Nevertheless, many scientists continued to favor a stable, i.e., non-expanding universe. A number tried to explain Hubble's red shift as something other than expansion. "Tired light" is an example. Enter two great theorists, George Gamow and Ralph Alpher. George Gamow was Ukrainian physicist who made a name for himself in 1920s in the still young Soviet Union. He studied first under Alexander Friedmann who had posited an expanding universe and then independently, making discoveries that gave him a considerable reputation. He saw, however, that Soviet Communists were disposed to punish any scientists whose findings disagreed with political dogma just like the church had with religious dogma in Galileo's day. He and his wife managed to defect from the Soviet Union and Gamow took a faculty position at George Washington University. There, he set out to explain how the elements were first formed in a new universe rapidly expanding from a very small beginning. His theory would have to explain the abundance of the elements known from spectroscopic observations of stars.

figure 4

Let us look at a periodic table. One of these hangs in essentially every chemistry and physics lecture room in every high school and college.

Hydrogen is the lightest element having a nucleus of only one proton orbited by a single electron. Helium is next with two protons and two electrons, but complicated by two additional neutrons in the nucleus. Then progressively, the table shows the rest of elements arranged in order of increasing numbers of protons in the nucleus and electrons in orbit. The number of orbital electrons decides the chemical properties of the element and the number of protons and neutrons the weight. Spectroscopy indicates that hydrogen is the most abundant element, accounting for 90% of the matter in the universe. Helium is next, at 9% of all matter. Everything else, more than 100 elements, are crowded into the remaining 1%.

Page 6
Next Page

Page 1 • Page 2 • Page 3 • Page 4 • Page 5 • Page 6 • Page 7 • Page 8 • Page 9 • Page 10