Everything about Alexander Friedman totally explained
Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman or Friedmann (
June 16 1888,
Saint Petersburg,
Imperial Russia –
September 16 1925,
Leningrad,
USSR) was a
Russian and
Soviet cosmologist and
mathematician.
Life and work
Alexander Friedman lived much of his life in
Leningrad. He fought in
World War I (on behalf of
Imperial Russia) as a bomber and later lived through the
Russian Revolution of 1917.
He discovered the
expanding-universe solution to
general relativity field equations in 1922, which was corroborated by
Edwin Hubble's observations in 1929.(Ferguson, 1991: 67). Friedman's 1924 papers, including "Über die Möglichkeit einer Welt mit konstanter negativer Krümmung des Raumes" (On the possibility of a world with constant negative curvature of space) published by the German physics journal
Zeitschrift für Physik (Vol. 21, pp. 326-332), demonstrated that he'd command of all three Friedman models describing positive, zero and negative curvature respectively, a decade before
Robertson and
Walker published their analysis.
This dynamical cosmological model of general relativity would come to form the standard for the
Big Bang and
steady state theories. Friedman's work supports both theories equally, so it wasn't until the detection of the
cosmic microwave background radiation that the steady state theory was abandoned in favor of the current favorite Big Bang paradigm.
The classic
solution of the Einstein field equations that describes a homogeneous and isotropic universe is called the "
Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric", or "FLRW", after Friedman, and Robertson, Walker and
Georges Lemaître who worked on the problem in 1920's and 30's independently of Friedman.
In addition to general relativity, Friedman's interests included
hydrodynamics and
meteorology. In June 1925 he was given the job of the director of Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. In July 1925 he participated in a record-setting balloon flight, reaching the elevation of 7400 m.
Friedman died on September 16, 1925, at the age of 37, from
typhoid fever that he contracted during a vacation in
Crimea.
Another famous physicist,
George Gamow, was a student of Friedman.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Alexander Friedman'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://alexander_friedman.totallyexplained.com">Alexander Friedman Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
