The Expanding Earth: Some Consequences of Dirac's Gravitation Hypothesis
 | |
| Author | Pascual Jordan |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Series | International Series of Monographs in Natural Philosophy |
| Subject | Gravity, Expanding Earth, varying gravitation |
| Published | 1971 |
| Publisher | Pergamon Press |
| Pages | 202 |
| ISBN | 0080158277 |
The Expanding Earth: Some Consequences of Dirac's Gravitation Hypothesis is a 1971 book by the physicist Pascual Jordan, published by Pergamon Press. It is an English translation (by Arthur Beer) of his 1966 German work Die Expansion der Erde (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg).
Overview
Jordan takes up Paul Dirac's "large numbers" hypothesis of a gradual weakening of the gravitational constant G over cosmic time, and works out its geophysical consequences. He argues that, as gravity has weakened, the Earth has slowly expanded — swelling from an initial ball perhaps only about 7,000 km in diameter to its present size — and he connects this to continental drift, the growth of the ocean basins, and other geological evidence. The book is a rare instance of a major theoretical physicist developing the Expanding-Earth idea from a specific cosmological hypothesis.
About the author
Pascual Jordan (1902–1980) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory (the Born–Heisenberg–Jordan "three-man paper," and Jordan–Wigner quantization). In his later career he worked on cosmology and gravitation, including scalar-tensor ("Jordan–Brans–Dicke") theories of varying gravity, of which the Expanding Earth was a proposed consequence.
Publication details
- Author: Pascual Jordan
- Translated by: Arthur Beer (from Die Expansion der Erde, 1966)
- Series: International Series of Monographs in Natural Philosophy
- Publisher: Pergamon Press, Oxford
- Published: 1971
- Pages: 202
- ISBN: 0080158277
Links to Purchase Book
- The Expanding Earth (Amazon)