Philosophy of Cosmology - funded by Templeton

source: http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/news__events/news/philosophy_of_cosmology_-_new_field_of_study

John Templeton Foundation (who have a 'supernaturalistic' rather than a 'naturalistic' worldview) is sponsoring a group of philosophers and physicists in an area of study 'philosophy of cosmology'. I was surprised to see Brian Greene amongst the list of physicists receiving funds from Templeton.

The press release states:-

"Philosophy of Cosmology - new field of study

Oxford and Cambridge in partnership with US cluster to establish ‘Philosophy of Cosmology’ as a new field of study. Templeton grant funds initiative at top universities in philosophy

In a new partnership between Oxford and Cambridge, researchers in physics and philosophy Simon Saunders, Joe Silk, and David Wallace at Oxford University, and John Barrow and Jeremy Butterfield at Cambridge, are to join researchers at a cluster of US universities including Columbia University, Yale University, and New York University, to establish the field of philosophy of cosmology as a new branch of philosophy of physics.

The initiative, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, is of three years in duration and will culminate in a major international conference. The enduring impact of the project will be to isolate and clarify the outstanding conceptual problems in the foundations of cosmology, to seed and stimulate future research in the subject, and to define philosophy of cosmology as a new field in its own right, with its own distinctive problems and motivations.

Chief among them, according to Simon Saunders of Oxford University, ‘is the problem of how to compensate for selection effects – of making sense of the so-called ‘anthropic principle’. Even if we knew the structure of the universe, the whole story from beginning to end, what should we expect to see from our particular corner of it? What are the probabilities? And of course that’s what’s relevant to experiments.’ The problem isn’t restricted to the distribution of stars or galaxies; it could extend to the values of supposedly fundamental constants, such as the cosmological constant --- or dark energy, as it is known.

"Explaining the value of the cosmological constant is one of the most critical problems in theoretical physics" says John Barrow, whose book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, co-written with Frank Tipler, set the agenda for anthropic reasoning in cosmology the last two decades. “This problem goes deeper than merely describing the accelerated expansion of the universe: it requires an understanding of the vacuum, how the quantum nature of reality impacts on the universe as a whole, and what probability means when used to evaluate observed properties of the universe.”

The initiative is being made now in part because cosmology has in recent years turned into a spectacularly successful empirical discipline. But there is another reason too.  “One of the key obstacles to progress in understanding the universe as a whole – particularly the early universe -- is the lack of a realist understanding of quantum theory”, says Saunders.  “There are different aspects to the realism problem. One of them is about the nature of reality at the microscopic level; another is about how to apply quantum theory to systems ‘from the inside’ – to so-called closed systems. The latter is called the measurement problem. The universe as a whole is closed in this sense.” How then is it possible to apply quantum theory to cosmology – to obtain a genuinely quantum cosmology? “There has been real progress on that front in the last twenty years” Saunders continues. “That’s where our group and the East Coast group has an edge. We are interested in exploring these questions in quantum theories that are free of the measurement problem. Physicists try to be neutral on these questions, but it’s hard to do that and make sense of quantum cosmology”.

A major component of the Oxford-Cambridge project, like that of the US cluster led by Barry Loewer at Rutgers University, is to establish a community of scholars able to engage with such foundational questions in cosmology. To that end Joe Silk at Oxford, and John Barrow at Cambridge, will host a series of lecture courses, to be given by eminent figures in cosmology. These will be filmed and archived on a website dedicated to providing research materials and teaching resources in cosmology. Another component is related to the ‘PLUS’ e-magazine, associated with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University, which will house a series of interviews with leaders in cosmology on key questions in foundations. The three-year project will culminate in a major international conference, and the publication of a volume of papers devoted to the philosophy of cosmology.

The US cluster includes Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.  It encompasses nine scholars: Barry Loewer, Dean Zimmerman, Sheldon Goldstein and Roderich Tumulka of Rutgers; David Albert and Brian Greene of Columbia, Tim Maudlin of New York University, Priya Natarajan of Yale, and Joel Primack of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Loewer, Zimmerman, Albert and Maudlin are philosophers; Goldstein and Tumulka, mathematicians; Greene, Natarajan, and Primack, physicists.  The US cluster, like the Oxford-Cambridge partnership, is funded by a $960,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation."

Could we observe the multiverse? - Brian Greene

Brian Greene

From Scientific American article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=multiverse-the-case-for-parallel-universe.

