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       When we talk about Cosmology we get an eerie feeling, almost as if we were trespassing on some sacred ground. It is important that we do not confuse what we do as a science and what our repsonsibilities as a human being are to do otherwise. Scientifically, cosmology is limited by the known laws of science. In other words, what we can say about the world, especially cosmologically, is limited by what we can know from science itself, through the processes of science and the laws that are known. In general, cosmology has been dependent upon philosophy to "think" out what the world is like. This does not work. Today, science has become the determining factor, yielding answers to questions we did not even know to ask a few short decades ago. With the Hubble Space Telescope and innumerable space probes collecting data to tell us better what the world is really like and giving us clues to how it got that way, we dare to frame our investigation more clearly. In particluar, we are interested in where the world came from. i.e.; we want to know how the universe began, And we want to not only know how it began, but how it got to be like it is today, and ultimately, what will become of it. These questions hold for us, the key to the meaning of life, to the very essence of our being. We considered earlier that maybe science in itself, is not suffiecient to answer all of the questions. Maybe that is why we study the liberal arts. But ineed, there are some things we can say with confidence about the world and from that we can use logical reasoning and apply the know laws of science to the process.  Science then, becomes a guide to help us along our journey of discovering just what we know for sure and what we think.

Early Models of the Universe

• Greeks
• Copernican
• Newton
• Kant
• Olber's Paradox

The Universe is expanding - Hubble expansion

Black Body Radiation

Cosmological Principle
 

Big Bang

Thermal History of the Universe
 

• Heavy Particle Era
• Light Particle Era
• Radiation Era
• Matter Era

Missing Mass - Dark Matter

Galaxies and structure of the universe on the large scale

Relativity and Gravitation

Flat Universe
Open Universe
Closed Universe

Latest Data

• COBE
• Hubble Space Telescope
• Supernovae
• Quasars and Galaxies

Bibliography