Böcker av D. W. Sciama

The exploration of the Universe, as conducted by physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists was one of the greatest intellectual adventures of the mid-twentieth century. This book, first published in 1971, tells the story of their achievements and the insight gained into the structure, history, working and scale of our Universe.

This book shows how modern cosmology and astronomy have led to the need to introduce dark matter in the universe. Some of this dark matter is in the familiar form of protons, electrons and neutrons, but most of it must have a more exotic form. The favoured, but not the only, possibility is neutrinos of non-zero rest mass, pair-created in the hot big bang and surviving to the present day. After a review of modern cosmology, this book gives a detailed account of the author's recent theory in which these neutrinos decay into photons which are the main ionising agents in hydrogen and nitrogen in the interstellar and intergalactic medium. This theory, though speculative, explains a number of rather different puzzling phenomena in astronomy and cosmology in a unified way and predicts values of various important quantities such as the mass of the decaying neutrino and the Hubble constant. Written by a cosmologist of the first rank, this topical book will be essential reading to all cosmologists and astrophysicists.