The logic and politics of cosmology
- PDF / 420,219 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 35 Downloads / 207 Views
The logic and politics of cosmology Bjørn Ekeberg: Metaphysical experiments: Physics and the invention of the universe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, $25.00 PB/$100.00 HB Robert Hudson1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Ostensibly, Bjørn Ekeberg’s book is about a particular “metaphysical experiment”: the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWSP) and the prospective collection of astronomical data using this telescope that will inform us about the nature of the universe. Although Ekeberg starts the book by summarizing the details of the JWSP, he does not discuss the telescope very much during the course of the book. Instead, his topic is mostly the nature of the theoretical entity called the “universe,” something he believes we need to do before we can make sense of what JWSP is designed to achieve. In brief, Ekeberg’s view of the universe is very clear: He says, “the universe is first and foremost a metaphysical idea, an invention” (11). What kind of invention is it? “What is the universe?” (147). The answer for Ekeberg is set forth in our current, scientific cosmology, a theoretical entity phrased in the language of mathematics. He asserts that the emphasis on the use of mathematics in understanding the universe is historically based on Descartes’ ideal of a universal mathematics, a “mathesis universalis” (34), an emphasis that runs through scientific investigations over the course of centuries in the works of Galileo and Newton, and onward in the writings of Maxwell, Boltzmann, Planck, Einstein, and so on. Ekeberg’s view is that favoring mathematics in understanding the universe is a matter of faith, in the same sense that a belief in a Christian God is a matter of faith. He says, “as I have tried to show in this book, some of the fundamental metaphysical problems bedeviling modern physics and cosmology stem from the idea that still ties the science to its Christian origins: the unwavering faith in the mathesis universalis” (157). But surely there is a large difference between religious faith and faith in (the usefulness of) mathematics in science. Particularly, mathematics has shown substantial value in logically connecting hypotheses to observational data, whereas religious faith has not.
* Robert Hudson [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Metascience
It turns out that the logic of science is fundamentally important to Ekeberg— though he thinks of logic in a somewhat idiosyncratic and unfamiliar way. For him, the history of science is underwritten by four distinct kinds of logics. The first, “analogic,” is the most familiar: One can, for example, use a manageable, constructed model to analogically represent a natural phenomenon, such as when one uses the Large Hadron Collider to “reproduce conditions in the early universe” (38). So far as I can see, analogic does not play a large role in Ekeberg’s subsequent argumentation. By comparison, the notion of the “autological” is critically important for
Data Loading...
