Cosmology and Science Education: Problems and Promises

Cosmology differs in some respects significantly from other sciences, primarily because of its intimate association with issues of a conceptual and philosophical nature. Because cosmology in the broader sense relates to the world views held by students, it provides a means for bridging the gap between the teaching of science and the teaching of humanistic subjects. Students should of course learn to distinguish between what is right and wrong about the science of the universe. No less importantly, they should learn to recognize the limits of science and that there are questions about nature that may forever remain unanswered. Cosmology, more than any other science, is well suited to illuminate issues of this kind.Comment: 37 page

Historical Aspects of Post-1850 Cosmology

Cosmology as an exact physical science is of new date, but it has long roots in the past. This essay is concerned with four important themes in the history of cosmological thought which, if taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive account of some of the key developments that have led to the modern understanding of the universe. Apart from the first section, dealing with early views of curved space, it focuses on mainstream cosmology from the expanding universe about 1930 to the emergence of the standard big bang model in the 1960s. This development includes theories we would not today consider "mainstream," such as the steady state model of the universe. The last section outlines what might be called the prehistory of the concept of dark energy, that is, ideas that were discussed before dark energy was actually inferred from supernovae observations in the late 1990s.Comment: 22 pages; Lectures at XVIII Special Courses at Observatorio Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2013. AIP Proceedings (in press

On Arthur Eddington's Theory of Everything

From 1929 to his death in 1944, A. Eddington worked on developing a highly ambitious theory of fundamental physics that covered everything in the physical world, from the tiny electron to the universe at large. His unfinished theory included abstract mathematics and spiritual philosophy in a mix which was peculiar to Eddington but hardly intelligible to other scientists. The constants of nature, which he claimed to be able to deduce purely theoretically, were of particular significance to his project. Although highly original, Eddington's attempt to provide physics with a new foundation had to some extent parallels in the ideas of other British physicists, including P. Dirac and E. A. Milne. Eddington's project was however a grand failure in so far that it was rejected by the large majority of physicists. A major reason was his unorthodox view of quantum mechanics.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure