Cosmology is the academic discipline that seeks to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order. Modern cosmology is dominated by the Big Bang theory, which brings together observational astronomy and particle physics.
Although the word cosmology is recent (first used in 1730 in Christian Wolff's Cosmologia Generalis), the study of the universe has a long history involving science, philosophy, esotericism and religion. Related studies include cosmogony, which focuses on the origin of the Universe, and cosmography, which maps the features of the Universe. Cosmology is also connected to astronomy. However, they are contrasted in that while the former is concerned with the Universe in its entirety, the latter deals with individual celestial objects.
In recent times, physics and astrophysics have played a central role in shaping the understanding of the universe through scientific observation and experiment. What is known as physical cosmology shaped through both mathematics and observation the analysis of the whole universe. It is generally understood to begin with the Big Bang, followed almost instantaneously by cosmic inflation - an expansion of space from which the universe is thought to have emerged ~13.7±0.2×109 (roughly 13.5–13.9 billion) years ago.
Alan Harvey Guth (born February 27, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). Currently serving as Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is the originator of the inflationary universe theory.
He graduated from MIT in 1968 in physics and stayed to receive a master's and a doctorate, also in physics.
As a junior particle physicist, Guth first developed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1979 at Cornell and gave his first seminar on the subject in January 1980. Moving on to Stanford University Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1981, the idea that the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion that was driven by a positive vacuum energy density (negative vacuum pressure). The results of the WMAP mission in 2006 made the case for cosmic inflation very compelling.
Alan Guth was born on February 27, 1947 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After his junior year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he enrolled in a five-year program where he could get his bachelor’s and master’s after two more years. Guth obtained a bachelor’s and master’s degree in 1969 and a doctorate in 1972. In 1971, he married Susan Tisch, his high school sweetheart. They have two children: Lawrence (born 1977) and Jennifer (born 1983).
Howard Bloom (born June 25, 1943) is an American author. He was a publicist in the 1970s and 1980s for singers and bands such as Prince,Billy Joel, and Styx. In 1988 he became disabled with chronic fatigue syndrome. Since then he has published three books on human evolution and group behavior, The Genius of the Beast, The Global Brain and The Lucifer Principle, which are informed by his ideas about what underlies the success of major rock and roll artists.
Bloom was born in Buffalo, New York to a Jewish family. He began his interest in science as early as ten years old, becoming fascinated in cosmology and microbiology, and at the age of twelve won the Westinghouse Science Award for his design with computers. By sixteen, Bloom was working as an assistant researching the immune system, at the world's largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute. Bloom graduated from New York University and at the age of twenty-five, veered from his scientific studies to work as an editor for a rock magazine. Bloom would go on to found the largest P.R. firm in the music industry.
William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949) is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, and the defense of Christian theism. One of his most notable contributions to the philosophy of religion is his defense of the Kalām cosmological argument, which is the most widely discussed argument for the existence of God in contemporary Western philosophy. In theology, he has also defended Molinism and the belief that God is, since Creation, subject to time.
Craig has authored or edited over 30 books, including The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (1980), Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (with Quentin Smith, 1993), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (with J.P. Moreland, 2003) and Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (3d edition, 2008).
Craig received a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1971 and two summa cum laude master's degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1975, in philosophy of religion and ecclesiastical history. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, England in 1977 and a Th.D. under Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich in 1984.
William Lane (6 September 1861 – 26 August 1917) was a journalist, advocate of Australian labour politics and a utopian.
Lane was born in Bristol, England, eldest son of James Lane, from Ireland a Protestant Master Gardener, and his English wife Caroline, née Hall. When Lane was born his father was earning a miserable wage, but later his circumstances improved and he became an employer. The boy was educated at Bristol Grammar School and showed ability, but he was sent early to work as an office boy. Lane's mother died when he was 14 years of age, and at age 16 he migrated to Canada, then to the United States, where he worked first as a printer, then as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press (1881), there meeting his future wife Ann MacGuire. In 1885 they migrated to Brisbane, Australia, where Lane immediately got work as a feature writer for the weekly newspaper Queensland Figaro, then as a columnist for the newspapers Brisbane Courier and Evening Telegraph, using a number of pseudonyms ("Lucinda Sharpe", which some consider to be the work of Annie Lane, William Wilcher and "Sketcher").