scholarly journals Feyerabendian Pragmatism

Author(s):  
Jeff Foss

In the not-too-distant future the scientific realism debate will be absorbed into the far more ancient-and-venerable, old-and-unqualified, realism debate. The first efficient mover of this absorption will be the fact that scientific ontology is a growing and very mixed bag, including not just rocks, plants, animals, and stars, but the Higgs boson, the Big Bang, evolutionary pressures, teenage anxieties, economic growth, social trends, countries, industrial toxins, and hedge funds. Trying to hedge off these ever-stranger newcomers by such moves as castling the debate within well- (or best-) established, mature (two decades old? five?), basic physics is to submit to a biased umpire, with a narrow strike-zone, to get to an arbitrary first base.

Author(s):  
P. J. E. Peebles

This chapter introduces physical cosmology as the attempt to make sense of the large-scale nature of the material world by the methods of the natural sciences. It explains that physical cosmology operates under the special restrictions of astronomy, which is considered successful in sister fields, such as stellar astronomy and particle physics. It cites the substantial progress of cosmology as an enterprise in physical science, although the advances certainly have moved around considerable gaps in one's understanding. The chapter details how cosmology inherits from basic physics the more ancient and honorable tradition of attempts to understand where the world came from, where it is going, and why. It reviews believable evidence that the universe is expanding, the space between the galaxies opening up, and that this expansion traces back to a hot dense phase, the big bang.


2006 ◽  
Vol 190 ◽  
pp. 15-15
Author(s):  
D CASTELVECCHI
Keyword(s):  
Big Bang ◽  

Author(s):  
Abraham Loeb ◽  
Steven R. Furlanetto

This book provides a comprehensive, self-contained introduction to one of the most exciting frontiers in astrophysics today: the quest to understand how the oldest and most distant galaxies in our universe first formed. Until now, most research on this question has been theoretical, but the next few years will bring about a new generation of large telescopes that promise to supply a flood of data about the infant universe during its first billion years after the big bang. This book bridges the gap between theory and observation. It is an invaluable reference for students and researchers on early galaxies. The book starts from basic physical principles before moving on to more advanced material. Topics include the gravitational growth of structure, the intergalactic medium, the formation and evolution of the first stars and black holes, feedback and galaxy evolution, reionization, 21-cm cosmology, and more.


Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz

This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space. This is a narrative of the Earth's long and dramatic history, as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal realms of the Universe, in the Big Bang and in supernova explosions and continues amid the construction of the Solar System. Jan Zalasiewicz shows the almost incredible complexity present in such a small and apparently mundane object. Many events in the Earth's ancient past can be deciphered from a pebble: volcanic eruptions; the lives and deaths of extinct animals and plants; the alien nature of long-vanished oceans; and transformations deep underground, including the creations of fool's gold and of oil. Zalasiewicz demonstrates how geologists reach deep into the Earth's past by forensic analysis of even the tiniest amounts of mineral matter. Many stories are crammed into each and every pebble around us. It may be small, and ordinary, this pebble - but it is also an eloquent part of our Earth's extraordinary, never-ending story.


1996 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-33
Author(s):  
F. A. Tsitsin
Keyword(s):  
Big Bang ◽  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document