Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin propose relies on three central ideas. There is only one universe at a time. Time is real: everything in the structure and regularities of nature changes sooner or later. Mathematics, which has trouble with time, is not the oracle of nature and the prophet of science; it is simply a tool with great power and immense limitations. The argument is readily accessible to non-scientists as well as to the physicists and cosmologists whom it challenges.
Author(s): Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Lee Smolin
Edition: P2P ePub v 1.0 [UL]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2014
Language: English
Commentary: P2P ePub v 1.0 [UL]. Based on the Library Genesis pdf file md5=b769927f489bae7bacd573a859e0575c. Handproduced in Abbyy, NotePad++, verified in Firefox. ePub version of the html further compiled with Sigil. Html5 and CSS3 validated at W3C. OCR verified in Abbyy. Proofreading 1 pass, during editing. Therefore, errors are likely. Equations above the minimal symbol set rendered as images. Minimal but consistent formatting. Page numbers preserved and discretely marked throughout. HTML single-file section easy to extract for browser display.
Pages: xii+544
The nature and scope of this work x
ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER AND LEE SMOLIN
Part I. Roberto Mangabeira Unger 1
1. The science of the one universe in time 5
The singular existence of the universe 5
The inclusive reality of time 7
The selective realism of mathematics 15
The first cosmological fallacy 18
The second cosmological fallacy 23
Causality without laws 32
2. The context and consequences of the argument 46
The argument and recent physics and cosmology 46
The argument and the physics of the first half of the twentieth century 49
The argument and natural history 54
The argument and social and historical study 67
Reinventing natural philosophy 75
What is at stake 89
3. The singular existence of the universe 100
The conception of the singular existence of the universe introduced 100
Arguments for the singular existence of the universe 116
Implications for the agenda of cosmology 141
The finite and the infinite at the beginning of the universe 144
The initial conditions of the history of the universe 147
The unexplained constants of nature 156
4. The inclusive reality of time 162
The problem presented: How much of nature exists in time? 162
The argument in science and natural philosophy 170
Time as the transformation of transformation 222
Attributes of time: non-emergent, global, irreversible, and continuous 226
The proto-ontological assumptions of this view of time 239
The idea of the inclusive reality of time restated 245
From being to becoming 249
5. The mutability of the laws of nature 259
Changing laws 259
The conundrum of the meta-laws 275
The problem of causation in the early universe revisited 277
The best hope for resolving the conundrum of the meta-laws 280
From speculative conception to empirical inquiry 288
Implications of the inclusive reality of time for some fundamental ideas 292
6. The selective realism of mathematics 302
The problem 302
Mathematics as discovery and mathematics as invention 303
The attributes of mathematics 305
A natural-evolutionary conjecture 323
The history of mathematics reconsidered: soaring above the world without escaping it 325
The history of mathematics reconsidered: right and wrong in Hilbert's program 342
A deflationary and naturalistic view of mathematics 345
Part II. Lee Smolin 349
1. Cosmology in crisis 353
The crisis introduced 353
Temporal naturalism 361
Naturalism is an ethical stance 362
2. Principles for a cosmological theory 367
The roots of relationalism 367
The Newtonian paradigm 373
The failure of the Newtonian paradigm when applied to cosmology 373
The failure of the Newtonian paradigm to satisfy the principles for a cosmological theory 377
The failure of the Newtonian paradigm for elementary events 379
Reductionism and its limits 379
The uniqueness of fundamental events 382
Relationalism and its limits: relational versus intrinsic properties 385
Two relational paths to general relativity: Einstein and shape dynamics 386
Relational purism 388
Impure relationalism: a role for intrinsic properties 388
Dynamical pairings and relational versus intrinsic properties 389
The Newtonian paradigm from the viewpoint of temporal naturalism 391
3. The setting: the puzzles of contemporary cosmology 393
The message of the data from particle physics 393
The message of the large-scale astronomical data 395
What questions are imperative, given the data? 399
What features of the standard cosmological model are unconstrained by the data? 400
What happened at very early times? 401
Brief review of the singularity theorems 402
The meaning of the singularity theorems 405
What will happen to the far future of our universe? 407
What is very far away from us, outside the cosmological horizon? 410
4. Hypotheses for a new cosmology 414
The uniqueness of the universe 414
The reality of time 415
Does a real time conflict with the relativity of simultaneity? 418
5. Mathematics 422
A new conception: mathematics as evoked reality 422
The reasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics 428
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in mathematics 430
The stages of development of mathematics 431
Why is mathematics effective in physics? 445
6. Approaches to solving the meta-law dilemma 447
Three options for global structure of the larger universe 449
Prospects for a solution of the landscape problem in the three scenarios 451
Linear cyclic models 452
Branching models 453
Branching cyclic cosmologies 454
Cosmological natural selection 454
Pluralistic cosmological scenarios 460
Principle of precedence 465
Universality of meta-law: reducing the choice of laws to choices of initial conditions 470
The unification of law and state 476
7. Implications of temporal naturalism for the philosophy of mind 480
Two speculative proposals regarding qualia 482
8. An agenda for science 484
The agenda for observational cosmology 484
Can the laws of nature be observed to change? 485
The agenda for quantum foundations 486
The existence of a preferred global time 491
The agenda for explaining the arrows of time 492
The agenda for quantum gravity 496
The main challenge: resolving the meta-laws and cosmological dilemmas 498
9. Concluding remarks 500
Acknowledgments 502
References 503
A note concerning disagreements between our views 512
Index 533
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