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How science, so that we in this area is a description of the universe, a picture of the universe as a whole.  The universe itself is an ancient attempts to understand the world and to make up for the observation and speculation, grounded in symbolic stories and rituals. Until 100 years ago, that the universe of those lying outside the scope of science. Of course, people guess whether there is a beginning of the universe (as the causes of the book may also be considered implied), or whether it is sustained, and will last forever (as many philosophers and scientists believe), or whether it (as some East cosmologies proposal) process cycle, and become a prospering, as a living organism, in addition to it forever.           Whence the Universe?     According to modern science the universe we live in began in an eruption of primordial fire which flowed and foamed in a massive expansion creating all space, time and matter. The hot, dense furnace which became our universe came from nowhere between ten and twenty billion years ago. Nearly everything important happened in the first three minutes of its existence. It is still working out the consequences of its beginning. The conditions for the structure of matter, the evolution of galaxies and stars and the development of life (our life, as well as all life) were laid down in the very first moments.   What science gives us in this description is a cosmology, a picture of the universe as a whole. Cosmology is itself an ancient attempt to know the world, made up of observation and speculation, grounded in symbolic stories and rituals. Until a hundred years ago the issues of cosmology were thought to lie beyond the scope of science. Of course people speculated about whether the universe had a beginning (as the book of Genesis might be seen to imply), or whether it had lasted and would last for ever (as many philosophers and scientists believed), or whether it was (as some oriental cosmologies suggested) a cyclical process of becoming and perishing, like a living organism, except that it went on forever.   But scientists did not foresee that there would be theories and observations which might be able to answer some of these questions. It was widely doubted that we would ever even know what the stars were made of, or what made them shine, or why the night sky was black between the stars, let alone how old universe was and whether it had a beginning or an end. Only since the 1920s has it been possible to begin to develop scientific cosmologies grounded in the discoveries of physics and astronomy. Only in the last forty years has a cosmology begun to emerge which scientists are able to check with experiment.   ... The modern account of our universe is incomplete, but it has begun. Unlike earlier cosmologies, the story that is emerging is subject to passionate debate and disagreement. Some of the outstanding issues may never be settled. Nevertheless, there is a considerable amount that we can now say that we know about the origins and nature of our universe. Unlike earlier cosmologies, the emerging scientific one does not belong to one race or culture or religion. It is the same in Tokyo as it is in Chicago, in Adelaide as in Argentina. It belongs to everyone who has access to scientific ideas. That means everyone who is being seriously educated at the end of this century and into the next. That is not to say that all the details of the account are agreed on, or that all the mechanisms by which one phase passed into another are understood, or that there are not some big unresolved issues concerning the data behind this account. But nearly all scientists agree that the universe we live in has developed from a hot dense state in which everything was a fierce soup of primitive matter and radiation. Our universe seems to be one that has a history, a biography, a beginning and a middle and maybe an end.   ... The universe is an astonishing fact. It is extraordinary to discover in the years that lead up to the millennium, that the world, the whole planet, really does have a common cosmology, a shared account of how we came into existence and where we fit in the scheme of things. All this is new. It requires scientists to look at the big picture as well as the small; to relate their investigations to a holistic view of nature and our place within it.           — Angela Tilby, Soul: God, Self and New Cosmology                     Indexes/14