Cosmology
/kɒzˈmɒlədʒi/noun
The science of the universe's origin, structure and fate.
The Greek roots
Literally: “study of the ordered whole”
The story of the word
κόσμος meant order and arrangement long before it meant the universe, which is why the same noun gives cosmetic, the ordering of a face. Ancient tradition credits Pythagoras with the transfer, calling the whole world a kosmos because it is arranged rather than chaotic. Cosmology appears in English in the 1650s as a branch of speculative philosophy, and turned into an observational science only in the 1920s, when Hubble showed that the faint spirals are other galaxies and that they are receding.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1650s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Modern cosmology can date the cosmic microwave background to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.