North J.D. The Measure of the Universe: A History of Modern Cosmology

Clarendon Press — Oxford, 1965. — 466 p.The main concern of this book is with the development of cosmology dining the first half of this century. It is divided into two parts. The first is a fairly straightforward historical and theoretical narrative. The second is the sort of thing Lucretius might have had in mind when he spoke of ‘the outer view of the inner law’: it is a discussion of conceptual problems which are to be found at various points in the first part of the book. Modern theories of cosmology were almost all prompted by theories of gravitation, and such peripheral subjects as relativistic thermodynamics and theories of a unified field are here barely touched upon.