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What Is a Physically Reasonable Space-Time?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

John Byron Manchak
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Abstract

Cosmologists often use certain global properties to exclude “physically unreasonable” cosmological models from serious consideration. But, on what grounds should these properties be regarded as physically unreasonable if we cannot rule out, even with a robust type of inductive reasoning, the possibility of the properties obtaining in our own universe?

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 410 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I am grateful to Jeff Barrett, Bob Geroch, David Malament, John Norton, and Kyle Stanford for comments on an earlier draft. I also wish to thank audiences at Pittsburgh and Oxford for valuable discussions.

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