Towards a Unified Cosmology

Excerpts: The wider the range of a piece of research the less adequately can any one worker deal with each of its specialized aspects. Breadth and depth compete for his attention and cannot both secure the whole of it. I am only too well aware how particularly this truism applies to the study presented here. The very words 'Unified Cosmology' are both a challenge and a reminder that every conclusion arrived at has to be consistent with all the facts that have their appropriate place in every intellectual discipline. No conclusion here can be considered sufficiently tested by establishing its consistency with what is known in one branch of science only. Anyone who would make the most modest contribution to the unification of science should never claim to be writing specifically as a nuclear physicist, or as an astronomer, or as a relativist, or as a classical physicist, or as a mathematician, or as any other specialist whatever. When he does so he introduces a misplaced emphasis. He must never forget that knowledge acquired by himself in his own particular field of study is not necessarily more relevant, and may well be less so, than knowledge acquired by others in fields remote from his own. In order to find means of confirming or falsifying his conclusions, he must look for facts belonging to every branch of science to which he can obtain access. He must be prepared some day to be refuted by facts known to others, but of which he himself is still in total ignorance.