1998 Bonestell Lecture presented by Dr. Kai Woehler

Stories about the origin of the world have been told and recorded since 5000 years back. The early mythologies and allegorical images were eventually subjected to the scrutiny of critical thought by the Greek philosophers 2500 years ago. They held the belief, that the world and the processes in it are understandable. The era of science, beginning with the Renaissance has uncovered the FUNDAMENTAL LAWS that govern physical processes which means that observed REGULARITIES in processes in our world were codified. Concepts were extracted from the observations which could be connected in meaningful sentences the words of which could be mapped to geometric-mathematical quantities, allowing quantitative description of the processes and their underlying structures, that could be compared with observational quantitative facts.

COSMOLOGY, the science of the Cosmos as a whole began with the discovery of the cosmic expansion by Edwin Hubble in 1929. Since then there has been a rapid evolution of models and observational facts, providing a deeper insight into the nature and structure of the physical UNIVERSE. Most recently there has been an auspicious convergence of many different avenues of scientific search into the nature of our cosmos, a coming together of many discoveries by a large number of scientists from a wide spectrum of physics and astronomy. This convergence makes it now possible to give a science based conjecture, telling a coherent story about the mechanisms that underlie the ORIGIN of our UNIVERSE.

In this lecture a report is given about the fundamental ideas as they now appear in the scientific literature that make up this story.

EINSTEIN'S UNIVERSE
About the Big Bang and Black Holes
THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF MATTER AND FORCES
About Elementary Particles and Forces
SYMMETRIES - PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN
About the Search for the Holy Grail--The Theory of Everything
STRINGS AND STRINGY SPACE
About Hidden Dimensions
OUR UNIVERSE--A VERY SPECIAL PLACE
About Worlds Hospitable to Life
THE MULTIVERSE
About the Origin by Natural Selection
CONCLUSION

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