Compared with their cosmologist colleagues, cosmogonists can sound a tad old-fashioned. Edgar Allen Poe turned to the mysteries of cosmogony in an 1848 public lecture, just reprinted by Hesperus Press. And we encountered a reference to cosmogonists most recently in a new edition of Poe’s prose poem Eureka.
What’s the difference between cosmologists and cosmogonists? Just two letters and a few billion light years. Cosmologists worry about where the Universe came from, cosmogonists with how the Solar System formed. The interesting thing is that one-and-a-half centuries after Poe, they still can’t reach agreement on what happened in the nearest 5 light years of space.…
