The Great Debate
History and Philosophy of Physics
2020-01-13 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Abstract
A hundred years ago (1920) in the auditorium of the Smithsonian Institution's U.S. National Museum there were two lectures under the auspices of the George Ellery Hale Lecture series, what has come to be called the 'Great Debate'. In the debate, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis argued over the 'Scale of the Universe'. Curtis argued that the Universe is composed of many galaxies like our own and they are relatively small. Shapley argued that the Universe was composed of only one big Galaxy. In Shapley's model, our Sun was far from the center of this great island Universe.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2001.00159,
title = {The Great Debate},
author = {I. Horvath},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.00159},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
In Hungarian. This article was published in the 2020 Astronomical Yearbook (Hungarian, MCSE)