- Cosmology (from Ancient Greek κόσμος (cosmos) ’the universe, the world’, and λογία (logia) ‘study of’) is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe, the cosmos. The term cosmology was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher Christian Wolff, in Cosmologia Generalis. Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation myths and eschatology. In the science of astronomy, cosmology is concerned with the study of the chronology of the universe.
- John M. Pinch, 83, of 2005 Barclay St., Maplewood, Minn., formerly of Dubuque and Epworth, Iowa, died Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at Pillars Hospice Home, Maplewood.