A member of the Institute staff, during a chance encounter in the hall, asked me to explain this conflict. I faked it at the time. That experience and discussions with colleagues during the most recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference led me to examine this issue more carefully to better understand the significance of the Hubble observations. What follows are the results of an admittedly brief effort that served as the foundation for a seminar that I gave recently at the Institute. The editor of the Bulletin then bullied me into summarizing the seminar for publication here.
Any discussion requires a shared language or concept.
It is in that spirit that I present a Readers Digest version of the history of the universe in order to define the context of this paper as well as some terminology. The chronology of the universe is depicted schematically in Fig. 1. While some remarkable events occurred in the earliest phases of the evolution of the universe, the intervals of time that are relevant to our discussion are those indicated by the symbols and . The second interval marks the passage of time from the formation of the galaxy until the solar system was formed. The third interval corresponds to the age of the solar system.