Best Selling Books by James Jeans

First published in 1936, this volume contains six of the Halley Stewart Lectures – originally founded "For Research towards the Christian Ideal in All Social Life" – by some of the greatest of English scientists of the mid-20th century, each a leading authority in his respective field: cosmology, physics, meteorology, medicine and genetics. The final lecture considers the relationship between scientific knowledge and human ideals, commenting on the paradox that a century which produced such scientific advance also witnessed the most concentrated period of social, economic and political turmoil in world history.

Problems of Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics is a theoretical prelude to Jeans''s later and more mature work on the subject, Astronomy and Cosmogony. The impetus for publishing his theories on the behaviour of rotating masses, and on general dynamical theory, was the 1917 Adams Prize on the ''rotating and gravitating fluid mass''. Jeans won the prize with the core text of this volume. Enlarging on that work, and utilising the burgeoning results of astronomy, as well as the author''s bolder theoretical conjectures, this book became a solid foundation for substantial progress in cosmology.