science · 10 September 2005 · 20 years ago
death
Died 10 Sep 2005 at age 85 (born 1 Nov 1919).
Austrian-British mathematician and cosmologist who, working with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold, conceived the steady-state theory of the universe (1948). This explained the paradox: how can the stars continually recede, yet without disappearing? They audaciously proposed an unproven hypothesis: that the universe has an eternal existence, with no beginning and without an end. Further, the universe is continuously expanding, maintaining a constant density by continually creating new matter from energy. Their model was rendered obsolete, when in 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected a background microwave radiation from all directions in space, as predicted by the “Big Bang” theory of creation that is now accepted.
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