Cosmology "refers to the study of the cosmos(relating it to a society's view of the universe" (Bergeron, 1992). Although ancient cultures were dependent upon pre-technological modes of exploring the universe and trying to understand it, by the time the great scientific thinkers such as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein were born, they were able to piece together a concept of the concept through logic and mathematics. As Bergeron (1992) puts it, thanks to them, "we have been able to advance from a geocentric, isolated snapshot of our heavens to an astounding, complex, intriguing tapestry of the full cosmos." Bergeron (1992) includes Stephen Hawking among modern scientific thinkers and sees today's cosmology as "a complex arrangement of theories and observations, of equations and hypotheses...built on the backs of the most intelligent minds this world has seen, describing for us the things that confounded our ancestors for centuries upon centuries."
The Big Bang Theory is the theory put forth by modern scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose asserting that 10 to 20 billion years ago, the universe's matter was very dense and small and "the curvature of space-time was infinite" (Shipper, n.d.). Shipper (n.d.) notes that "At such a point, the general theory of relativity breaks down, according to its own principles, and all the laws of science known to man today break down with it," a condition that scientists refer to as "a singularity." No mathematical or physical laws apply there, and prediction becomes impossible (Shipper, n.d.). At some point, however, the universe began expanding rapidly (Shipper, n.d.). Some scientists conceive this expansion as starting with a "big bang," or explosion, that somehow brought together molecules that produced life. John Gribbin (1999, p. 77) describes the Big Bang as "the outburst in which the universe was born." When Penzias and Wilson in 1964 conducted an experiment...