IAU02623
Presentation type requested: ORAL
EMERGENCE OF STRUCTURE: 1ST 2 CENTURIES OF THE 1ST 2 EONS
Virginia Trimble
Univ of Maryland/Univ. of California (Irvine)
"Early" maps of the cosmos included the 26th dynasty air god Shu supporting the sky goddess Nut above the earth god Geb, Descartes's Voronoi tesselation, William Herschel's star gauging, and Carl Charlier's 1922 plot of the nebulae in NGC, which he intended as observational support for the fractal nature of large scale cosmic structure. He was apparently wrong about this (as was de Vaucouleurs a half century later), though right about there being at least two levels of clustering. Because Shapley, van Maanen, and others were still denying the very existence of external galaxies at the same time Lundmark and Opik were measuring their distances and masses and Charlier plotting his hierarchies, the story of the discovery of large scale structure in the universe cannot be told in any very linear, coherent way, but the speaker will try. The underlying themes are probably (1) expanding horizons, (2) recognition of additional levels of structure, and (3) increasing mediocrity of our vantage point.
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