XIV. Antike Lickttheorien.

Arthur E. Haas, from the Atom to the Cosmos—Struggles for a Scientific Career in the Early 20th Century

“…In earlier years he had studied cosmological concepts from a purely philosophical point of view, but he already had used physics arguments, such as the limitations provided by entropy and the timescales set by the laws of radioactivity, to underline his tenet that the universe must be finite. [11] Motivated by Compton's discovery, Haas published two articles on the relevance of the Compton Effect for cosmology: the first is only a short note suggesting a possible role of the Compton Effect for the conversion of light into matter, [12] which he considered as a possible way to generate mass in a mass-less universe. It was a revolutionary thought of a radiation dominated universe, well before the idea of the Primeval Atom was formulated by Canon Georges Lemaître (1894-1966).…”

“…It was an early stage of quantitative cosmology, which was primarily based on the thoughts of Einstein and de Sitter, [20] but Haas tried to contribute, partly motivated by his earlier philosophical ideas of a finite universe. [11] With the identification of stellar nebulae as truly extragalactic systems, the question of the dimensions of the universe beyond the Milky Way as well as the relative velocity of the extragalactic systems with respect to the Milky Way became relevant. In 1929, Hubble published the linear correlation between the velocities and distances of extra-galactic systems to the Milky Way, today known as Hubble relation, which can be considered to be the first step towards a quantitative cosmology as we know it today.…”