The Relationship between Physics and Philosophy
The comments in the An Explanation from Nothing? post by Sean Carroll (linked here to his blog) and Lee Smolin are very helpful. They move the discussion in a good direction. So let’s put an end to the kerfuffle (or brouhaha) over whether David’s review of Krauss’ book was fair and whether Krauss response was inappropriate.
The issue was raised by Carroll and Smolin and Krauss himself of exactly what the relationship between physics and philosophy of physics can be and should be. Obviously, there are some questions and problems that properly belong to one field but not the other. For example, physicists make proposals about what laws and chances there are while philosophers of physics are interested in what laws and chances are. Physicists produce explanations and argue that one theory is better supported by evidence than another without having explicit accounts of explanation or support. These jobs properly belong to philosophy.
However, there are some issues and problems where collaboration seems the way to go. I (and I hope others) would be interested in some discussion of issues in the history of philosophy/physics where collaboration did pay off (even if is just Einstein collaborating with himself!) and some current issues where it looks like collaboration may lead to progress. My own two cents is that the discussion of non- locality (exactly what are the consequences of nature failing to satisfy Bell’s inequality) has been advanced by work that involved both physicists and philosophers and interactions between them though there is still a lot of confusion on this topic. (One can still find people saying that what Bell showed is that hidden variable theories are impossible because they are non-local).
Here is another question involving quantum mechanics where some collaboration may be useful. Sean in the post in Cosmic Variance mentions that in quantum mechanics the states of the universe are “wave functions.” I am not sure whether he means by “wave functions” mathematical entities or whatever concrete things or stuff satisfy a certain mathematical description. My question concerns the second construal; In other words, what is the ontology of quantum mechanics?
It would be really good to see more collaboration between physicists and philosophers on this issue. Anyway, the blog is open for successful past and current collaborations (and also unsuccessful ones).
An Explanation from Nothing?
Here is David Albert’s review of Laurence Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something rather than Nothing. Krauss claims that the laws of quantum mechanics can provide an answer to the old philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing. Albert finds his answer, to put it mildly, wanting. There is no philosophical consensus about answers to this question or whether the question has an answer (or must have an answer) or whether it is even meaningful. There are two questions. Why is there Anything? Why does the universe have the particular feature it has (e.g. very low entropy condition 14 billion years ago)? The latter question was the subject of Eric’s recently posted paper and the ensuing discussion. An older philosophical discussion is Derek Parfit’s classic “Why Anything; Why This?” With some trepidation we would like to open a discussion of these issues again. Not only about Krauss and David’s review but also more generally about whether there could be a scientific or philosophcial answer to Why there is Anything? As usual the comments will be moderated for relevance. In thinking about these issues it might be helpful to listen to this.
A Paper on Sean Carroll’s Multiverse model for explaining the low entropy initial condition
Hi everyone,
In his introductory post, Barry listed several questions that are central to this blog. The first three revolve around the question of whether anything explains the low entropy condition of the Universe at the Big Bang; and they are the subject of a paper I just published in Entropy. In the paper, “Bumps on the Road to Here (from Eternity)” (It’s open access!) I discuss Sean Carroll’s proposal which says that the world consists of an ever-growing set of universes that cleave off from each other in Big-Bang-like states. Like Barry, I’m uncertain if the proposal works even if the fundamental laws do the work that Sean hopes they do. I’m hoping to attract some comments on the paper here and to get the blog ball rolling!
Abstract: In his recent book, From Eternity to Here, and in other more technical papers, Sean Carroll (partly in collaboration with Jennifer Chen) has put forward an intriguing new way to think about the origin of the Universe. His approach, in a nutshell, is to raise certain worries about a standard Boltzmannian picture of statistical mechanics, and to present certain commitments that he thinks we ought to hold—commitments that the standard picture doesn’t share. He then proposes a cosmological model—one that purports to give us insight into what sort of process brought about the “initial state” of the universe—that can uniquely accommodate those commitments. The conclusion of Carroll’s argument is that statistical mechanical reasoning provides grounds for provisionally accepting that cosmological model. My goal in this paper is to reconstruct and critically assess this proposal. I argue that “statistical cosmology” requires a careful balance of philosophical intuitions and commitments against technical, scientific considerations; how much stock we ought to place in these intuitions and commitments should depend on where they lead us—those that lead us astray scientifically might well be in need of philosophical re‑examination.
Welcome to Our Blog on Philosophy of Cosmology
Welcome to our blog on philosophy of cosmology. Herein you will find discussions of issues in philosophy of cosmology, developments in cosmology and fundamental physics, and more generally philosophy of physics and philosophy of science and sometimes discussions about what it all means. The Bloggers are members of a group of philosophers and physicists (see main page) who are involved in a 3 year project supported by the Templeton Foundation and whose research includes cosmology, string theory, philosophy of physics, metaphysics, philosophy of religion and related fields. In addition there will be invited guest bloggers and commentators whose work and interests appropriately intersect with our group. We are aiming to produce lively, informed, and philosophically interesting discussions.
Among the questions in philosophy of cosmology which we are interested in addressing are:
