Why are we here? That's not astronomy.
How did we get here? That is astronomy.
People are curious about that, our origins
are just a wonderful, wonderful but
elusive story for us.
So I want students to understand at a reasonably solid conceptual level
what the modern model of cosmology is, the Big Bang theory.
But I also want the students to understand that the
Big Bang model is not the only story and
the idea at the end of the cours is to compare the
Big Bang model to these cultural stories
and really find out if anything is new
in the Big Bang cosmology.
I'm a professor in the Department of Classics and Bruce Balick asked me to give a presentation
in his astronomy class on the origin of the universe as seen by ancient Greeks and jumped at the opportunity.
One of the great observations that they made and they used as their metaphor for
understanding the origin of the universe
was birth. So so they using this
observation they pondered about the origin of the world and in their attempt to
explain it created an narritive of a number
of
births took place resulted in the world in which we live. A secondary goal is to bring the
universality of the universe into the
university by connecting astronomy
and things like that to
fields of study on the upper campus where the social sciences
and the humanities exist.  When you
put investigation of mythology together
with astronomy, what happens is that
allows the ancient myths to be seen for
what they were; genuine attempts at
understanding the world based on
observation. There's no downside to collaboration sharing ideas is vital to the whole
academic endeavor and you know some of these ideas in the other cultures might
enrich astronomy by dropping new ways of looking at things into the broader
discussion that's the that's where the potential is, that's what's so much fun.
