Milne, Edward Arthur

Edward Arthur Milne, (born Feb. 14, 1896, Hull, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Sept. 21, 1950, Dublin), English astrophysicist and cosmologist best known for his development of kinematic relativity.

Milne was educated at the University of Cambridge and served as assistant director of the Solar Physics Observatory at Cambridge from 1920 to 1924. He then became a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Manchester, and from 1929 until his death he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford.

Collaborating with Sir Ralph H. Fowler, Milne became known in the 1920s for their formulation of a reliable surface-temperature scale for stars of any spectral type. His theoretical studies of the balance between gravitational forces and radiation pressure in stellar atmospheres led him to study the escape velocities of molecules from stars, and he demonstrated that the Sun can eject atoms at speeds up to 1,600 km per second (1,000 miles per second). In 1929 he turned his attention to the structure and internal conditions of stars. His work eventually led to the theory explaining the highly dense white dwarf stars.

About 1932 Milne shifted his focus to cosmology, and he developed the theory of kinematic relativity. Like cosmologies based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, kinematic relativity featured an expanding universe, but it was nonrelativistic and used Euclidean space. Milne’s theory met with opposition from his contemporaries on both scientific and philosophical grounds, but his work helped to sharpen mainstream ideas about space-time and also inspired the steady-state theorists. Milne’s works include Thermodynamics of the Stars (1930), The White Dwarf Stars (1932), Relativity, Gravitation and World-Structure (1935), and Kinematic Relativity (1948).