memnoncg Posted October 28, 2002 Report Posted October 28, 2002 I am a student facing a term paper for an evolutionary philosophy class and I'm quite interested in doing it on cosmology. However, i am a biologist with little to no knowledge of this subject and am having extreme difficulty with coming up with a problem or topic to pursue. The paper has to be around 15 pages in length. You folks seem to have extensive knowledge in this field and I thought you may be capable of helping me come up with a cosmological problem to attack. I thought about consulting sources by Milton Munitz and Steven Weinberg, but again i really have no clue where to start. Any ideas for a nice provocative question???? Thank you all for your time and help. Quote
Tormod Posted October 29, 2002 Report Posted October 29, 2002 memnoncg, what level are you at? College? Steven Weinberg is certainly an interesting person, and one of the first writers I ever encountered. His book, The First Three Minutes, was a landmark in cosmology. Weinberg autobiography for the Nobel Prize I have never read any books by Milton Munitz, but his ideas are certainly interesting. I suggest you try to look closer at his thoughts about the origins of the Universe and come up with a single issue to concentrate on. Example of topics could be:- is the Universe finite/infinite? What are current thoughts and do we have any "proof" of either?-what is the topology (ie, shape) of the Universe? Why?-why is Earth located in the middle of the observable Universe? What does this tell us about the Big Bang and the expansion rate of the Universe? In October there was a special issue of Scientific American which was all about the Cosmos. There are lots of excellent articles which should give you plenty of background. You can buy the entire issue online (I did) and download each article as PDF files. Scientific American I found a book by Ernest Sternberg quite interesting. He suggest that before the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of only a single electron and a single positron, orbiting each other. These split, and then there was another split, and so on, until the density of the Universe caused the Big Bang. (So a kind of evolutionary theory, then). I have written a review of his book here at Hypography. Feel free to come up with other ideas and don't hesitate to ask for assistance. You should also be able to find quite a few ideas in these forums. Quote
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