Ways of Seeing
- Exploring Modern Metaphysics -
COSMOLOGY - The MACRO view of Science
Science has finally begun to provide an understanding of the origin and nature of the universe as a whole.
Through astronomy it has been discovered that the earth is in an elliptical orbit around the sun at a distance of about 8 light minutes (the distance light travels in 8 minutes) or about 100 million miles. There are 8 other major planets also orbiting our sun at other distances. The stars we see in the sky at night are also suns like ours (some larger, some smaller, some hotter, some cooler, etc.) only further away. The closest star to us (besides our sun) is about 4 light years away, some 6,000,000,000,000 or 6 million million miles. Our sun is one of about a million million stars that form a spinning disk of stars in the shape of a spiral called the Milky Way galaxy that is about 10,000 light years thick and about 100,000 light years across.
Astronomers have observed many other galaxies of stars, usually in one of several basic shapes. It has been calculated that there are about a million million galaxies in the universe (the universe is finite, but unbounded!), the closest spiral galaxy being about 2 million light years away from our own Milky Way. Interestingly, the further away a galaxy is from our own the faster it appears to be moving away, and the furthest ones at 10+ billion light years seem to be moving away from us almost at the speed of light!
These observations among others have caused the "Big Bang" theory of the origin of the universe to be developed. This theory argues that these observations mean that there must have been a time long ago when all the matter in the universe was contained in a single point that then "exploded" and shoved all the matter apart, forming the stars and the galaxies of stars as we now see them. It has been convincingly argued in the Big Bang theory that all the matter and energy in the universe was once located in a single point, known as a "singularity", at a time about 13 billion years ago.
According to the theory, the early universe was composed mainly of the simple element hydrogen. Each time the natural pull of gravity accumulated a sufficient amount of hydrogen a star was formed. As each star burned, heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen were formed in their interiors. Many stars explode after several billion years spewing these heavier elements out into space. As new stars form from this mixture of hydrogen and the heavier elements, planets are sometimes formed in orbit around them at the same time. Our sun and its 9 major planets were formed in this way about 5 billion years ago. Most of the atoms of the material we see around us, including our bodies themselves, were formed in the interior of stars billions of years ago. We are, literally, children of the stars.
Here is a video from the History Channel showing how the universe evolved according to current scientific thought:
Evidence is still being collected to help cosmologists determine with confidence whether the universe will continue to expand as it has done so far, or whether the universe has enough mass so that at some point it reaches its largest size and gravity causes it to collapse back down to a singularity again some 13 billion years or more in the future. Interestingly, time (and even space and matter) do not exist for a singularity; according to the theory they are only created when the singularity "explodes", and in a given resulting universe the properties may be quite different from those that define our particular universe.
Note that the words you are reading/hearing are completely your interpretations of tiny electrochemical impulses moving from your eyes/ears to your brain. Similarly, the scientists that have come to these conclusions regarding cosmology did so in the same way using information that came from machines they themselves created. One has to wonder how much of this cosmological interpretation is influenced by the structure of the brain itself!
Return to WOS Home Page
