By the end of the twentieth century, many prominent cosmologists were fascinated by the questions why is the universe the way it is, and why does the universe appear to be just right for life to emerge.1 Indeed, the shift to posing questions beginning with why rather than what or how is a relatively recent development in modern cosmology. This paper begins by looking at the emergence of why questions in cosmological discourse by tracing affiliated anthropic reasoning and fine-tuning arguments (...) in cosmology. I also consider recent suggestions that the laws of physics may themselves evolve. In response to the why questions, this paper then examines the proliferation of multiverse discourse in the late twentieth... (shrink)

This paper deals with two important English scientists of the first half of the twentieth century: Edward Arthur Milne and James Hopwood Jeans. It examines the philosophical reasons that, in 1932, induced Milne to devote himself to the newborn modern cosmology. Among those reasons, it is argued that the most important ones were some of Jeans’ philosophical statements regarding the new relativistic view of the expanding universe. In particular, Milne reacted to some confusing idealist opinions expressed by Jeans in the (...) London newspaper The Times, in May 1932, in a debate on the expansion of the universe. Actually, as it will be shown, Jeans received many criticisms about the philosophical reasonings present in all of his popularizing works. (shrink)

While Karl Popper’s philosophy of science has only few followers among modern philosophers, it is easily the view of science with the biggest impact on practicing scientists. According to Peter Medawar, Nobel laureate and eminent physiologist, Popper was the greatest authority ever on the scientific method. He praised the “great strength of Karl Popper’s conception of the scientific process,” a main reason for the praise being “that it is realistic—it gives a pretty fair picture of what goes on in real (...) life laboratories” (Medawar 1990, p. 100). Either explicitly or (more often) implicitly, many scientists subscribe to some version of simplified Popperianism, usually by adopting the demarcation criterion that a .. (shrink)

Problems of scientific cosmology only rarely occur in the works of Karl Popper. Nevertheless, it was a subject that interested him and which he occasionally commented on. What is more important, his general claim of falsifiability as a criterion that demarcates science from non-science has played a significant role in periods of the development of modern physical cosmology. The paper examines the historical contexts of the interaction between cosmology and Popperian philosophy of science. Apart from covering Popper’s inspiration from Einstein (...) and his views on questions of cosmology, it focuses on the impact of his thoughts in two periods of controversy of modern cosmology, the one related to the steady state theory and the other to the recent multiverse proposal. It turns out that the impact has been considerable, and continues to be so, but also that the versions of Popperian methodology discussed by cosmologists are sometimes far from what Popper actually thought and wrote. (shrink)