Discordance - The Troubled History of the Hubble Constant

The speed of the expansion of the universe is governed by the Hubble constant. Discordance tells of its troubled 100-year history, from tentative steps to measure the distances of nearby stars to orbiting telescopes peering into the far reaches of space. But recent results hint at more trouble ahead: the 'Hubble tension'. The story is not over yet.

List of contents

• Preface


• Prologue: Starry Messengers


• 1: Miss Leavitt's Law


• 2: The Scale of the Universe


• 3: Hubble's Constant


• 4: Divine Curves of Creation


• 5: Parameters of the Universe


• 6: Hubble Wars


• 7: The Inflationary Universe


• 8: Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe


• 9: Concordance


• 10: The Hubble Tension


• Epilogue: Discordance


• Appendix 1: Symbols and Acronyms


• Appendix 2: Cosmic Distances


• Appendix 3: Redshifts and 'Look-back' Times


• Acknowledgements


• Endnotes


• Bibliography

About the author

Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. Trained as a scientist in the Universities of Oxford and Stanford, and a former lecturer at the University of Reading, he has written popular books on science, philosophy, and history. His books include Higgs (2012), Mass (2017), for which he won the 2020 Premio Cosmos prize, Quantum Reality (2020), Quantum Space (2018), and, with the late John L. Heilbron, Quantum Drama (2024). His books have been translated into a dozen different languages, and he has won awards both for his scientific research and his science writing.

Product details

• Authors: Jim (Freelance science writer) Baggott, Baggott Jim
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 23.10.2025
• EAN: 9780192864062
• ISBN: 978-0-19-286406-2
• No. of pages: 336
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Physics, astronomy > Astronomy; popular science, Astrophysics, SCIENCE / Physics / Astrophysics, Cosmology & the universe, Cosmology and the universe, Theoretical & mathematical astronomy, SCIENCE / Space Science / Cosmology, Theoretical and mathematical astronomy