History of Cosmology/Talk

	Revision 8 . . September 27, 2001 8:59 am by (logged).64.83.xxx
	Revision 7 . . May 22, 2001 10:53 pm by Larry Sanger

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The origins of such words as "cosmology" should not be dated from its first appearance in English but from its first appearance by educated people (whose jargon and names for theories and such are often variants of the same basic, usually Latin or Greek, words). Anyway, though, today, the word is just used differently by different people; nothing unusual about that. I'd just emphasize that the fact that the physicists use the term in one particular way gives us no reason whatever to suppose that their usage is the "correct" one. There is no single correct usage, it seems. --LMS

The origins of such words as "cosmology" should not be dated from its first appearance in English but from its first appearance by educated people (whose jargon and names for theories and such are often variants of the same basic, usually Latin or Greek, words). Anyway, though, today, the word is just used differently by different people; nothing unusual about that. I'd just emphasize that the fact that the physicists use the term in one particular way gives us no reason whatever to suppose that their usage is the "correct" one. There is no single correct usage, it seems. --LMS Maybe there should be headings: "physical cosmology", "philosophical cosmology", etc.? Right now "dark matter" is next to "creationism"... -- S. Winitzki