In this video Dr. Karin Öberg, Harvard University astronomy professor and founder of The Öberg Astrochemistry Lab, offers an intriguing comparison between the Big Bang and previous cosmological models including ones from the ancient Near East, the Greeks, and the Enlightenment.
Video Transcript
If we go back to the ancient East we have a cosmos that you would recognize from Genesis, where you have sort of small flat earth and then you have an abode above.
If we fast forward to the ancient Greeks, we have a new kind of cosmos that's now centered on the earth and the earth is a globe.
In the 16th 17th century we came to realize that the earth orbited the sun. This new heliocentric cosmos was a centerpiece of the enlightenment cosmology, and they really imagined the whole universe as a clock that's been just wound up, and this is the setting when the Big Bang is first conceived.
The Big Bang cosmology is very different from any of the previous cosmologists that humans have imagined.
We live in a universe that changes in an extremely ordered way that still has many mysteries left in it, and
that also just keeps throwing surprises at us.