Acknowledgments

A work many years in the making, I dedicate this thesis to my parents for their unwavering dedication and support. I cannot thank John Dubinski sufficiently for his patience and guidance. I thank Clem Heusch and Lars Hernquist for providing motivation. I also thank David Koo for his love of teaching and cosmology, which put me on this path many years ago.

I thank the following authors, whose figures I have reproduced: Sancisi (1976), Mulder (1983), Freudenreich et al. (1994), and Audouze & Israël (1985).

I thank Meriko Blink for the extended loan of her printer. I further thank innumerable friends for listening to my rambling and reading my wretched prose.

I wrote all text in Word 6.0 for the Macintosh, learning in the process why real scientists use TeX. I performed data analysis with JMP on the Macintosh, and with GnuPlot, SuperMongo, and Xgraph on X11. All charts were produced using SuperMongo.

The resources of the UCSC Science Library, and the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) proved invaluable in my research.