"De Sitter's redshift phenomenon is not caused by the Doppler effect of stars moving away. It is a property of space-time, which appears when these are forced into the bitter conditions of the empty universe with the lambda-term. ...de Sitter was the first to suggest, in 1917 when galaxies were not yet known, that one should try to find a redshift-distance relation for very remote celestial bodies. ...Even Friedmann, who five years later demonstrated the possibility of an expanding universe, failed to point out the redshift phenomenon as a property of his own model."
Willem de Sitter

January 1, 1970

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