{"id":1620,"date":"2016-03-17T14:51:46","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T14:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.futura-sciences.com\/e-luminet\/?p=1620"},"modified":"2016-05-08T17:59:08","modified_gmt":"2016-05-08T17:59:08","slug":"cosmogenesis-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.futura-sciences.com\/e-luminet\/2016\/03\/17\/cosmogenesis-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Cosmogenesis (2) : Chaos and Metamorphosis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sequel of the preceding post Cosmogenesis (1) : From Myth to Myth<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Chaos and Metamorphosis<\/strong><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The ancient Greeks had a great variety of myths relating to the history of the world. Although they all shared a language and a culture, each village, each tribe had its own beliefs, its own version of the Creation story and its own gods who were responsible for cosmic order.<\/p>\n

\"213
The Birth of the Gods According to Hesiod’s Theogony<\/strong> (8th-7th century BC) is a history of the gods. It begins with Gaea, goddess of the Earth, the primordial element from which all the deities emerged. By herself she gave birth to the sea and the sky as well as to the gods Uranus and Pontus; by Uranus she then mothered numerous other deities: the Titans (including Cronos) and Titanesses, the Cyclops and the Giants. The work continues with an account of how Zeus became lord of the universe after decisive battles against the Titans and against the monster Typhoeus. This story of the creation of the world out of the struggle between the forces of order (cosmos) and the forces of disorder (chaos) had a strong influence on Greek cosmological thinking.
In this illustration by Georges Braque, Hesiod is seen receiving the torch of Hebrew tradition from Moses.
Hesiod, Theogony, Paris, Maeght, 1955.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hesiod’s Theogony <\/em>(8th-7th century BC) was the first attempt to synthesize these traditions, which probably dated back to the Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations. In recounting the stages in the emergence of the gods from primordial chaos Theogony <\/em>offers an answer to the eternal questions of cosmogony: who created the world; what were the basic materials from which it was made; which came first, the gods, the stars or the elements?<\/p>\n

Not only did Theogony <\/em>have a strong influence on Greek thought, it also anticipated in many ways today’s theories of the origin of the world – particularly the idea of primordial chaos. Since the universe appears to have an ordered structure (albeit an imperfect one), it seems logical to regard the state which preceded the Creation as one of disorder and confusion. This notion has provoked greater controversy than almost any other in the history of cosmogony.<\/p>\n

Ovid’s Metamorphoses <\/em>also trawled Greek mythology, as well as Roman legend, in attempting to reconstruct the series of metamorphoses the world had undergone between the original state of Chaos and Julius Caesar’s supposed transformation into a star:<\/p>\n

“Before the sea and the lands and the sky that covers all, <\/em>
\nthere was one face of nature in her whole orb<\/em>
\n(they call it Chaos), a rough unordered mass, <\/em>
\nnothing except inactive weight and heaped together<\/em>
\nthe discordant seeds of unassembled things.”<\/em> [i]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Ovid's
Ovid’s Metamorphoses<\/strong>. In his extended poem Metamorphoses (43 BC-17 AD) Ovid collected all the Greek myths about the transformation of gods and heroes into animals, plants and rocks and constructed a history of the world from the Creation out of Chaos to the time of the emperor Augustus. The first book describes Chaos and its “metamorphosis” into the Creation under the influence of one of the gods, who isolated the elements. A combination of epic poem, world history and cosmogony, Metamorphoses belongs to a tradition dating back to Hesiod’s Theogony. The artist Hendrick Goltzius (1565-1617) was one of the leading exponents of the school of mannerism in the Netherlands. His engravings illustrate Ovid’s conception of primeval Chaos: a scene of confusion, violence and disorder, like the molod tohu of the Jews, which the Creator gradually transforms, through a series of metamorphoses, into a harmonious, peaceful and ordered world.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

According to Hesiod the world was created ex vacuo, <\/em>i.e. out of the void that existed before it, rather than ex nihilo, <\/em>out of nothing. The distinction is fundamental. The standard Christian\/Jewish interpretation of the Creation story in the Bible is that the world was created out of nothing, but the first few lines of Genesis, <\/em>the Book of Job <\/em>and the Second Book of the Maccabees <\/em>give slightly different versions of the story – a discrepancy which has led to centuries of critical commentary. There are two possible interpretations of the scriptures: one that admits the pre-existence of some formless void [ii]<\/a> and one that denies the existence of any matter before the Creation, the latter being the predominant belief in the Christian world today.<\/p>\n

