Philosophy and the Sciences

Transcript for lecture 2.4

Cosmology and Scientific Methodology

Michela Massimi
What can philosophers learn from the history of cosmology? How does a
branch of metaphysics, become ultimately, a scientific theory? In what
follows we go back to the three problems we identified, at the beginning of
this lecture. And we place them in the context of broader philosophical and
methodological discussions.
The first methodological problem that we saw about cosmology is how can
we extrapolate from our current laws of nature, to the early universe. To
address this problem, the physicist Bondi and other defenders of the socalled steady-state universe back in the 1950s, introduced what they called
the Perfect Cosmological Principle, which says that the universe is
homogeneous in its physical laws. But the steady-state universe, within
which the Perfect Cosmological Principle was formulated, has long been
disproved by experimental evidence for an evolving universe, coming from
the discovery of cosmic microwave background. Yet, this doesn't mean the
end of philosophical reflections about laws of nature in cosmology. On the
contrary, the problem remains pressing, and has prompted philosophers
and physicists, to rethink the notion of laws in cosmology. Just to mention
one example, the physicist Lee Smolin has introduced the view called
Cosmological natural selection, whereby we should stop thinking the laws
of nature are timeless and eternal, and embrace the view that laws have
history, they have evolved with our universe. So if we adopt cosmological
natural selection, the problem of laws of nature disappears. Because it's no
surprise our universe is governed by our current laws of physics. Those are
the laws that have exactly evolved with us and our universe.
The second problem with cosmology that we saw at the beginning of
today's session is the uniqueness of its object of study and the specific
problem that this poses for the testability of cosmology. Key to our ideas of
scientific theory, is the ability to test an experiment, upon multiple samples
of the same kinds and in different circumstances. But cosmology has only
one object to study, our universe, and no other objects to compare our
universe with. Karl Popper's criterion of falsification, seems to offer a

solution here. As we saw in the introduction, Popper believed that the

method of science consisted in a deductive method, whereby given a
hypothesis or conjecture with risky novel predictions, scientists can go
about and search for one single piece of negative evidence, that can
potentially falsify the hypothesis. If falsification is indeed the method of
science, the uniqueness of our universe doesnt pose any obstacle for
cosmology. All that is required from cosmology is one single risky
prediction, which may be tested and proved wrong, what Popper called a
potential falsifier. Here there's an interesting story to be told about
cosmology and Poppers method of falsification. A story you can find in the
additional sources for today's session. The physicist Bondi appealed to the
uniqueness of our universe, to defend precisely the hypothesis of the
steady-state universe. Funnily enough, Bondi also defended Poppers
method of falsification in cosmology, which became the object of an
interesting exchange with Whitrow that took place in the pages of the
British Journal For The Philosophy Of Science in 1953.The interesting final
twist of the story, is that Bondi's steady-state universe was itself disproved
by the discovery of cosmic microwave background, by the Popperian
method he had advocated. The second and even more ironical twist of the
story, is that Popper joined this methodological discussions about
cosmology. And became a public supporter of the steady-state universe
until the 1980s,when the scientific community had no longer dismissed the
view.
Coming to the third methodological problem namely, the restricted access
to what we can observe in terms of the past light-cone of the Earth now, the
main problem that we face here, is a form of indeterminism about space
time. There might be observationally indistinguishable space times, namely
many different models of space time, which are all compatible with the
same past light-cone of events, so that locally, an observer looking at their
past light-cone of events may not be able to tell in which of these different
spacetime models she actually lives. John Norton nicely illustrates the
problem. We are like ants on an infinite flat Euclidean sheet of paper, who
can survey only around a 10,000 square foot patch. And hence are not able
to tell whether the space time they inhabit, is indeed infinitely flat or curved
like a cylinder with a circumference of one mile. Given our past light-cone,
we might inductively infer to very different, and yet observationally
indistinguishable spacetime models. And no facts can make the inference,
to one of these models, more legitimate or justified, than to another model.

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