As witnessed by its 45-page bibliography, Peebles’ book is based on exhaustive historical documentation. It makes excellent use of both primary and secondary sources, including his own recollections and personal communications from some of his colleagues which add valuable information that cannot be found elsewhere. However, the historical perspective is largely limited to the technical and scientific development, which Peebles describes in fascinating and insightful details. As indicated by the subtitle, the book is an inside history and not an outside or contextual history of modern cosmology. This is indirectly reflected in the bibliography which comprises more than 1000 references of which fewer than a handful are written by historians of science. The book has almost nothing to say about the history of cosmology in its broader sense, including such aspects as its public appeal, its social and communicative structure, and its ideological and philosophical implications. Some of the more general perspectives are taken up in the final chapter, which is reflective and interesting if also, in my view, disappointingly narrow. The chapter includes a section with the provocative title “The Social Construction of Science.” Although Peebles is definitely not a social constructivist in the sense of philosophy and sociology of science, he labels cosmology in the 1920s as a “social construction” which eventually, with new observations and methods of testing, was turned into an “empirical construction.” Cosmology’s Century is primarily written with a scientific audience in mind, but it is also of great interest, even indispensable, for the small community of historians of modern astrophysics and cosmology. As Peebles notes in the preface, “It is generally acknowledged that in natural science, we take poor care of our history” (p. viii). This may be true in general, but with Cosmology’s Century it is no longer the case for modern cosmology. Its limitations apart, the book is by far the most authoritative and detailed account of how cosmology, a century after Einstein’s pioneering theory of the universe of 1917, became an advanced science in the form of the present standard cosmological model.

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寻找暗能量

正如其 45 页的参考书目所证明的那样，皮布尔斯的书是基于详尽的历史文献。它很好地利用了主要和次要来源，包括他自己的回忆和他的一些同事的个人通信，这些信息增加了在其他地方找不到的有价值的信息。然而，历史视角在很大程度上仅限于技术和科学发展，皮布尔斯以引人入胜且富有洞察力的细节描述了这一点。正如副标题所示，这本书是一部内部史，而不是现代宇宙学的外部史或背景史。这间接反映在参考书目中，该参考书目包含 1000 多篇参考文献，其中由科学史学家撰写的文献很少。这本书几乎没有谈论更广泛意义上的宇宙学历史，包括它的公众吸引力、它的社会和交流结构以及它的意识形态和哲学含义等方面。在最后一章中讨论了一些更一般的观点，尽管在我看来，它也令人失望地狭隘，但它具有反思性和趣味性。本章包括一个标题为“科学的社会建构”的章节。尽管皮布尔斯绝对不是哲学和科学社会学意义上的社会建构主义者，但他将 1920 年代的宇宙学称为“社会建构”，最终通过新的观察和测试方法，变成了“经验建构”。宇宙学的世纪主要是为科学读者而写的，但它也很有趣，甚至不可或缺，供现代天体物理学和宇宙学历史学家的小团体使用。正如皮布尔斯在序言中指出的那样，“人们普遍认为，在自然科学中，我们对历史的照顾很差”（第 viii 页）。这在一般情况下可能是正确的，但在《宇宙学的世纪》中，现代宇宙学不再如此。除了其局限性之外，这本书是迄今为止关于宇宙学如何在爱因斯坦 1917 年开创性宇宙理论一个世纪之后以当前标准宇宙学模型的形式成为一门先进科学的最权威和详细的描述。