Dissertation Research: Theory Development and Evaluation in Early Universe Cosmology

历史学家和科学哲学家研究了各种领域中理论的发展和评价，并针对这些主题发展了许多不同的方法。现代宇宙学几乎完全集中在大爆炸理论和稳态理论之间的争论上，这场争论在60年代中期结束。从那时起，人们投入了大量的理论努力来理解非常早期的宇宙。这篇论文的研究项目意在丰富这项研究的历史，重点关注理论发展和评估问题。NSF的论文研究支持将允许研究人员采访几位著名的宇宙学家，并访问与现代宇宙学(英格兰、芝加哥、波士顿和普林斯顿)有关的收藏档案。这些采访和档案访问将使研究人员能够对这一时期进行更微妙和更有洞察力的历史描述，并向工作的科学家提出方法论问题。此外，对宇宙学家的详细采访将是未来历史学家的宝贵资源。研究和访谈将集中于两个方法论问题。许多早期的宇宙研究都是由一个诱人的想法推动的，即基础物理学决定了宇宙的大尺度属性。特别是，膨胀宇宙学因其能够解决标准宇宙学的一些“微调”问题而赢得了广泛的认可。然而，宇宙学家对这一成功的重要性的评估大相径庭。通过对通胀的支持者和批评者(以及动机相似的早期理论)的集中采访，研究人员将探索这些不同评估的原因。采访还将集中讨论对通胀进行精确测试的尝试。

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.