{"id":2299,"date":"2009-09-21T13:16:46","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T18:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2299"},"modified":"2009-09-24T17:49:46","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T22:49:46","slug":"characterising-science-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2299","title":{"rendered":"Characterising Science and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week the Templeton Foundation is funding yet another conference on the Multiverse, this one is entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/astroweb1.physics.ox.ac.uk\/~philcosmo2009\/index.html\">Philosophy of Cosmology 2009: Characterising Science and Beyond<\/a>.  The conference is also celebrating the 70th birthday of Templeton Prize winner George Ellis.  The conference web-site includes a <a href=\"http:\/\/astroweb1.physics.ox.ac.uk\/~philcosmo2009\/reading.shtml\">page<\/a> showing the book covers of recent multiverse books, noting that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The selection of books shown here (at both the popular and technical level) demonstrate the fact that the notion of the Mutliverse is becoming increasingly mainstream. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ellis has expressed some skepticism about the question of whether the multiverse idea is testable, but, as usual with these Templeton conferences, there seem to be rather few skeptics invited.  On the other hand, there do seem to be quite a few philosophers of science, and some philosophers of religion, (Alex Pruss of Baylor and Robin Collins of Messiah College), which I guess is appropriate.<\/p>\n<p>Sean Carroll, who seems to have overcome his <a href=\"http:\/\/preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com\/2005\/04\/purity-of-essence.html\">earlier qualms<\/a> about Templeton funding, is live-blogging the conference (see <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/09\/20\/philosophy-and-cosmology-slow-live-blogging\/\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/09\/21\/philosophy-and-cosmology-day-two\/\">here<\/a>).  He notes that Ellis is worried that the multiverse may be inherently untestable and thus not science, but doesn&#8217;t himself think this is worth worrying about.  Presumably he&#8217;ll continue tomorrow, covering the rest of the conference.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Sean Carroll&#8217;s live-blogging of the Templeton conference is the lead item of the front-page news on their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.templeton.org\/\">web-site<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week the Templeton Foundation is funding yet another conference on the Multiverse, this one is entitled Philosophy of Cosmology 2009: Characterising Science and Beyond. The conference is also celebrating the 70th birthday of Templeton Prize winner George Ellis. The &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2299\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2299"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2312,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299\/revisions\/2312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}