» General Space Information
In our time, every educated person needs to know what space is and have an understanding of the processes occurring within it.
Before proceeding to the exposition of modern ideas about space, let us clarify the meaning of the word "cosmos".
"Cosmos" in Greek means order, structure, harmony (in general, something ordered).
The philosophers of Ancient Greece understood the word "cosmos" as the Universe, considering it as an ordered harmonious system. The cosmos was contrasted with disorder, chaos. For the ancient Greeks, the concepts of order and beauty in natural phenomena were closely related. This point of view persisted in philosophy and science for a long time; it is no coincidence that even Copernicus believed that the orbits of the planets must be circles simply because a circle is more beautiful than an ellipse.
Initially, the concept of "cosmos" included not only the world of celestial bodies, but also everything we encounter on the surface of the Earth. The famous 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt created a fundamental work, "Cosmos" (5 volumes, 1845-62), which summarized everything that was known about nature at that time.
