Month: November 2017

Cosmological Conjecture as Thought Experiment

Cosmophilosophical conjectures can function as thought experiments intended — not to scientifically demonstrate this of that — but to allow us to consider and feel our reality differently, at least for a few seconds, at least intuitively.

Consider the following example:

What if the very small (smaller than particles) and the very big (bigger than our observable universe) were domains of pure thought, while anything in between would be (a least partly) material? Then, matter would the tension or the difference between the infinitesimally small and the cosmologically immense, a fold between the two infinites already described by Pascal and Leibniz.

But if the two infinites are pure thought, they are in fact one and the same entity: the infinitesimally small = the cosmologically enormous = pure thought.

How can there be a tension or a difference in identity? Perhaps if there is a polarity in Thought or Spirit, which is what Hegel proposed with his dialectics.

 

 

Scientific Cosmology Today, by George F.R. Ellis

“Cosmology is today a precision science with masses of high quality data every increasing our understanding of the physical universe, but paradoxically theoretical cosmology is simultaneously increasingly proposing theories based on ever more hypothetical physics, or concepts that are untestable even in principle (such as the multiverse). We are also seeing ever more dogmatic claims about how scientific cosmology can solve philosophical problems that have been with us for millenia. This talk comments in these trends, carefully distinguishing what is and what is not testable in scientific cosmology, and relating this solid scientific background to some of the recent philosophical claims made about how scientific cosmology relates to issues of meaning. The fourth Copernicus Center Lecture – “On the Nature of Cosmology Today” – was delivered by Professor George Ellis, a famous cosmologist, mathematician, philosopher of science as well as researcher of the relationship between science and religion, currently Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The 2012 Copernicus Center Lecture was part of the 16th Kraków Methodological Conference – “The Causal Universe”, which was co-organized by the Copenicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.”