bodies and with several planets and moons circling the sun it is inevitable that mutual perturbations of the predicted perfect elliptical orbits should occur. Newton himself could never precisely model not even the lunar motion and concluded that divine intervention was periodically necessary to maintain the equilibrium of the solar system. 

Without this luxury Laplace set out to assess the natural stability of the system. When asked by Napoleon to clarify the role of God in this, he replied I have no need of that hypothesis . The first important result, which he demonstrated mathematically, was that the irregularities in the eccentricities and inclinations of planetary orbits oscillate about fixed values, without amplification, and hence never deviate too far from the ideal orbits. He could therefore theorize that the solar system remains indefinitely stable. Like some self-correcting clockwork, driven by the universal force of gravitation, the solar system was concluded to be inherently stable and predictable. Laplace saw no reason why the whole universe should not be dynamically stable in the same sense. He claimed that  

Not everybody agreed with this deterministic philosophy, but the model proved hard to refute. It prevailed long enough to stimulate the world view of a well-organized cosmos, designed with a mathematical precision that guarantees its faultless operation. At about this time (1772) the independent 

Starting with the sequence of numbers 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96,. .., in which each new term beyond 3 is obtained by doubling the previous term, adding 4 to each term, and divide by 10, the sequence of planetary distances is reproduced in astronomical units. lAU equals the distance of planet Earth from the sun. Hence  

The subsequent discovery (1801) of the asteroid belt, consisting of thousands of minor planets on an orbit that corresponds with the gap in the Bode -Titius table elevated the law from a cm-iosity into a serious scientific observation. The physical basis of this law remained a mystery for more than two centuries. 

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Pagel, B.E.J. 2001, in E. Vangioni-Flam, R. Ferlet M. Lemoine (eds.), Cosmic Evolution, Singapore World Scientific, p. 223. 

This confluence between two great streams of thought, the physics of the nucleus and the physics of stars, founds the notion of cosmic evolution which is as important for astronomy and cosmology as the evolution of the species for biology. 

Reeves H. (1991) Hour of our Delight Cosmic Evolution, Order and Complexity (W.H. Freeman, New York). 

Other estimates of the amount and of the distribution of DM in the universe come from the study of large scale structures at more recent epochs in the cosmic evolution. The reason why cosmic structures contain a record of the DM distribution in the universe is due to the fact that the evolution of the parent density perturbations was dominated by their DM content from early times on (see Peacock in these Proceedings). Thus the study of galaxies and galaxy clusters - the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe whose potential wells are dominated by DM - provide information on both the amount of DM and on its density distribution. 

Hubert Reeves, Atoms of Silence An Exploration of Cosmic Evolution (Cambridge MIT Press, 1984) M. Beech, Blue stragglers as indicators of extraterrestrial civilizations Earth, Moon, and Planets 49 177-186 (1990) Guillermo A. Lemarchand, Detectability of extraterrestrial technological activities. ... 

Hubert Reeves, Atoms of Silence An Exploration of Cosmic Evolution (Cambridge MIT Press, 1984), 121. 

Henderson, L. J. (1916). Teleology in cosmic evolution a reply to Professor Warren. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, 13, 326. 

The properties of matter and the course of cosmic evolution are now seen to be intimately related to the structure of the living being and to its activities they become, therefore, far more important in biology than has been previously suspected. For the whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric. 

Rozental IL (1988) Big bang, big bounce - How particles and fields drive cosmic evolution. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York 106. Trimble V (1988) Nature 336 111... 

In order to understand the types of reactions taking place in the early universe, scientists need to have some estimates of the amount of energy present. Another way to express that concept is to say that scientists must know the approximate temperature of the universe, since temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy present. Discussions of the evolution of the young universe are, therefore, often phrased in terms of the temperatures present at various stages of cosmic evolution. 

S. Goriely, L. Siess, in From Lithium to Uranium Elemental tracers of early cosmic evolution ed. by V. Hill et al., Proc. of IAU symposium Nr 228, (Cambridge Cambridge University Press), p. 451 (2005)... 

Presented below and summarized in Table I are suggestions and resources for integrating the above topics of cosmic evolution, multiwavelength spectroscopy, atomic line spectra, UV-visible, and IR spectroscopy into specific chemistry courses. 

Had this process proceeded unchecked it would have by-passed several important stages in cosmic evolution between t = 10 and Is, such as baryogenesis, electroweak symmetry breaking, combination of free quarks to form hadrons and interconversion between protons and neutrons. Not to interrupt this orderly evolution it would therefore be useful to have the phase transition postponed for a while. Many phase transitions are indeed known to be delayed by the phenomenon of supercooling. Why not this one ... 

He teaches an environmental chemistry course for liberal arts students organized around the cosmic evolution time line. 

Chaisson, E. J. Cosmic Evolution Harvard University Press Cambridge, MA, 2001. 

A pioneer of thermochemistry, Julius Thomsen was first and foremost an experimentalist. Yet he also had an interest in chemical theories, and he was the only Danish scientist who, until Bohr in 1913, actively examined and contributed to the understanding of the periodic system. As mentioned, ever since the 1860s he entertained the heterodox view that the atoms of chemistry are complex particles and that this is revealed by regularities in their atomic weights. Of course, he was far from the only neo-Proutean of his time, but he was one of the most distinguished and articulate advocates of the idea of a basic unity of matter. In a work of 1887 he connected for the first time this idea with the periodic system, undoubtedly inspired by an address that William Crookes (1832-1919) had given the year before to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.Another likely inspiration was the British astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), whose work on the cosmic evolution of the elements had a great deal of similarity with the views expounded by Thomsen. 

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