Speaker
Description
Richard Feynman and John Wheeler’s joint contributions on radiation reaction and absorber theory, based on the action at a distance picture, are historically retraced and contextualized. Then we focus on the cosmological consequences of absorber theory, as emerged from the talks and discussions which took place at the conference on “The Nature of Time”, held at Cornell University in June 1963 and organized by Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi. The emphasis is on the reinterpretation of absorber theory by Jack Hogarth, Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar as a theoretical criterion for evaluating the global structure of the universe, in a period dominated by the broader cosmological controversy between steady-state models and evolutionary Big-Bang scenarios.