Abstract
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 students’ world views, 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.
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Notes
- 1.
The number of publications on cosmology grew dramatically in the 1960s, apparently an indication of the revolutionary effect caused by the standard big bang theory (Kaiser 2006, p. 447; Marx and Bornmann 2010, p. 543). However, the growth is in some respect illusory, as the number of publications in the physical and astronomical sciences as a whole grew even more rapidly. While cosmology in 1950 made up 0.4 % of the physics research papers, in 1970 the percentage had shrunk to a little less than 0.3 % (Ryan and Shepley 1976). Numerical data can be presented in many ways, sometimes resulting in opposite messages.
- 2.
See also Comins’ website on ‘Heavenly Errors’ that includes nearly 1,700 common misconceptions that students and other people have about astronomy and cosmology. Among them are that the universe has stopped expanding, that there is a centre of the universe and that all galaxies are moving away from the Earth (http://www.umephy.maine.edu/ncomins/).
- 3.
The undignified name ‘big bang’ was coined by Fred Hoyle in a BBC radio programme of 1949, but neither Hoyle nor other scientists used it widely until the late 1960s. Contrary to what is often said (e.g. Marx and Bornmann 2010, p. 454), the phrase did not catch on either among supporters or opponents of the exploding universe. Hoyle belonged to the latter category, and it generally thought that he coined the name as a way of ridiculing the theory, but this is hardly the case. The first scientific paper with ‘big bang’ in its title appeared only in 1966.
- 4.
The classical steady state theory was abandoned half a century ago and for this reason is mainly of historical interest. On the other hand, from a methodological and also an educational point of view, it is an instructive example of how an attractive theory with great predictive power was eventually shot down by new observations. In addition, it illustrates the aesthetic and emotional appeal of a cosmological theory, a phenomenon which is not restricted to the past. While Kuhn (1998, p. 555) covers the essence of the steady state theory, other textbook authors choose to ignore it (Krauskopf and Beiser 2000).
- 5.
It is far from obvious that the symbol t, as it appears in the equations describing the very early universe near or before the Planck time t = 10−43 s, can be ascribed a well-defined physical meaning (Rugh and Zinkernagel 2009). The meaning of time is even less clear in theories of quantum cosmology describing the hypothetical universe before t = 0. The claim that there was a universe ‘before’ ours seems to presuppose a common measure of time in the two universes.
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Kragh, H. (2014). The Science of the Universe: Cosmology and Science Education. In: Matthews, M. (eds) International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7654-8_20
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