"Matter is actually distributed very unevenly... conglomerated into stars and galactic systems. The average density is the density that we should get if all... could be evaporated into atoms of hydrogen, or protons, and... distributed evenly over the whole of space. ...three or four protons in every cubic foot. ...a million million times less than that of the most perfect vacuum that we can produce... The universe thus consists mostly of emptiness... consider a universe without any matter at all, an empty universe, as a good approximation. But we may also take as our first approximation a universe containing... three or four protons per cubic foot. The local deviations from the average, caused by the conglomeration of matter into stars and stellar systems, are then disregarded in the grand scale model, and are only taken into account when we come to study details."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
CosmologistsAstronomers from the NetherlandsPhysicists from the NetherlandsMathematicians from the Netherlands
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Willem_de_Sitter
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Willem de Sitter
Willem de Sitter (6 May 1872 – 20 November 1934) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, astronomer and cosmologist who applied the general theory of relativity to the early investigation of the structure of the universe.
61 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Willem de Sitter →
Related Quotes
"There is no direct observational evidence for the curvature [of space], the only directly observed data being the mea…"
"It was early 1932, when Einstein and I both were at the California Institute of Technology in Pasedena, and we just d…"
"[Einstein's cosmological constant] is a name without any meaning. ...We have, in fact, not the slightest inkling of w…"
"Our own galaxy system is only one of a great many, and observations made from any of the others would show exactly th…"
"Gradually... during the second half of the nineteenth century, the uncomfortable feeling of dislike of the action at …"
"In electromagnetism... the law of the inverse square had been supreme, but, as a consequence of the work of Faraday a…"
"The inconsistency of first explaining matter by atoms and then explaining atoms by matter was only slowly realised, a…"
"How does it come about that we have been able to find satisfactory hypotheses to explain electricity and magnetism, l…"
"Gravitation is not only similar to inertia in its generality, it is also measured by the same number... the mass. The…"
"Gravitation is entirely independent of everything that influences other natural phenomena. It is not subject to absor…"