Experimentation in cosmology: Intervening on the whole universe.

Autor: Leconte-Chevillard G; Département 'Sciences, philosophies et sociétés', Université de Namur, Belgium. Electronic address: gauvain.leconte@ac-lille.fr.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Studies in history and philosophy of science [Stud Hist Philos Sci] 2024 Aug; Vol. 106, pp. 136-145. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Jul 05.
DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.06.007
Abstrakt: There are many arguments against the possibility of experimenting on the whole universe. This system seems to be too big to be manipulated, it exists in only one exemplar and its evolution is a non-repeatable process. In this paper, I claim that we can nonetheless talk about experimentation in cosmology if we use Woodward's non-anthropocentric notion of intervention. However, Woodward and other interventionists argued that an intervention was necessarily an exogenous causal process and thus that no intervention on a closed system such as the universe was possible. I discuss their argument and I determine the conditions under which a consistent notion of endogenous intervention on the universe can be defined. Then, I show that there is at least one cosmic phenomenon satisfying these conditions: the photon decoupling. Finally, I draw some conclusions from this analysis regarding a realist approach of cosmology.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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