Experimentation in cosmology: Intervening on the whole universe

Abstract

There are many arguments against the possibility of experimenting on the whole universe. This system seems to be too big to be manipulated, it exists in only one exemplar and its evolution is a non-repeatable process. In this paper, I claim that we can nonetheless talk about experimentation in cosmology if we use Woodward’s non-anthropocentric notion of intervention. However, Woodward and other interventionists argued that an intervention was necessarily an exogenous causal process and thus that no intervention on a closed system such as the universe was possible. I discuss their argument and I determine the conditions under which a consistent notion of endogenous intervention on the universe can be defined. Then, I show that there is at least one cosmic phenomenon satisfying these conditions: the photon decoupling. Finally, I draw some conclusions from this analysis regarding a realist approach of cosmology.