Lecture
CANCELLED: LTP Colloquium 'Dark Matter Realism'
- Date
- Thursday 14 November 2024
- Time
- Location
-
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden - Room
- 0.06
CANCELLED
The Leiden University Centre Theoretical Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Dr. Niels Martens, Philosopher of physics, especially astronomy and cosmology at the Utrecht University.
According to the standard model of cosmology, CDM, the mass-energy budget of the current stage of the universe is not dominated by the luminous matter that we are familiar with, but instead by some form of dark matter (and dark energy). It is thus tempting to adopt scientific realism about dark matter. However, there are barely any constraints on the myriad of possible properties of this entity—it is not even certain that it is a form of matter. In light of this underdetermination I advocate caution: we should not (yet) be dark matter realists. The “not(-yet)-realism” that I have in mind is different from Hacking’s (1989) anti-realism, in that it is semantic rather than epistemological. It also differs from the semantic anti-realism of logical empiricism, in that it is naturalistic, such that it may only be temporary and does not automatically apply to all other unobservables (or even just to all other astronomical unobservables, as with Hacking’s anti-realism). The argument is illustrated with the analogy of the much longer history of the concept of a gene, as the current state of the concept of dark matter resembles in some relevant ways that of the early concept of genes.