| Acknowledgements | p. ix |
| Foreword | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Cosmological concepts at the end of the Middle Ages | p. 5 |
| The spherically closed universe of antiquity and the Middle Ages | p. 6 |
| Cusanus and his universe without centre or boundary | p. 10 |
| A warning by the Church | p. 13 |
| Copernicus and the question of an infinite universe | p. 14 |
| Thomas Digges: How far do stars extend? | p. 15 |
| A crucial step in observational techniques | p. 16 |
| Kepler's finite universe and Galileo's telescope | p. 17 |
| Descartes: An evolving universe | p. 21 |
| Newton's Principia and Bentley's sermon | p. 24 |
| Nebulae as a new astronomical phenomenon | p. 27 |
| Early reports on nebulae | p. 27 |
| Edmond Halley on several nebulae or lucid spots like clouds | p. 29 |
| The universes of Wright, Kant and Laplace | p. 31 |
| On the construction of the heavens | p. 35 |
| Herschel confirms and then rejects island universes | p. 35 |
| The Leviathan of William Parsons, the Earl of Rosse | p. 40 |
| Huggins applies spectroscopy on nebulae | p. 42 |
| On the spectrum of the great nebula in Andromeda | p. 45 |
| Island universes turn into astronomical facts: A universe of galaxies | p. 46 |
| Kapteyn's Galaxy | p. 47 |
| Shapley's Changing view of the Milky Way | p. 48 |
| Slipher favours island universes | p. 56 |
| Curtis and his novae | p. 57 |
| Was there a villain in the game? | p. 58 |
| The Great Debate | p. 59 |
| Öpik finds the distance to Andromeda | p. 60 |
| Hubble cuts the Gordian knot | p. 60 |
| The early cosmology of Einstein and de Sitter | p. 63 |
| Some fundamental relations | p. 65 |
| The static universe of Einstein | p. 72 |
| The static universe of de Sitter | p. 76 |
| De Sitter's Trojan horse | p. 77 |
| No energy conservation in relativistic cosmology! | p. 85 |
| Schwarzschild's vision of curved space | p. 87 |
| The dynamical universe of Friedmann | p. 88 |
| An alternative to Einstein and de Sitter | p. 89 |
| Einstein's rejection | p. 92 |
| Redshifts: How to reconcile Slipher and de Sitter? | p. 93 |
| Redshifts | p. 93 |
| Distances | p. 95 |
| Early interpretation of redshifts | p. 96 |
| Lemaître discovers the expanding universe | p. 99 |
| Lemaître, a student of Eddington and research fellow in Shapley's group | p. 99 |
| Doubts about de Sitter's choice of coordinates | p. 101 |
| The discovery of the expanding universe | p. 103 |
| The derivation of the linear velocity-distance relationship | p. 106 |
| Lemaître determines the 'Hubble constant' from observations | p. 108 |
| Lemaître's Interpretation of theory and observations | p. 109 |
| Lemaître's debt to Friedmann | p. 110 |
| Einstein judges Lemaître's interpretation as 'abominable' | p. 111 |
| Hubble's contribution of 1929 | p. 114 |
| Hubble finds the linear velocity-distance relationship from observations | p. 115 |
| Hubble's interpretation of the velocity-distance relationship | p. 117 |
| What was Hubble's motive for his 1929 investigation? | p. 117 |
| The reception of Hubble's discovery | p. 118 |
| Hubble and the expansion of the Universe | p. 119 |
| The breakthrough for the expanding universe | p. 121 |
| The Friday, 10 January 1930 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society | p. 121 |
| Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington | p. 124 |
| The spreading of the gospel | p. 125 |
| Hubble's anger about de Sitter | p. 129 |
| De Sitter's check on Hubble | p. 129 |
| Hubble's angry letter | p. 130 |
| Hubble and Humason enlarge the sample | p. 134 |
| Robertson and Tolman join the game | p. 137 |
| Robertson starts from first principles | p. 137 |
| Tolman and the annihilation of matter | p. 139 |
| Weyl's brief return to cosmology | p. 142 |
| The Einstein-de Sitter universe | p. 144 |
| Einstein's conversion | p. 144 |
| Einstein and de Sitter agree on the structure of the Universe | p. 149 |
| Eddington's 'after dinner speech' | p. 152 |
| Are the Sun and Earth older than the Universe? | p. 153 |
| The age of the Universe deduced from the expansion rate | p. 153 |
| The age of the Earth | p. 154 |
| The age of the Sun and the stars | p. 154 |
| Baade and Sandage drastically reduce the Hubble constant | p. 156 |
| In search of alternative tracks | p. 157 |
| Zwicky and the gravitational drag | p. 157 |
| Milne's static Euclidean space | p. 158 |
| The Steady State alternative | p. 161 |
| The seed for the Big Bang | p. 164 |
| Expansion out of Einstein's static state | p. 165 |
| Expansion out of a primeval atom: The ancestor of the Big Bang | p. 166 |
| A case for the cosmological constant | p. 168 |
| Is there a beginning to the Universe? | p. 169 |
| Is the Big Bang the origin, or a transition in a cyclic universe? | p. 170 |
| Dark energy: Lemaître equates the cosmological constant $$ with Vacuum energy | p. 171 |
| Summary and Postscript | p. 173 |
| A brief recollection | p. 173 |
| The birth of modern cosmology | p. 174 |
| How different is today's cosmology | p. 177 |
| A glass of port | p. 186 |
| Mathematical Appendix | p. 188 |
| Chapter 6: The early cosmology of Einstein and de Sitter | p. 188 |
| Some fundamental relations | p. 188 |
| The static universe of Einstein | p. 193 |
| The static universe of de Sitter | p. 195 |
| De Sitter's Trojan horse | p. 196 |
| Chapter 7: The dynamical universe of Friedmann | p. 197 |
| Chapter 9: Lemaître's discovery of the expanding universe | p. 198 |
| Doubts about de Sitter's choice of coordinates | p. 198 |
| The discovery of the expanding universe | p. 199 |
| Chapter 13: Robertson and Tolman join the game | p. 201 |
| Robertson starts from first principles | p. 201 |
| Tolman and the annihilation of matter | p. 203 |
| Chapter 14: The Einstein-de Sitter universe | p. 204 |
| Today's presentation of fundamental cosmological relations | p. 205 |
| Abbreviations | p. 209 |
| References | p. 210 |
| Index | p. 220 |
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