The term cosmography has two distinct meanings: traditionally it has been the protoscience of mapping the general features of the

cosmos The cosmos (, ) is another name for the Universe. Using the word ''cosmos'' implies viewing the universe as a complex and orderly system or entity. The cosmos, and understandings of the reasons for its existence and significance, are studied in ...

heaven Heaven or the heavens, is a common religious cosmological or transcendent supernatural place where beings such as deities, angels, souls, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or reside. According to the bel ...

and

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surf ...

; more recently, it has been used to describe the ongoing effort to determine the large-scale features of the

observable universe The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because the electromagnetic radiation from these obj ...

Traditional usage

The 14th-century work ''

'Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa-ghara'ib al-mawjudat Aja'ib al-Makhluqat wa Ghara'ib al-Mawjudat'', ( ar, عجائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات, meaning ''The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation'') is an important work of cosmography by Zakariya al-Qazwini, who ...

'' by Persian physician

Zakariya al-Qazwini Zakariyya' al-Qazwini ( , ar, أبو يحيى زكرياء بن محمد بن محمود القزويني), also known as Qazvini ( fa, قزوینی), born in Qazvin (Iran) and died 1283, was a Persian cosmographer and geographer of Arab anc ...

is considered to be an early work of cosmography. Traditional Hindu,

Buddhist Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...

and

Jain Jainism ( ), also known as Jain Dharma, is an Indian religion. Jainism traces its spiritual ideas and history through the succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (supreme preachers of ''Dharma''), with the first in the current time cycle being ...

cosmography schematize a universe centered on

Mount Meru Mount Meru ( Sanskrit/ Pali: मेरु), also known as Sumeru, Sineru or Mahāmeru, is the sacred five-peaked mountain of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist cosmology and is considered to be the centre of all the physical, metaphysical and sp ...

surrounded by rivers, continents and seas. These cosmographies posit a universe being repeatedly created and destroyed over time cycles of immense lengths. Peasants spinning

In 1551,

Martín Cortés de Albacar Martín Cortés de Albacar (1510–1582) was a Spanish cosmographer.p131 Antonio Barrera-Osorio ''Experiencing nature: the Spanish American empire and the early scientific revolution;'' University of Texas Press, 2006 In 1551 he published the s ...

, from

Zaragoza Zaragoza, also known in English as Saragossa,''Encyclopædia Britannica'"Zaragoza (conventional Saragossa)" is the capital city of the Zaragoza Province and of the autonomous community of Aragon, Spain. It lies by the Ebro river and its tribut ...

, Spain, published ''

Breve compendio de la esfera y del arte de navegar A breve (, less often , neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (the wedge or in Czech, in S ...

''. Translated into English and reprinted several times, the work was of great influence in Britain for many years. He proposed spherical charts and mentioned magnetic deviation and the existence of magnetic poles. Peter Heylin's 1652 book ''Cosmographie'' (enlarged from his ''Microcosmos'' of 1621) was one of the earliest attempts to describe the entire world in English, and being the first known description of Australia and among the first of

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

. The book has 4 sections, examining the geography, politics, and cultures of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with an addendum on '' Terra Incognita'', including Australia, and extending to

Utopia A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book '' Utopia'', describing a fictional island socie ...

, Fairyland, and the "Land of Chivalrie". In 1659, Thomas Porter published a smaller, but extensive ''Compendious Description of the Whole World'', which also included a

chronology Chronology (from Latin ''chronologia'', from Ancient Greek , ''chrónos'', "time"; and , '' -logia'') is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. ...

of world events from

Creation Creation may refer to: Religion *'' Creatio ex nihilo'', the concept that matter was created by God out of nothing *Creation myth, a religious story of the origin of the world and how people first came to inhabit it *Creationism, the belief that ...

forward. These were all part of a major trend in the European Renaissance to explore (and perhaps comprehend) the known world.

Modern usage

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the he ...

, the term "cosmography" is beginning to be used to describe attempts to determine the large-scale

matter distribution In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic par ...

and kinematics of the

, dependent on the

Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric The Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW; ) metric is a metric based on the exact solution of Einstein's field equations of general relativity; it describes a homogeneous, isotropic, expanding (or otherwise, contracting) universe ...

but independent of the temporal dependence of the scale factor on the matter/energy composition of the Universe. In recent decades, an acceleration in the expansion of the Universe has been observed. Several dynamic mechanisms have been proposed to explain this otherwise mysterious phenomenon. These include modified gravity and dark energy. Many observations focus on the high-redshift region. For example, the supernova in a joint light-curve analysis (JLA) compilation can span the redshift region up to 1.3; the cosmic microwave background (CMB) even can retrospect to the very early universe at z ~ 1100. To legitimate the expansion at high redshift, they introduced an improved redshift parametrization y = z/(1 + z) cosmography in the y-based expansion is mathematically safe and useful, because of 0 < y < 1, even for the high redshift. Later, some other methods of redshift were also proposed The word was also commonly used by

Buckminster Fuller Richard Buckminster Fuller (; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing m ...

in his lectures.

References

{{Portal bar, Astronomy, Space Physical cosmology

Traditional usage

Modern usage

See also

References