Modern Cosmology

This volume addresses the history and epistemology of early modern cosmology. The authors reconstruct the development of cosmological ideas in the age of ‘scientific revolution’ from Copernicus to Leibniz, taking into account the growth of a unified celestial-and-terrestrial mechanics. The volume investigates how, in the rise of the new science, cosmology displayed deep and multifaceted interrelations between scientific notions (stemming from mechanics, mathematics, geometry, astronomy) and philosophical concepts. These were employed to frame a general picture of the universe, as well as to criticize and interpret scientific notions and observational data.

This class is an introduction to the modern extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, i.e., the part of astrophysics that deals with the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole, and its major constituents: dark matter, dark energy, galaxies, quasars, large-scale structure, and intergalactic gas.

This book describes how and why the early modern period witnessed the marginalisation of astrology in Western natural philosophy, and the re-adoption of the cosmological view of the existence of a plurality of worlds in the universe, allowing the possibility of extraterrestrial life.