History and Philosophy of Twentieth Century Cosmology
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Description: Paper presented at an Italian national conference in 1996, with references.
ON THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY COSMOLOGY The term "cosmology" has several different connotations, ranging from a society's world-view to the scientific study of the universe at large. I shall deal only with the latter meaning of the term, but even then it is far from obvious what cosmology is, exactly. We may provisionally define it as the attempt to understand the universe in scientific terms, which in practice means those of the mathematical-physical sciences. The keyword is the domain of cosmology, the universe, and it is this domain which makes cosmology as most peculiar science, for the reason that the universe is a most peculiar entity. It is so basically because it is unique and all-encompassing, features that are not shared by any other domain of science, a point to which I shall return later on. For the moment, let us loosely define the universe as everything in space and time, including spacetime itself, although we should of course restrict this "everything" to what has physical existence and can be subjected to scientific analysis, at least in principle. The universe, rigidly understood as the totality of everything, includes after all phenomena that are beyond the power of physics, such as thoughts and human emotions, and it is obviously not with such things the cosmologist is concerned. He or she is concerned with the structure and composition of the physical universe, that is, the geometrical structure of space and the matter and radiation distributed in it, as well as the temporal evolution of this largest possible physical system. To get a reasonable picture of what cosmology is about, we should add that although, in principle, its domain has no limitations in space and time, in practice cosmology deals only with the large-scale features of the universe, typically of galactic or extra-galactic magnitude: atoms, butterflies, and mountains are all parts of the universe, but they are of no interest to the cosmologist.
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| Date | Created: 1996-01-29 00:00:00 Created: 2007-03-01 10:35:42 Created: 1999-09-08 00:00:00 Created: 1999-09-08 00:00:00 Created: 1999-09-08 00:00:00 Last Update: 2014-01-30 00:38:01 Last Update: 2011-03-24 11:01:07 Last Update: 2011-03-24 11:01:08 |