Closing in on the Cosmos: Cosmology's Rebirth and the Rise of the Dark Matter Problem

2019/03/11 by de Swart, Jaco · 2 citations
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1903.05281

Abstract

Influenced by the renaissance of general relativity that came to pass in the 1950s, the character of cosmology fundamentally changed in the 1960s as it became a well-established empirical science. Although observations went to dominate its practice, extra-theoretical beliefs and principles reminiscent of methodological debates in the 1950s kept playing an important tacit role in cosmological considerations. Specifically, belief in cosmologies that modeled a "closed universe" based on Machian insights remained influential. The rise of the dark matter problem in the early 1970s serves to illustrate this hybrid methodological character of cosmological science.

Cited by

• Evidential Reconfiguration as Bayesian Confirmation For Dark Matter in 1974: How Existing Data Become Evidence in New Structures
• Why did the dark matter hypothesis supersede modified gravity in the 1980s?

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