Nature of the Universe

Catalog description

This course, intended for non-science majors, reviews the scientific field of cosmology, or the nature of the physical universe, from a historical perspective. Beginning with the ancients, the course traces the development of cosmological principles through the Greek and Egyptian era of Aristotle, C. Ptolemy, and others; the 16th and 17th centuries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton; and the cosmology of the 20th century based upon Einstein's theories of relativity coupled with several fundamental observations. This leads to an examination of the current model of the universe, which is based upon the Big Bang theory.