"Any theory in physics stands or falls depending on whether its predictions agree with the data. But how can we verify the existence of other bubble universes?

Is the multiverse theory unscientific, because it cannot be tested, even in principle?

Surprisingly, observational tests of the multiverse picture may in fact be possible. A collision of our expanding bubble with another bubble in the multiverse would produce an imprint in the cosmic background radiation—a round spot of higher or lower radiation intensity. A detection of such a spot with the predicted intensity profile would provide direct evidence for the existence of other bubble universes. The search is now on, but unfortunately there is no guarantee that a bubble collision has occurred within our cosmic horizon." 

This is the point that Brian Greene spends 1 minute making (@16 mins 45 s) http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fine_tuned_for_life.html & http://blog.ted.com/2012/02/28/the-multiverse-in-three-parts-brian-greene-at-ted2012/ (video transcript)

"explaining how it might be able to actually detect OTHER universes because of temperature differences in the cosmic macro-background radiation. Could we ever confirm the existence of other universes? 

Inflationary theory has observational support. Perlmutter, Schmidt & Riess won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/press.html for discovering that the Universe expansion is SPEEDING UP due to Dark Energy - a type of inverse gravitation which means galaxies are repelling each other rather then attracting each other as gravitation would do.

Brian Greene says

'The Big Bang would have been so intense that as space stretched, tiny quantum jitters would have stretched from the micro to the macro world, creating a distinctive fingerprint across space - which powerful telescopes have now observed.
Similarly, we might be able to detect if one universe collided with another, we might one day detect those temperature differences." 

Greene published 'The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the deep laws of the cosmos' in 2011 and the Penguin paperback in Feb 2012 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Hidden-Reality-Parallel-Universes/dp/0141029811/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335814001&sr=1-1

Put a Little Science in Your Life by Brian Greene

Brian Greene argues that teaching science can give life context and meaning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01greene.html?ex=1212984000&en=d1bd4cd7cfefa238&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Put a Little Science in Your Life
By BRIAN GREENE

A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we've all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I'd written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists' search for nature's deepest laws — the soldier's letter might strike you as, well, odd.

But it's not.

Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning.

At the same time, the soldier's letter emphasized something I've increasingly come to believe:

our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.

Allow me a moment to explain.

When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it's easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don't hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions.

And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there's simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.

These are the standard — and enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science matters.

But here's the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still.

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.

To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don't have to be a scientist for science to be transformative.

I've seen children's eyes light up as I've told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I've spoken with high school dropouts who've stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going because it revealed a deeper reality of which we're all a part.

It's striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the "real" world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality,

science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.

If science isn't your strong suit — and for many it's not — this side of science is something you may have rarely if ever experienced.

I've spoken with so many people over the years whose encounters with science in school left them thinking of it as cold, distant and intimidating. They happily use the innovations that science makes possible, but feel that the science itself is just not relevant to their lives. What a shame.

Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension

And it's yet another level of experience to realize that those stars account for less than 4 percent of what's out there — the rest being of an unknown composition, so-called dark matter and energy, which researchers are now vigorously trying to divine.

As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific passion. And it's a profound loss.

A great many studies have focused on this problem, identifying important opportunities for improving science education. Recommendations have ranged from increasing the level of training for science teachers to curriculum reforms.

But most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue:

in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science's underlying technical details.

In fact,

many students I've spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, "Wow, that's science?"

In physics, just to give a sense of the raw material that's available to be leveraged, the most revolutionary of advances have happened in the last 100 years — special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics — a symphony of discoveries that changed our conception of reality. More recently, the last 10 years have witnessed an upheaval in our understanding of the universe's composition, yielding a wholly new prediction for what the cosmos will be like in the far future.

These are paradigm-shaking developments. But rare is the high school class, and rarer still is the middle school class, in which these breakthroughs are introduced. It's much the same story in classes for biology, chemistry and mathematics.

At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it's a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.

But science is so much more than its technical details. And with careful attention to presentation, cutting-edge insights and discoveries can be clearly and faithfully communicated to students independent of those details; in fact, those insights and discoveries are precisely the ones that can drive a young student to want to learn the details.

We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.

Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that's been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama.

We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.

It's the birthright of every child, it's a necessity for every adult, to look out on the world, as the soldier in Iraq did, and see that the wonder of the cosmos transcends everything that divides us.