The Universe as an Open System

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Throughout science a distinction is made between systems and their environments. Systems can be treated as either open, if they exchange energy, matter, heat or information with the environment, and closed if they do not. Since the system is so much smaller than the environment, such exchanges are assumed to be asymmetric, from the environment to the system. Often, all that is assumed about the environment is that is very large compared to the system, since it is the latter that is being studied. As was pointed out long ago by Bertrand Russell (1903), strictly speaking all systems within the universe should be expected to be open, since the force of gravity is universal. If we accept Russell’s argument, there is then only one ‘system’ that can be treated as a closed system: the universe as a whole. If the ‘part’ of the universe being studied is the entire universe, then it seems obviously true that there can be nothing left to play the role of the environment, and thus that we are, by definition, studying a closed system. Despite the persuasiveness of the universe as a closed system viewpoint, there are three plausible arguments why it may prove insightful to represent the universe as an open system after all. Each of these arguments will be investigated in this project. More specifically, we will conduct a synthetic and integrated analysis of cases and in doing so establish the philosophical and physical viability of modelling the universe as an open system. Our core methodological question is whether scientists are justified in treating the universe as an open system merely as a pragmatically useful falsehood, or whether there are good reasons to accept the universe as an open system as a genuine ontological claim. We aim to defend the ontological claim that the universe is an open system, in a limited and precise sense, based upon a formally and conceptually rigorous analysis of the relevant system-sub-system relationships. In particular, this project will (i) provide new formal and conceptual tools to understand both the universe and our place in it; (ii) evaluate the motivations and implications of the idea of the universe as an open system, (iii) characterize openness in three important physical contexts via a detailed study of the appropriate mechanisms; (iv) demonstrate that these mechanisms can be linked together by considering the role of epistemic agents as an information processing system embedded within a universe and weakly coupled to a measuring apparatus and the rest of the environment; and (v) defend the ontological claim that universe is an open system in a limited and precise sense.