Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- The nature and scope of this work
- Part I Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Part II Lee Smolin
- 1 Cosmology in crisis
- 2 Principles for a cosmological theory
- 3 The setting: the puzzles of contemporary cosmology
- 4 Hypotheses for a new cosmology
- 5 Mathematics
- 6 Approaches to solving the meta-law dilemma
- 7 Implications of temporal naturalism for the philosophy of mind
- 8 An agenda for science
- 9 Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgments
- References
- A note concerning disagreements between our views
- Index
3 - The setting: the puzzles of contemporary cosmology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- The nature and scope of this work
- Part I Roberto Mangabeira Unger
- Part II Lee Smolin
- 1 Cosmology in crisis
- 2 Principles for a cosmological theory
- 3 The setting: the puzzles of contemporary cosmology
- 4 Hypotheses for a new cosmology
- 5 Mathematics
- 6 Approaches to solving the meta-law dilemma
- 7 Implications of temporal naturalism for the philosophy of mind
- 8 An agenda for science
- 9 Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgments
- References
- A note concerning disagreements between our views
- Index
Summary
The crisis of contemporary physics and cosmology begins with the triumphs of the standard model of particle physics and its counterpart in cosmology. The crisis arises out of our failure to go beyond the successes of these models to a deeper understanding of nature. As I will argue in detail, these failures have a common cause, which is the breakdown of the Newtonian paradigm when faced with cosmological questions. The questions left unanswered by these models then serve as the primary challenges to the science framed by the new, cosmological principles we have just outlined.
The message of the data from particle physics
What we know about the elementary particles and forces is neatly summarized in the standard model of particle physics, which has been tested by numerous experiments since first proposed in 1973. As of this date, experiments at Fermilab and CERN have so far failed to discover any phenomena not accounted for by the standard model.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Singular Universe and the Reality of TimeA Proposal in Natural Philosophy, pp. 393 - 413Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014