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Lecturer: Wil Van Breugel
Lecture Title: Masks of the Cosmos: Cosmologies since the Beginning of Time
Lecture’s Central Argument: How the study of cosmology has increased our knowledge of how the universe was truly created and the steps it took to get from the age of magic to the age of science.
Lecture’s Supporting Evidence/Examples:
• Our view of the world has changed over time but we still love to think that we are at the center of it
• In every age people believe that they at last discovered the true nature of the universe
• The universe is real, but is unknowable in its entirety
• Plato …show more content…
This is because throughout the centuries/years science has helped us discover that earth is not the center of the universe and has helped change how we see life. This core Friday also reminded me of Sagan’s Can We Know the Universe because in his article he states that “to understand such a vast and complex universe, is through science,” which is pretty much what Professor Van Breugel stated in his lecture, that our view of the universe has changed over …show more content…
I was really surprised to know that even though “our view of the world has changed, we still love to think that we are at the center of it” (Breugel). I also found interesting that cosmology is perceived/viewed differently around the world and how “the emergence of agriculture and city states has helped develop more concepts of universe development” (Breugel).
After attending this lecture it reminded me of the time when my ERWC class and I got into a heated discussion about the paranormal (spirits, poltergeists, ghost) during a fishbowl. About two thirds of the class believed in the paranormal meanwhile the rest thought that it was nonsense. Those who believe in the paranormal, including myself, argued that there is such things as spirits because of previous experiences we have had in the past but also because we believe that there are some deceased who haven’t been able/ cannot pass on to the afterlife and are stuck here. Also that even though there is no scientific evidence that ‘spirits’ exist, there are ways to prove that they exist. For example, we can always conduct our own experiments/ investigations and as Sagan stated in Can We Know the Universe? “Science sometimes requires courage” (Sagan 1). But the non-believers claim that since there hasn’t been any scientific