Book contents
- Interpreting Feyerabend
- Interpreting Feyerabend
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Feyerabend on Art and Science
- Chapter 2 The Coherence of Feyerabend’s Pluralist Realism
- Chapter 3 Feyerabend’s General Theory of Scientific Change
- Chapter 4 Feyerabend’s Theoretical Pluralism
- Chapter 5 Epistemological Anarchism Meets Epistemic Voluntarism
- Chapter 6 Feyerabend Never Was an Eliminative Materialist
- Chapter 7 Feyerabend’s Re-evaluation of Scientific Practice
- Chapter 8 On Feyerabend, General Relativity, and “Unreasonable” Universes
- Chapter 9 Feyerabend, Science and Scientism
- Chapter 10 Against Expertise
- Chapter 11 A Way Forward for Citizen Science
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - On Feyerabend, General Relativity, and “Unreasonable” Universes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2021
- Interpreting Feyerabend
- Interpreting Feyerabend
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Feyerabend on Art and Science
- Chapter 2 The Coherence of Feyerabend’s Pluralist Realism
- Chapter 3 Feyerabend’s General Theory of Scientific Change
- Chapter 4 Feyerabend’s Theoretical Pluralism
- Chapter 5 Epistemological Anarchism Meets Epistemic Voluntarism
- Chapter 6 Feyerabend Never Was an Eliminative Materialist
- Chapter 7 Feyerabend’s Re-evaluation of Scientific Practice
- Chapter 8 On Feyerabend, General Relativity, and “Unreasonable” Universes
- Chapter 9 Feyerabend, Science and Scientism
- Chapter 10 Against Expertise
- Chapter 11 A Way Forward for Citizen Science
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Let us begin with a few preliminaries.1 A (relativistic) model of the universe is an ordered pair(M,g) where M is a smooth four-dimensional “manifold” representing the shape of the universe and g is a smooth relativistic “metric” encoding the geometry of the universe. Each point in the manifold represents a possible event in space and time. Experience seems to tell us that any event (e.g., the moon landing) can be characterized by four numbers – one temporal and three spatial coordinates. Accordingly, the local structure of a manifold “looks like” a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system. But the global structure can be quite different. Many two-dimensional manifolds are familiar to us: the plane, the sphere, the torus, and so on.
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- Interpreting FeyerabendCritical Essays, pp. 157 - 171Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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