Importance of Cosmology

This discipline allows us to know and understand what the set of everything that surrounds the planet Earth. TO beginning In the 20th century, scientists only knew about the Milky Way, but today cosmology has expanded its horizons to other galaxies.

All the civilizations that have existed throughout history have had an overall vision of the universe. This general idea or worldview allowed us to understand the connection between the terrestrial and celestial worlds.

In ancient times the universe was conceived as something finite divided into spheres and controlled by the action of the gods. We now know that the universe is permanently expanding, and we use mathematical calculations to describe the laws that govern the whole of the cosmos (the word cosmos comes from the Greek kósmos, which means precisely order and is the antithesis of the term chaos).

Albert Einstein's research revealed a fundamental fact: the universe is constantly expanding

Since the approaches of Aristotle and Ptolemy, humanity believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Thus, the set of everything that exists was divided into two regions: the sublunary world and the supralunary world. The first was located between the Moon and the Earth and it was understood that everything that exists in that region was made up of by four elements (earth, water, air and fire that correspond to the idea of ​​solid, liquid, gaseous and hot).

In the supralunary world, everything that exists was conceived as eternal and immobile. This conception of the universe had consequences in the realm of philosophy and religion and remained a theoretical explanation for more than twenty centuries.

From the contributions of Copernicus and Galileo there was a change of vision, since the geocentric model of Aristotle and Ptolemy was replaced by the heliocentric model.

The new paradigm of cosmology changed the self-perception of the human being: we were no longer the species that was in "the center of the world" but we were located in any part of the universe.

Questions related to cosmology

The advances in this discipline have a double interest. On the one hand, they allow us to understand the large-scale structure of everything that exists.

On the other hand, this area of ​​knowledge invites us to ask ourselves a series of questions: did the universe have a beginning and is it guided by by some kind of force? Are there borders in the cosmos? Is there life on other planets? What is the matter of which the planet is made? cosmos? Or should one speak of a single universe or would it be more correct to speak of different universes?

Images: Fotolia. Marina, Ckybe