Philosophy and the Sciences

Transcript for lecture 2.1

The Origins of our Universe

Michela Massimi
Welcome to the first part of our MOOC, Philosophy and the Sciences. In the
next three lectures we will explore a variety of philosophical issues arising in
contemporary cosmology.
In today's lecture, the Cosmologist John Peacock and I will briefly review
the history of cosmology from the 18th century to modern days. And we'll
highlight three main philosophical problems that stood in the way of
cosmology becoming a science. In the next lecture, we focus on two entities
at the very heart of contemporary cosmology: dark energy and dark matter.
We explain in a simple, non-technical way what they are, and we address
the philosophical problem of whether there are any rivals to dark energy
and dark matter, and how scientists go about making rational decisions
about which theory to endorse in the lack of available evidence. In the
fourth lecture, we finally turn our attention to anthropic reasoning in
cosmology, and to the philosophical and physical debate surrounding the
so-called anthropic principle.
So why cosmology? The experimental discovery that our universe is
accelerating in its expansion, for which the 2011 Nobel Prize was awarded,
has sparked important philosophical debates about cosmology. This comes
at a time when new data coming from large galaxy surface are trying to give
an answer to pressing questions about the existence of dark matter and
dark energy. But for very long time, cosmology was not even regarded as a
science. Indeed, it was regarded as closer to philosophy, than to physics.
Consider Newton's 'Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. This
extraordinary book laid the foundations of modern physics by providing
testable laws of nature. That could explain a variety of observable
phenomena from free fall, to planetary motion. Yet Newton's mathematical
physics didnt explain what set planets in motion at the origin of our
universe, or in general, explaining how planets and stars formed, how they
evolved, what set them in motion, was beyond the scope of Newtons
mathematical principles of natural philosophy. And the task was taken up in
the 18thcentury by philosophers in the context of other discussion of

Newtons natural philosophy, or in the context of metaphysics. For example,

the German philosopher, Alexander Baumgarten in his 1739 book
'Metaphysics, claimed that, since cosmology contained the first principles
of psychology, physics, theology, teleology, and practical philosophy,
cosmology belonged to metaphysics. Thus cosmology in the works of
Baumgarten and Christian Wolf, became a rational exercise of examining
the concept of the world or of the universe.
The necessity of supplementing Newtons physics with metaphysical
foundations found its most influential expression in the works of Immanuel
Kant. One of the first attempts at the modern metaphysical explanation of
the origin of our universe according to Newtonian Principals can be found
in Kant's 1755 'Universal Natural History Interior of the Heavens, whose
subtitle reads, 'Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origins of the
Whole Universe according to Newtonian Principles. In this text Kant
claimed that at the origin of the universe, space was not empty as Newton
suggested, but was filled with what he called the fine matter on which two
fundamental forces acted. The first force was attraction as a force acting at a
distance and capable of lumping matter into what became planets and
stars. The second force was repulsion as a force counterbalancing attraction
and causing matter to whirl in vertices that would eventually become
planets and stars. While both attraction and repulsion can be found in
Newton as fundamental forces of nature both in the 'Principia' and in the
'Optics', Kant's original take on Newton consisted in using those two forces
to provide an explanation of the presumed mechanisms at work in the
constitution of the universe. In so doing, Kant laid the foundation of what
became known as the Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis, one of the very first
attempts at a scientific explanation of the origin of our universe. And here
we see exemplified an interesting connection between philosophy and the
sciences. Kants 1755 'Cosmogony' effectively provided the basis for the
development of some seminal ideas in cosmology. Yet, Kant himself was
skeptical about the possibility of developing cosmology as a science,
because the very metaphysical idea of a universe having a beginning in
space and time seemed fraught with contradictions, something that Kant in
his mature work called the Antinomies of Reason.
Thus at the end of the 18th century, the prospects of developing cosmology
as a branch of metaphysics looked dim and the path to cosmology as a
science was still very long. Why did it take so long for cosmology to
become a science? It wasn't just that the metaphysical foundations of
cosmology proved fraught with contradictions as Kant said. Three main
problems stood in the way of cosmology to become a science. Scientific
theories allow scientists to make inferences based on laws of nature. For
example, given Newton's Law of Gravity, scientists can make inferences
about planetary motions, as well as the fall of an apple or the times of the

tides. A specific problem arises in cosmology when we try to use the laws of
nature to make inferences about the origins of our universe. How do we
know that the laws of nature that we know and love today apply to the
origin of our universe? Didnt our laws come into existence with our
universe? And how can we extrapolate from the present physics and its
laws, to the origins of our universe? For cosmology to have the status of an
experimental science, it should be possible to run experiments to test
hypothesis. But running an experiment typically involves being able to
repeat the test more than once, and on several different samples of the
same object. If repeating test on multiple samples and in different
circumstances is key to experimenting, then the prospects for cosmology as
an experimental science look unpromising. We have only one universe to
observe and to experiment upon, ours.
A third problem with cosmology concerns the extent to which wean
extrapolate information from our current vantage point, our planet earth, to
the universe as a whole. The amount of information we can access from our
current vantage point, considering the speed of light limit, which restricts
how far back into the history of our universe we can, so to speak, observe, is
restricted to events in the so-called past light cones, parts of the universe
that have been able to send information to us. This is known as the horizon
problem. Objects at a distance more than about ct away, where c is the
speed of light, can not be seen before time, t. This, per say, is not a huge
problem since we might assume that our horizon will grow and then any
object will eventually be seen, however distant. But in an accelerating
universe like ours, there exists an event horizon. Points sufficiently far apart
from each other, will never be in contact. That means there are bound to be
vast regions of our universe that will remain unobservable to us forever.
Despite these three methodological problems, cosmologists come a long
way from the time of the Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis and has
established itself as a science in its own right in just over a century. The path
that led cosmology from a branch of metaphysics to a proper science, has
not been without lively philosophical discussions. Still in the 1950s,
McCreer complained that cosmology was a highly unsatisfactory subject
and with Rolament the many physicists that found cosmology baffling,
compared to other branches of physics.
In the next section, we review some of the milestones in the history of
observational and theoretical cosmology of the past century. We return at
the end of this lecture to the three issues of laws of nature, uniqueness, and
unobservability, and we draw some philosophical conclusions about the
history of cosmology.

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