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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Philosophy of cosmology

The role of our scientific image of the universe in a rational world view has always caught the attention of Mosterín. He has devoted much work to the epistemic analysis of cosmological theories and of the reliability of their claims. Together with John Earman, he has undertaken a thorough critical review of the paradigm of cosmic inflation.Earman and Mosterín conclude that, despite the widespread influence of the inflationary paradigm and the fact that it does not contradict any known results, there are as yet no good grounds for admitting any of the models of inflation into the standard core of scientific cosmology. He has also dealt with the role of speculation in cosmology.In particular, Mosterín has shown the multiple misunderstandings underlying the so-called anthropic principle and the use of anthropic explanations in cosmology. Mosterín concludes that "in its weak version, the anthropic principle is a mere tautology, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know. In its strong version, it is a gratuitous speculation".Mosterín also points to the flawed “anthropic” inferences from the assumption of an infinity of worlds to the existence of one like ours:
“The suggestion that an infinity of objects characterized by certain numbers or properties implies the existence among them of objects with any combination of those numbers or characteristics [...] is mistaken. An infinity does not imply at all that any arrangement is present or repeated. [...] The assumption that all possible worlds are realized in an infinite universe is equivalent to the assertion that any infinite set of numbers contains all numbers (or at least all Gödel numbers of the [defining] sequences), which is obviously false.”

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