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Soviet Philosophic-Cosmological Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Maxim W. Mikulak
Maxim W. Mikulak*
Affiliation:
639 East Fifth Street, New York 9, New York
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Extract

Despite the rapid strides made in observational and theoretical astronomy, particularly in our century, there are two fundamental questions respecting the universe that defy solution. One pertains to the age of the universe, that is, did the universe have a beginning and therefore have a finite time-scale or has the universe existed without beginning. The other question deals with the dimensions of the universe, that is, is the universe infinite or not. For the time being no satisfactory proof or disproof has been offered either on purely logical grounds or through empirical evidence revealing whether the universe is boundless and eternal or not. It is for this reason that cosmologists must resort to a variety of unverifiable philosophic postulates in the hope of constructing a cosmological model that correlates the known laws of the physical world with the observed facts of nature and simultaneously presents a consistent picture of the universe as it changes in time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , January 1958 , pp. 35 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1958

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Footnotes

†

This writer is indebted to the Inter-University Committee responsible for the Research Program on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and to Columbia University for financial assistance supporting this study.

References

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34 Belinskii, P., op. cit., p. 94.

35 Petrov, V., op. cit.

36 Shafirkin, V., op. cit., p. 124.

37 Petrov, V., op. cit.

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49 Petrov, V. N., op. cit. Bogorodskii's original paper appeared in Tsirkuliary Glavnoi Astronomicheskoi Observalorii v Pulkove, no. 29 (1940) pp. 5–19; however, it was not available to this writer.

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56 Parenago, P. P., and A. G. Masevich, “Issledovanie zavisimosti massa-svetimost-radius,” Astronomicheskii Zhurnal, no. 3 (1950) p. 149.

57 Ibid., no. 4 (1950) pp. 209–210.

58 Ambartsumian, V. A., “Zvezdnye assotsiatsii,” ibid., no. 1 (1949) pp. 3–9.

59 Gurzadian, G. A., “Ob evoliutsii zvezd tipa O,” ibid., no. 6 (1949) pp. 329–335.

60 Trudy Vtorogo Soveshchaniia po Voprosam Kosmogonii, Moscow, 1953, p. 165 ff.

61 Gurevich, L. E., “Ob cvoliutsii plotnikh gravitatsionnikh sistom i obrnzovanii nebesnykh tel,” Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR, no. 6 (1950) pp. 981–984; Lebedinskii, A. L., “Gipoteza ob obrazovanii zvezd,” ibid., no 1 (1951) pp. 41–44; Lebedinskii, A. L., “Gravitatsionnaia kondensatsiia zvezdnogo gaza i obrazovanie zvezdnykh oblakov,” ibid., no. 1 (1952) pp. 33–36; Gurevich, L. E. and A. I. Lebedinskii, “Ob obrazovanii zvezd v nastoiashchee vremia,” ibid., no. 6 (1952) pp. 813–816.

62 Izvestiia, December 16, 1937, p. 4.

63 Science News Letter, August 20, 1949, p. 114.

64 Lenin, V. I., Selected Works in Two Volumes, vol. I, pt. I, Moscow, 1950, p. 641.

65 Adoratsky, V., Dialectical Materialism, New York, 1934, p. 36.

66 Trudy Vtorogo Soveshchaniia po Voprosam Kosmogonii, p. 152.