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The Day Without Yesterday

Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology

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By John Farrell

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On Sale
Oct 6, 2006
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9781560259022

Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the twentieth century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. Is the universe evolving to some unforeseen end, or is it static, as the Greeks believed? The debate has preoccupied thinkers from Heraclitus to the author of the Upanishads, from the Mayans to Einstein. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaîe convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaîe called “the day without yesterday.” Lemaîe’s skill with mathematics and the equations of relativity enabled him to think much more broadly about cosmology than anyone else at the time, including Einstein. Lemaîe proposed the expanding model of the universe to Einstein, who rejected it. Had Einstein followed Lemaîe’s thinking, he could have predicted the expansion of the universe more than a decade before it was actually discovered.

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$21.99

Price

$28.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

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Trade Paperback $21.99 $28.99 CAD

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John Farrell

About the Author

A Boston native, John Farrell is also the author of The Clock and the Camshaft: And Other Medieval Inventions We Still Can’t Live Without.
 
A graduate of Harvard College with a B.A. in English and American Literature, Farrell has written for Commonweal, Aeon, Skeptic, Cosmos Magazine, New Scientist, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Salon, Forbes and The Tablet of London. His fiction has appeared in Dappled Things, his poetry in Penwood Review, First Things and U.S. Catholic.

He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

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