2012/02/03 by Ram Brustein, Brustein, Ram, Judy Kupferman +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) #astro-ph.CO #physics.pop-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1202.0623
12 pages, based on a talk at the conference "Origin of Life - Scientific, Historical, and Philosophical Perspectives" at Ben-Gurion University, Israel and on other public lectures
arxiv created 2012/02/03 · arxiv updated 2012/02/13
How was the world created? People have asked this ever since they could ask anything, and answers have come from all sides: from religion, tradition, philosophy, mysticism... and science. While this does not seem like a problem amenable to scientific measurement, it has led scientists to come up with fascinating ideas and observations: the Big Bang, the concept of inflation, the fact that most of the world is made up of dark matter and dark energy which we can not perceive, and more. Of course scientists cannot claim to know the definitive truth. But we can approach the question from a scientific viewpoint and see what we find out. How do we do that? First, we look to the data. Thanks to modern technology, we have much more information than did people of previous ages who asked the same question. Then we can use scientific methods and techniques to analyze the data, organize them in a coherent way and try and extract an answer. This process and its main findings will be described in the article.