We want to welcome you to this course because this is a 35 year project. It was 10 years actually even in making the film. But we want to give you some background to this course as we launch it this week. Philosophical and religious cosmology is the basic way that humans have oriented and grounded and nurtured and transformed themselves. If we take just orienting to the cosmos, we know we have powerful stories from indigenous peoples, but from Plato's Timaeus where the whole universe was seen as a living universe. And something like the Confucian cosmology of a triad of heaven, Earth and human was deeply inspiring for the peoples of East Asia, that humans completed the universe, the stars, and the galaxies and the Earth systems. But humans were very deeply connected to it. That's a cosmology of orienting to the cosmos in Confucianism. >> And human groundings. Similarly, we find these powerful stories in the Navajo Dineh traditions in southwest of the United States. The sense of four sacred mountains and how those four sacred mountains then appear literally as pilings of sand in the famous sand paintings connected with the chant ways. And the sand from these image to mountains is then rubbed on the patients. So the sense of embodying the placement in the grounded world throughout human history, then, this relationship with place and grounding in place is really very powerful. >> Indeed, and as well these cosmologies gave humans away of nurturing with food and water both physically and symbolically. So all religious traditions have these great ceremonies of, for example, the Jewish tradition of the Seder gathering the family, breaking the bread, pouring this wine and sharing this meal. And very similarly, clearly in the Christian tradition, the Eucharist with bread and wine as central to a weekly ceremony, whether in the Mass or in other forms of Eucharistic bread-breaking. The Ramadan whole notion of fasting from food until the evening. And then at the very end of it, having a celebration that brings in the power of food and water to nurture the human in this long journey. >> Yes, similarly, symbols of transformation or transforming through symbols in the religious traditions, just to consider the image of the sun. And that possibility of the illumination of the Sun in so many religious traditions. And connected then with this basic teaching again of emptiness. That the tranquility of the statues activates a transforming experience of emptiness. >> Everywhere through Asia you look at the Buddhist statues and you feel that sense of liberation and of calm. So we come then to the Modern period and we have cosmology and the scientific revolution from the 16th century moving forward. And what we want to illustrate here, then, is there's a movement from an understanding of how we're oriented from a Cosmos to a Cosmogenesis, to change over time. And this is an exciting journey that we wanted to share here. We know it, but we need to draw it in for the power and the sense of challenge for the human. >> And it's also appropriate to acknowledge that many cultural traditions, for example, the Navajo and Dineh they have a dynamic sense of the universe. But this transition in the scientific cosmology to, as you say, cosmogenesis or developmental time, is very interesting development, and very important for this Journey of the Universe project. >> Exactly. So we begin with Copernicus, with this revolutionary discovery that the Earth is not the center of the universe, that the sun is. We're still trying to take that in in certain ways. We can say the Copernican revolution is the beginning of a new understanding of where we are in the cosmos, de-centering the Earth and the human. >> And the multi-layered dimension. You can feel it very strongly in the story of Galileo Galilei who, again, ratchets forward this whole sense of developmental time by his observational work with telescopes that supported Copernicus' understanding of a sun-centered cosmology. And so Galileo moves forward that whole sense of observational empirical science. >> And as we know, was very much challenged by the church on this. So the challenge to traditional cosmologies was enormous. >> Yes. >> And it still is. And Galileo suffered house arrest for that. But Kepler as well was a person who wanted to understand how did planets move? What were these elliptical movements. So the laws of planetary movement that Kepler has contributed to our understanding of our solar system is astonishing, really. >> And the sense of Kepler's attunement to a deep harmony in the universe affected people like Isaac Newton who, also his alchemical background, so deeply spiritual, one might say religious orientation, was hand in hand with an emerging sense of mathematical equations as providing insight into the workings of the universe. So that this sense of being able to formulate laws that allowed predictability gave rise after Newton to this new metaphor which stands in some tension with story. But it's a very interesting dynamic of the mechanical universe, so laws of a mechanical universe which Newton was able to put forward. >> And then we move to the great revolution of the 19th century of Darwin, of the movement through time, but now geological time, Earth time, biological time. This notion that we are part of a changing earth system was stunning for humans to really begin to grasp the revolution of Evolution. And that is still something we're grappling with, and the tensions between religion and science over evolution are widespread in this country, although not necessarily in other parts of the world. But Darwin himself struggled with what does this mean for belief. What does it mean for a sense of a creator and so on. In this course we'll not certainly solve or resolve these kinds of tensions, but it will explore what it means for humans to situate themselves in a vast, evolving universe, with the physics of the early universe, and the systems from Copernicus onward to a sense of what is our role in the 13.8 billion year unfolding universe story. >> One of the interesting stories in this regard is the person of Albert Einstein who's thought experiments also resonate with the imaginative quality of story And so Einstein was able to image himself into questions of the relationship of space-time, which had incredible ripple effect on our understanding of the world in the West. And so this emerging worldview associated with relativity, and brings Einstein even to the doorstep of the quantum world. And Einstein himself lived with the uncertainty of his own equations and his own work in terms of this emerging sense of a developmental world in flux. >> And Einstein had a marvelous sense of the mystery and the vastness of what we were living in. And that sense, that challenge to all of us, well, it's much larger than we thought. Where do we fit in? For some, it gives a sense we're kind of very small in the cosmos. But we're trying to suggest no, this connects us to all of these emerging and unfolding processes. But we want to just come back to what's happening now for a search for an integrated story with all of the science now beginning to be absorbed by a much larger audience. And so we have from Ed Wilson at Harvard. He began this term actually Epic of Evolution recognizing that humans needed a way to feel a part of this. Cosmic Evolution is another term Eric Chaisson has been using, and teaches a course at Harvard on this. Its quite popular. Again, how humans can find their way to the future by understanding the past. And then we have a movement in history called Big History that David Christian from Australia has been leading. And he's trying to come at it from the historian's point of view and say we can't tell human history without the history of the universe and Earth. So this is also an exciting development. All of these are beginning to filter into both secondary and college education in North America and around the world. And once again, this is how Universe Story fits into a larger discussion of a story. This, again, is the 1992 version. And then almost 20 years later we have brought forward this Journey of the Universe and integrating story. And our hope is to join together in conversation, science and humanities. So we welcome you to this course and we're delighted to be on the journey of journey with you all. [MUSIC]
