  The separate contributions to cosmology of the above researchers are
revisited and a cosmology encompassing their basic ideas is proposed. We study
Dirac's article on the large number hypothesis (1938), Sciama's proposal of
realizing Mach's principle (1953), and Dicke's considerations (1957) on a
flat-space representation of general relativity with a variable speed of light
(VSL). Dicke's tentative theory can be formulated in a way which is compatible
with Sciama's hypothesis on the gravitational constant G. Additionally, such a
cosmological model is shown to satisfy Dirac's second `large number' hypothesis
on the total number of particles in the universe being proportional to the
square of the epoch. In the same context, Dirac's first hypothesis on an
epoch-dependent G-contrary to his prediction- does not necessarily produce a
visible time dependence of G. While Dicke's proposalreproduces the classical
tests of GR in first approximation, the cosmological redshift is described by a
shortening of measuring rods rather than an expansion of space. Since the
temporal evolution of the horizon R is governed by \dot R(t) =c(t), the
flatness and horizon problems do not arise in the common form.
