From Water World to Inflation; Humanity Faces the Universe

Abstract

From the earliest of times, human beings have asked questions about the world around us. What really is this world in which we live? What is its true nature and from whence did it come? Many and varied have been the attempts at answering these questions. Stories of universal genesis, most frequently framed in the symbolism of myth, date to the earliest stirrings of human consciousness, but the first accounts that we might recognize as scientific cosmologies and cosmogonies (i.e. theories of the nature and origin of the universe) come from a school of Greek thinkers living on the Ionian coast of what is nowadays Turkey. The man honored by today’s historians of scientific thought as deserving the title of the first known scientist was Thales of Miletus (circa 624–circa 546 bc) (Fig. 1.1).