Counting of radio sources: A personal perspective

Abstract

This article gives the author's personal perspective on the continuing efforts by radio astronomers to determine the nature of the cosmological model by counting radio sources in the universe out to different levels of faintness. Although initially the source counts were expected to reveal the underlying geometry of space and time, subsequent experience showed that the issue is mixed up with the physical properties of the sources and their evolution with epoch. It is shown, how the earlier claims of disproof of the steady state model through source sounts, turned out to rest on very uncertain evidence.