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• T.S. Eliot: 'We shall never cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.'
• Cosmogony


  The study of the universe as an ordered system
• The Greeks were struck by the general regularity of the motion of the stars
• The Greeks tried to fit the "sky wanderers" or planets into the universal order that prevailed
• Cosmology


  The study of the present cosmos to the origin of the cosmos
• The Greeks were the first to consider what they saw in the light of more basic assumptions - that human beings can know the heavens, chart the stars follow regular motions, that they follow laws that can be comprehended by the human brain
• The Greeks realised the cosmos was orderly and human reason could reason out this order
• The idea that the human brain could understand the Universe was not a surprise to a culture that celebrated the human Son of God every year
• Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler were both scientists and religious in their worldview
• Newton reasoned that the same force of gravity that he discovered to be operative on Earth was the operative throughout the universe
• Astronomers have always been interested in new ways of capturing spectrum ranges beyond visible light and have designed various devices to do just that
• Radio astronomy helped scientists find out a great deal more about the heavenly bodies and unlocked the current understanding of the Big Picture
• Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found that the signal of radio transmission was coming from all directions in the sky, indicating an evenly distributed weak source
• Edwin Hubble discovered that the cloudy objects seen through telescopes were not clouds but galaxies millions of light-years away, and that almost all of them were moving away from the Earth
• Hubble's Law states that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving
• The implications of Hubble's Law led astronomers to speculate that there was an initial moment when all the galaxies, or at least the matter and/or energy they are made from, were together at one point in space and at the one initial point in time, which they referred to as the "Big Bang"
• Space-time


  The mathematical formulation of the Theory of General Relativity of Albert Einstein, where space is modelled as a four-dimensional manifold that is twisted and bent in accord with the amount of matter or energy that it contains
• The expansion of the space-time manifold carries the galaxies and all material reality with it, causing the galaxies to move apart from each other as described by Hubble's Law
• Cosmologists have determined that only three possible shapes for the space-time manifold are possible: spherical, saddle-shaped, or flat
• Cosmologists wanted to know why the cosmos, at its furthest, appears to be homogeneous
• We can determine the shape of the universe if we knew the amount of matter
• Cosmologists have tried to determine the amount of matter in the Universe
• Possible shapes for the space-time manifold

  • Spherical universe
  • Saddle-shaped universe
  • Flat universe
• The shape of the universe depends on the amount of energy-matter
• The Inflation Theory postulates that the cosmos should be flat
• Inflation Theory


  Theory that the Universe expanded extremely quickly near its beginning and then settled down thereafter, creating a homogenous and flat universe
• 1. ray astronomy was only possible when satellite technology had developed far enough to allow large telescopes to be placed in space
• 1. ray telescopes collected the X-rays coming from the stars, which were coming from more energetic sources than ordinary stars or from ordinary stars that were very far away
• The Hubble Space Telescope, X-ray Space Telescope, and Boomerang Infrared device were used to study the Cosmic Background Radiation and confirm the predictions of the Inflation Theory
• The Hubble telescope and X-ray telescope discovered that the universe is not only flat, but also accelerating, due to the existence of "dark energy"
• "Dark matter" is matter that cannot be seen or detected directly, but whose existence is inferred from its gravitational effects
• The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe determined that dark matter and dark energy make up 23.3% and 72.1% of the universe respectively, and that the universe is 13.73 billion years old
• The attempts to see the universe in a new light have opened doors to more of the unknown
• In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is one of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary.
• We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.
• Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology.
• The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.
• We shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it.
• Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.
• We are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.