Wolfgang Priester forsaw Big Bounce cosmology

[marcus]

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0608644
Wolfgang Priester: from the big bounce to the Lambda-dominated universe
James Overduin, Hans-Joachim Blome, Josef Hoell
12 pages, 7 figures, optimized for A4 paper. Partly biographical, partly historical review of subjects to which Priester contributed (quasars, nonsingular cosmology, dark energy). Preprint version only; published version to appear in Naturwissenschaften

"Wolfgang Priester was one of Germany's most versatile and quixotic astrophysicists, re-inventing himself successively as a radio astronomer, space physicist and cosmologist, and making a lasting impact on each field. We focus in this personal account on his contributions to cosmology, where he will be most remembered for his association with quasars, his promotion of the idea of a nonsingular "big bounce" at the beginning of the current expansionary phase, and his recognition of the importance of dark energy (Einstein's cosmological constant Lambda) well before this became the standard paradigm in cosmology."

just to show a little respect for the guy
he seems to have been a bit ahead of his time and that can be a trouble

 

[marcus]

things are quiet in this subforum, so I will take a moment just to quote something Einstein said in 1918. The authors of that article about Wolfgang Priester recalled it to me. It was something they think Wolfgang would have understood.

"...we can do no better than borrow from Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1918: “The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding, can lead to them ... The state of mind that enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.[/color]”