\"Chaos
Chaos or the Origin of the World in the 17th century.<\/strong> In the 17th century writers and artists represented chaos as a formless, irregular and confused mass of elements (particularly fire in this illustration from The Temple of the Muses) and creatures of all kinds from which, according to the ancient philosophers, the world was created. It was therefore regarded as the first principle of the Creation and the cradle of the universe, the physical equivalent of the axiom ex nihilo nihil fit (“nothing is made from nothing”).
Le Chaos, ou l’Origine du Monde”, engraving by Picart. Paris, BNF<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Modern historians have established that the Genesis <\/em>story is a combination of two accounts written at different times. The later of these (Genesis 1 and 2, 1-4<\/em>) was written after the flight from Israel and dates from the fifth or sixth century BC. Known as an elohistic text it tells that the world was created in six days by the Elohim, the seventh day being a day of rest. The earlier account dates from between the ninth and the sixth century BC and is a jehovistic text in that it is the story of Jehovah, the God of Israel, who created man and woman to inhabit an earthly paradise (Genesis 2, 4-25<\/em>). The elohistic story echoes the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic (18th century BC), in which the Creation begins with a struggle between God the Creator (whom the Babylonians called Marduk, the Jews Jehovah) and Chaos. Like the bible story it describes the Creation as a sequence of increasingly complex developments.<\/p>\n

\"Chaos
Chaos or the Origin of the World in the XXth century. In 1988 the Russian physicist Andrei Linde suggested that in its initial state the universe was chaotic – in other words, the quantum vacuum was not at all homogeneous. According to his hypothesis many different universes were created by different types of fluctuations, each with its own physical properties, each in parallel with or embedded within the others so that no communication between them was possible. In this computer simulation of the origin of such universes, those whose early development underwent a phase of rapid expansion (“inflation”) are the most prevalent (indicated by the peaks), whereas those, like ours, which have expanded relatively slowly are less common (indicated by the throughs).
Computer simulation, @A. Linde, Stanford University<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Quantum cosmology, which is now the most sophisticated scientific method of analyzing the history of the universe, is based on the general theory of relativity and quantum physics. It is an attempt to explain in mathematical terms how the universe suddenly emerged from the “quantum vacuum”. Quite different from the traditional concept of the primeval void, the quantum vacuum is like a virtual ocean whose surface is continuously agitated by ripples of energy. These ripples can spontaneously generate pairs of particles and antiparticles, which disappear almost as soon as they appear, leaving behind a sort of bubbling brew of energy, in constant flux, called the “space-time foam”. Occasionally the ripples create particles and antiparticles which are far enough apart not to cancel each other out. This is how matter emerges from the vacuum and how our entire universe could have arisen: from an ever expanding ocean of ripples.<\/p>\n

\"Spacetime
Spacetime foam<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Ovid, Metamorphoses, <\/em>book I, translated by D. E. Hill, Aris & Phillips Bolchazy-Carducci, 1985, p. 13.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> For example St Augustine, De Genesi Contra Manichaeos, <\/em>book I, chapter iv.<\/p>\n

******************************************************************<\/p>\n

Go to next post Cosmogenesis (3) : Time and Creation<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sequel of the preceding post Cosmogenesis (1) : From Myth to Myth Chaos and Metamorphosis   The ancient Greeks had a great variety of myths relating to the history of the world. Although they all shared a language and a culture, each village, each tribe had its own beliefs, its own version of the Creation … Continue reading Cosmogenesis (2) : Chaos and Metamorphosis<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47,14],"tags":[184,188,139,183,182,187,185,186],"class_list":["post-1620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","category-history-of-science-epistemology","tag-chaos","tag-chaotic-inflation","tag-cosmogony","tag-genesis","tag-hesiod","tag-linde","tag-metamorphosis","tag-ovid"],"yoast_head":"\nCosmogenesis (2) : Chaos and Metamorphosis, by Jean-Pierre Luminet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.futura-sciences.com\/e-luminet\/2016\/03\/17\/cosmogenesis-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cosmogenesis (2) : Chaos and Metamorphosis, by Jean-Pierre Luminet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sequel of the preceding post Cosmogenesis (1) : From Myth to Myth Chaos and Metamorphosis   The ancient Greeks had a great variety of myths relating to the history of the world. 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