Documents / FOIA release
This JPRS translation, dated 1 August 1990, is an article from the Soviet journal Kommunist by Leonid Grishchuk of the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute. In it he argues that basic science needs state support. He notes that lecture audiences ask a lot about flying saucers and space aliens. He goes on to review cosmology, including galaxy structure, cosmic expansion, relic radiation, Fridman's models and inflationary theory. He closes by saying the question of non-Earth civilizations is a topic for another author.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 12 of 16 critical value, expansion will be replaced by compression: otherwise it will continue without limit. Obviously, the critical value of density is determined by the rate of expansion and is expressed in the Hubble constant. According to contemporary data, the average density of all types of matter (including the hidden mass) in the observed Universe is close to the critical value. 25. The averaged, smoothed-over distribution of matter of the galaxies in the observed Universe is well described by Fridman's cosmological solutions and Fridman's models. Why we are observing precisely expansion, and not compression, is a separate question, which cosmologists are now examining. 26. According to Fridman's solutions, it is possible to calculate the course of the change in both density and temperature in the future, as well as in the past. Using these calculations, G. Gamov designed a theory of primary (pre-stellar, pre-galactic) nucleosynthesis and predicted that the contemporary Universe ought to be full of electromagnetic radiation at a temperature of about six degrees. Although the actual discovery of three-degree (relic) radiation occurred accidentally, beyond any connection to G. Gamov's prediction, in principle its existence was expected. Interpretation of the relic radiation has not caused serious difficulties, the more so since the actual value of the temperature does not differ too greatly from the predicted value. 27. The successful prediction of the relative content of chemical elements, coinciding with the content actually observed, also relies considerably on the laws for the change of density and temperature with time. In turn, these laws on the whole depend on the forces of gravity, since precisely gravity determines the behavior of large masses of matter. Thus, gravitation field theory plays an important role in cosmology. 28. It is possible to roughly describe the volumes of the Universe with small dimensions using ordinary classical mechanics and the Newtonian theory of gravity. However, for distances comparable to the scale of the observable Universe, the Newtonian theory is not suitable. Cosmology has to be relativistic and relies on the conclusions of the special and general theories of relativity. Here, the concepts of time and space hold an especially important place. 29. The special theory of relativity has changed the old concepts of pre-relativistic physics concerning time and space. Absolute time, ''flowing uniformly and independent of anything external,'" turned out to be overly idealized. According to the special theory of relativity, the judgments of observers about the interval of time and the segment of distance between one and the same pair of events
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 12 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.