Dissertation Research: Theory Development and Evaluation in Early Universe Cosmology

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Historians and philosophers of science have studied the development and evaluation of theories in a wide variety of fields, and have developed a number of different approaches to these topics. What little attention has been devoted to modern cosmology has focused almost entirely on the controversy between the big bang theory and the steady state theory, a controversy which ended in the mid-60s. Since then a great deal of theoretical effort has been devoted to understanding the very early universe. This dissertation research project intends to develop a content-rich history of this research, with a focus on issues of theory development and evaluation. The NSF dissertation research support will allow the researcher to interview several prominent cosmologists and visit archives with collections related to modern cosmology (England, Chicago, Boston, and Princeton). These interviews and archival visits will allow the researcher to develop a more nuanced and insightful historical account of this period and to pose methodological questions to working scientists. In addition, detailed interviews with cosmologists will be a valuable resource for future historians. The research and interviews will focus on two methodological questions. Much of early universe research has been motivated by the alluring idea that fundamental physics dictates large scale properties of the universe. In particular, inflationary cosmology has won widespread acceptance due to its ability to solve a number of "fine-tuning" problems of standard cosmology. However, cosmologists' assessments of the importance of this success differ widely. Via focused interviews with proponents and critics of inflation (and earlier theories with a similar motivation), the researcher will explore the reasons for these differing assessments. The interviews will also focus on attempts to make precision tests of inflation.