Abstract

Where do we come from? Where are we going? In all ages, people have wondered about their destiny and their origins, and it seemed to them that knowing more about their past would allow them, at the same time, to know more about their future. The poetry of origins was intertwined with blind gropings, then with decisive steps forward in science. With the starry sky above them, the learned and the unlearned allowed themselves to be carried away by the same metaphysical anguish in which space and time took the principal roles. We had to wait a very long time until science finally taught us a little more on the birth of the universe and of thought. Sometimes, on more than one point, science resembled primitive mythologies passed on through the darkness of time.