Modern Archaeoastronomy: From Material Culture to Cosmology

Creation, Chaos, Time : from Myth to Modern Cosmology

Every society has a story rooted in its most ancient traditions, of how the earth and sky originated. Most of these stories attribute the origin of all things to a Creator whether God, Element or Idea. We first recall that in the Western world all discussions of the origin of the world were dominated until the 18th century by the story of Genesis, which describes the Creation as an ordered proc...

Modern Cosmology and Anthropic

Abstract: The anthropic fine-tuning of the cosmos refers to the claim that the laws of nature, the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe must be set to an enormous degree of precision for life to exist. Three major responses have been offered to this fine-tuning: the multiverse explanation; theism; and the claim that it is just a brute fact that requires no further ex...

Modern Cosmology and Structure Formation

An introduction to modern cosmology is given, focusing on theories for the origin of structure in the Universe. After a brief review of the theory of growth of cosmological perturbations and a summary of some important observational results, most of the article is devoted to discussions of the inflationary Universe scenario and of topological defect models of structure formation. The final chap...

Latin Language and Latin Culture from ancient to modern times

Archaeoastronomy and Literature

We report the resolution of a long-standing controversy related to the dating of ancient Indian astronomical texts and literature. We show that the Brāhman. as, which are post-Vedic texts, cannot be later than the second millennium B.C. This means that the chronology of the Indian texts is close to the traditional dates. We sketch the stages of the earliest Indian astronomy.