Can Typicality Arguments Dissolve Cosmology’s Flatness Problem?

Philosophy of Science 84 (5):1239-1252 (2017)
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Abstract

Several physicists, among them Hawking, Page, Coule, and Carroll, have argued against the probabilistic intuitions underlying fine-tuning arguments in cosmology and instead propose that the canonical measure on the phase space of Friedman-Robertson-Walker space-times should be used to evaluate fine-tuning. They claim that flat space-times in this set are actually typical on this natural measure and that therefore the flatness problem is illusory. I argue that they misinterpret typicality in this phase space and, moreover, that no conclusion can be drawn at all about the flatness problem by using the canonical measure alone.

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C. D. McCoy
Yonsei University

Citations of this work

Meta-Empirical Support for Eliminative Reasoning.C. D. McCoy - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90:15-29.
Stability in Cosmology, from Einstein to Inflation.C. D. McCoy - 2020 - In Claus Beisbart, Tilman Sauer & Christian Wüthrich (eds.), Thinking About Space and Time: 100 Years of Applying and Interpreting General Relativity. Cham: Birkhäuser. pp. 71-89.

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References found in this work

Philosophy of Cosmology.Chris Smeenk - 2013 - In Robert Batterman (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 607-652.
Typicality and Notions of Probability in Physics.Sheldon Goldstein - 2012 - In Yemima Ben-Menahem & Meir Hemmo (eds.), Probability in Physics. Springer. pp. 59--71.

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