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How to Construct a Falsifiable Theory in Which the Universe Came Into Being Several Thousand Years Ago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Frank J Tipler
Frank J Tipler*
Affiliation:
Tulane University
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Extract

As everyone knows, in almost all modern cosmological models the origin of the Universe is placed between 10 and 20 billion years ago (van den Bergh 1984). The only exception I am aware of is the steady state theory, which has recently been given new life by the inflationary universe model (see Gott 1982, and Schramm's conference presentation), and which requires the universe to be infinitely old. No modern cosmological theory holds the Universe's age to be a mere 6,000 years, the traditional value in the West for centuries (Ussher 1660; Whiston 1696, 1717; Haber 1959). It is universally thought that radioactive dating and astronomical observation have definitely ruled out such a short age for the Universe. It is universally thought that it is impossible to construct a falsifiable theory which is consistent with the thousands of observations indicating an age of billions of years, but which holds that the Universe is only a few thousand years old.

Type
Part XXII. Invited Paper: Philosophy of Physics
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1984 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1984 , 1984 , pp. 872 - 902
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to J.D. Barrow, S.G. Brush, M. Dupre, D. Eardley, W. Israel, A. Levine, D. Mohr, D.N. Page, D. Schramm, B.J. Sargent and J. Silk for helpful discussions. I am grateful to Philip Kitcher and all the other members of the PSA for giving me the opportunity to talk about and publish this wacky theory. Most of all, I am indebted to Rev. Andrew Osiander (1543) (See Armitage 1951, p. 108 and Kuhn 1957, p. 187) for the paper's Introduction. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants PHY-78-26562 and PHY-84-09672.

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