Autorentext

Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. Trained as a scientist in the Universities of Oxford and Stanford, and a former lecturer at the University of Reading, he has written popular books on science, philosophy, and history. His books include Higgs (2012), Mass (2017), for which he won the 2020 Premio Cosmos prize, Quantum Reality (2020), Quantum Space (2018), and, with the late John L. Heilbron, Quantum Drama (2024). His books have been translated into a dozen different languages, and he has won awards both for his scientific research and his science writing.

Klappentext

The speed of the expansion of the universe is governed by the Hubble constant. Discordance tells of its troubled 100-year history, from tentative steps to measure the distances of nearby stars to orbiting telescopes peering into the far reaches of space. But recent results hint at more trouble ahead: the 'Hubble tension'. The story is not over yet.

Inhalt

• Preface

• Prologue: Starry Messengers

• 1: Miss Leavitt's Law

• 2: The Scale of the Universe

• 3: Hubble's Constant

• 4: Divine Curves of Creation

• 5: Parameters of the Universe

• 6: Hubble Wars

• 7: The Inflationary Universe

• 8: Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe

• 9: Concordance

• 10: The Hubble Tension

• Epilogue: Discordance

• Appendix 1: Symbols and Acronyms

• Appendix 2: Cosmic Distances

• Appendix 3: Redshifts and 'Look-back' Times

• Acknowledgements

• Endnotes

• Bibliography