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3 - The setting: the puzzles of contemporary cosmology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2014

Roberto Mangabeira Unger  and
Lee Smolin
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Affiliation:
Harvard Law School, Massachusetts
Lee Smolin
Affiliation:
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada
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Summary

The crisis of contemporary physics and cosmology begins with the triumphs of the standard model of particle physics and its counterpart in cosmology. The crisis arises out of our failure to go beyond the successes of these models to a deeper understanding of nature. As I will argue in detail, these failures have a common cause, which is the breakdown of the Newtonian paradigm when faced with cosmological questions. The questions left unanswered by these models then serve as the primary challenges to the science framed by the new, cosmological principles we have just outlined.

The message of the data from particle physics

What we know about the elementary particles and forces is neatly summarized in the standard model of particle physics, which has been tested by numerous experiments since first proposed in 1973. As of this date, experiments at Fermilab and CERN have so far failed to discover any phenomena not accounted for by the standard model.

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The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time
A Proposal in Natural Philosophy
 , pp. 393 - 413
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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