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| by S. Smith and J. Szpila |
| History | New Discoveries | Bibliography |
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| by S. Smith and J. Szpila |
| History | New Discoveries | Bibliography |
Cosmology is the study of how the universe and time were created, how they work today, and where they are going in the future. People have long debated the origin of the universe. Some rely on the big bang theory, while others believe everything happened by chance, and still others believe a supernatural being created everything in the universe. These ideas have long been debated by several great minds including Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Lemgitre, Hubble, and Hawking. It has only been in the past 40 years that technology has allowed us to travel beyond our Earth's atmosphere to investigate and assess the validity of the theories on the origin of the universe.
Throughout recorded history, there have been many varying cosmological theories. Every culture has a different myth or legend of how the universe was created. Some of the most widely known or accepted hypothesis came through religion. These include the Hindu belief in the four-headed god Brahma who created the universe as well as all of humanity. Hindus believe that when Brahma sleeps the universe and everything in it is destroyed, and when he awakes the entire universe is created new, creating a perpetual cycle of creation and destruction.
The ancient Chinese believe in two opposite forces known as the yin and yang. Yin is the power of darkness while yang is the power of light and sunshine. Yin and yang had a child named Pan Gu who created the universe: "His eyes became the sun and the moon, His hair the trees and plants, His flesh the earth, His sweat rain, and the worms that left His corpse became people." (qtd. in Couper 27)
The Egyptians worshiped the sun god Re (pronounced Ra) created the cosmos. Re was believed to give birth to himself at the beginning of time and then one day got bored or lonely and decided to create the universe.
The Muslims believe their holy book, the Koran, which says:
Christians and Jews believe their holy book, the Bible, which says, " In the beginning God created the heavens and the universe . . . and God said, 'let there be light' and there was light." (Genesis 1:1&3 NIV)
The modern theories of the universe started with Copernicus and his heliocentric theory, and has expanded to Einstein's Theory of Relativity,* Georges Lemgitre and the expansion of the universe, four-dimensional geometry, and Hawking's as well as other physicists' and cosmologists' search for a Grand Unification Theory. This would be the one theory on which all the theories of physics could be explained. (McDaniel 19) The search for this theory led to many other influential and exciting discoveries that may eventually lead up to an explanation of how the universe began.
Unchallenged until Copernicus was the idea of the Ptolemic theory. This theory said the Earth was the center of the universe and all things revolved around it. (Mckay 591) Copernicus reasoned that planetary motion only worked if the sun and not the Earth stood still. Upon further observations he saw that the planets further away from the sun took longer to orbit than the ones closest the sun.
In the early 1530s Copernicus recorded his observations in a book called The Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs, he knew that his findings would be considered blasphemous by the Catholic Church and left his book unpublished until 1543, after he could recheck his observations for accuracy. In 1616 the Church placed Copernicus' book on its list of banned books where it stayed for more than 200 years. (Kallen 13) Before the book was banned a man by the name of Johannes Kepler obtained a copy, and later proved that Copernicus was wrong in his mathematical methods used to determine planetary motion, but not about the Earth orbiting the sun.
Kepler, who was made Imperial Mathematician after the death of Tycho Brahe, worked for many years trying to solve the mysteries of planetary motion. Copernicus held the belief that the planets moved in a circular motion around the sun; however, this theory did not fit Kepler's observations. One day, in frustration, Kepler drew an elliptical orbit for the planets instead of a circle, and, "In a single defining moment, Kepler had solved a problem that had confounded astronomers for many centuries." (Kallen 14) From this discovery, Kepler was able to form three laws of planetary motion. The first law states that the planets move in an ellipse and not perfect circles; the second law states that the planets move faster the closer they are to the sun; and the third law states that the inner planets take less time to orbit the sun than the outer planets. (Rosen 14) Although Kepler observed these laws he did not understand the mechanics behind them.
In 1609 an Italian scientist named Galileo Galilei was the first person known to have used a telescope for astronomical observations. He pointed his telescope towards the moon and discovered that it was not a perfect sphere, as the Church had taught, but a marred planet covered by millions of craters and mountains. In 1610 Galileo, while observing Jupiter, saw three points of light which he thought to be stars. When he looked for these stars the next night he was puzzled when they had moved to the other side of the planet. After several nights of observations, and the disappearance of the "stars" and then the appearance of four of them he realized that they were not stars, but moons orbiting Jupiter. This was proof that Copernicus was correct in his theories. If moons were orbiting other planets, there was no way that the Earth was the center of the universe.
In this century there have basically been two dominant schools of thought about the history of the universe. These contradicting views were dubbed the steady state theory, introduced by Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle (Cole 33), and the big bang theory. The steady state theory claimed that as the universe grew, the "matter would form from nothing in the empty space and would eventually consolidate into new galaxies." (qtd. in McDaniel 46) The second theory was the big bang, which stated that in order for all the matter in the universe to expand apart, it would have to have been closer together in the past, in one point that exploded and propelled matter across space. (McDaniel 46) This theory was thought to be absurd at first, but in 1962 when Hawking proved the steady state theory to be mathematically impossible, the big bang theory quickly gained acceptance. (McDaniel 49)
Today, the most widely accepted theory of the universe's origin is the "Big Bang" theory. As Hawking stated in his web page, "The Beginning of Everything," this theory is built on the:
Edwin Hubble observed that all the galaxies are moving away from one another and that the farther away they are the faster they are moving. (Backtiming) Based upon his observations, scientists have developed three possible structures for our universe. The first is called the open universe in which after the big bang the universe continues to expand at a gradual rate and will never stop expanding, but continue to grow and disperse itself throughout space. The second is called the flat universe in which the universe expands to a certain point and then stays at a constant size for the rest of time. This, however, is unlikely because the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, a body's ratio of its energy to its temperature, always increases in any transformation of energy. According to this:
The third situation, and probably the most widely accepted, is the closed universe. The closed universe accounts for the loss of energy within a system through various forces, such as friction, acting upon it. According to this theory the universe will eventually lose all of the energy from the big bang and will start to collapse upon itself due to the gravitational pull of all the matter in the universe. The universe will eventually collapse upon itself in what is known as the big crunch. (Kallen 44) When this happens everything except time will reverse itself. This gives rise to the idea of an oscillating universe, which is a theory that says when all the matter converges in the big crunch, it will in effect create another big bang, and this would create a new universe with new properties. (Couper 42)
For any of these structures to be possible there would have to have been a big bang. If there were a big bang there should still be evidence of it in the form of microwave radiation. The evidence of the big bang came about from an unexpected source. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both of Bell Laboratories, were working on relaying telephone messages through satellites in space. These satellites used large microwave antennas to relay their information. Unfortunately for Bell Laboratories the satellites picked up an unexpected interference in space caused by microwave radiation. They began looking at these signals closely and discovered that the radiation was of the same intensity in every direction. This discovery was finally able to give some proof that there was actually a big bang. (Kallen 50)
As time and technology progress, mankind's ideas on the origin of the universe may yet change. New discoveries and techniques, such as using redshift surveys to assess radiation levels in space (Wieland 141) and use of the Hubble space telescope to view the formation of new universes in black holes, will bring about new theories about the origin of the universe. All of the theories in this paper have, at one time, been thought to be true, but as technology increases man has drastically changed his view of the universe. Some of these ideas have been thought of as amusing or ridiculous, because of what we know today. What will the people of the future think about our views of the universe as they discover new truths about our origin?
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