Philosophy and The Sciences: Conclusions

Philosophy and the Sciences
Transcript for lecture 2.5
Conclusions
Michela Massimi and John Peacock
So to conclude, in this session we have seen how for centuries cosmology
was regarded as a branch of philosophy rather than a science. In the 18th
century the Kant-Leplace Nebular hypothesis was one of the very first
attempts at a scientific explanation of the origin of our universe. Cosmology
faces three distinct methodological problems as a science. First, whether
our current laws apply to the origin of our universe. Second, the uniqueness
of its subject of study, and third, the unobservability of large portions of our
universe.
But although we can't see all of the universe, we've seen enough of it by
now to know it is very uniform in its large scale properties. This is possible
because of the general red shifting of galaxies, first measured by Slipher,
from about 1913. And via Hubble's law, those redshifts increase with
distance, so we're able to make three dimensional maps of the universe in
this way. But theory played an important part in the establishment of the
expanding universe. In 1917, Einstein had introduced into his theory of
gravity the idea of the cosmological constant; something that today we call
dark energy equivalent to the density of empty space, and, how this can
produce an accelerating expansion. Very quickly De Sitter, produced the
first expanding model of the universe in which Hubble's law was predicted.
And in fact many astronomers, try to find this prediction. But the full
understanding of the expanding universe, came only in 1922with a Soviet
cosmologist Friedmann. He solved Einstein's equations in their general
form containing both dark energy, ordinary matter and radiation. The
conclusion he reached was an astonishing one, that such expanding
universes couldn't have lived forever, they must have emerged from a finite
time in the past from a state of infinite density, what we calla singularity, or
today the Big Bang. But as we know today, the matter in the universe is
predominantly dark, so we have dark matter and dark energy. Two very
similar sounding names, but theyre very different in practice. The dark
energy is uniformly distributed throughout space, and it causes expansion
of the universe to accelerate. But dark matter, in contrast, can clump under
gravity, and it makes the structures in the universe around us, indeed of
which we're part.

In the next lectures, we'll be talking about these topic in more detail. We
believe in the general correctness of Friedmann's ideas about an
expanding universe because they can be observed. The early universe was
a very small place. Small means dense, and therefore, extremely hot. At
these temperatures, ordinary matter can't exist. Only when the universe is
expanded and cooled, can protons and electrons come together, and make
ordinary atoms. From this time onwards, radiation can travel freely, so we
can actually look back to this time, the formation of the first atoms. And the
radiation coming from this time is visible to us, this is cosmic microwave
background. So since about the 1960s, we've had a very successful picture
for the evolution of the universe that allows us to understand what
happened during the last, say, 10 billion years or so. But it leaves many
open unanswered questions. That the universe began with the Big Bang,
what happened beforehand? Why did the universe start expanding? And
most particularly, why when it expanded, did it contain small fluctuations in
density, that subsequently collapsed into the astronomical structures that
we now inhabit?
Possible ways of overcoming the problem with laws of nature are either by
assuming a different philosophical view of what laws of nature are or by
hypothesizing that rules of nature changeover time and evolve with our
universe. Despite there being only one object under study, our universe,
cosmology is amenable to Poppers method of falsification. For example
the discovery of cosmic microwave background falsified the hypothesis of
the steady state universe. The restriction of observability to the past lightcone of events means that there may well be many observationally
indistinguishable spacetimes, and an inductive inference from the available
data to the natural spacetime we live in, is unwarranted. In the next lecture,
well discuss in more detail the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
Particularly in the context of the broader philosophical debate about the
rationality of theory choice, and the challenge posed by what philosophers
of science call the problem of the under determination of theory by
evidence. We go back to Thomas Kuhn's view and explore its implication
for the rationality of theory choice, and we also look at some rival
cosmological theories that don't resort to dark matter and dark energy. So
we very much look forward to seeing you all in the next class. Thank you.
This transcript is published as Creative Commons under the Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 4.0 license, as outlined at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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Philosophy and the Sciences

Transcript for lecture 2.5

which we're part.

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