Thank you for your interesting questions. The standard view is that space and time (or, more accurately, spacetime -- since space and time are not independent entities according to the theory of relativity) came into existence with the Big Bang. So there was no time before the Big Bang. So the laws of physics were not existing before the Big Bang, just waiting to come into force. However, there is a sense in which many laws of physics are waiting to come into force. Suppose it is a law of physics that two electrical point charges of 1.234 statcoulombs and 5.678 statcoulombs, at a distance of 1 centimeter, exert upon each other a mutually repulsive force of 10.234 dynes. There was presumably a first moment in the history of the universe when there were two point charges of those quantities, 1 centimeter apart. (Or perhaps there has never yet been such a moment. Perhaps there never ever will be two such point charges in the entire history of the universe.) The law governing two such point...

Hello Helen from Worcester! Thank you for your excellent questions! Let's start with whether the universe is infinite. The answer is: We don't know! But suppse it is NOT infinite. Then what is outside of it? Perhaps the answer is that there is no such thing as "outside" of it. The universe consists of all of space and time. An "outside" would be a location -- in space -- that is outside of the universe -- and so outside of all space. That is a contradiction, right? (It would be in space and outside of space at the same, um, time.) Suppose that the universe is not infinite. Suppose you head off in your spaceship in a particular direction, and just keep going straight. Since the universe is not infinite, will you eventually get to a wall that you cannot penetrate: the edge of the universe? No! Instead, you might just find yourself approaching the place from which you started, but from the opposite direction. Space might be curved so that there is only a finite amount of it, but there is no edge...

This is a difficult question. Different philosophers of science have different opinions regarding how much background in science one needs to do good philosophy of science. In the olden days, less scientific background was needed than is the case today. A great deal of philosophy of science today presumes considerable scientific literacy. However, it is frequently not the kind of literacy that is especially fostered by taking science courses or reading science textbooks. Furthermore, different philosophers of science will specialize in different areas. Some areas require less technical knowledge of science, others more. Someone who works on the philosophical ramifications of relativistic quantum field theory obviously needs to know a good deal about relativistic quantum field theory. On the other hand, someone who works on the philosophical ramifications of 19th century electromagnetic field theory does not need to know about relativistic quantum field theory. But she needs to know about 19th...

Whether the "law of parsimony" works depends on what it says. Broadly speaking, it says that we should prefer a simpler explanation over a complicated explanation of some phenomenon, all other things being equal. This leaves a lot unspecified: What makes one explanation simpler than another? What does it take for one fact to explain another? What are the "other things" and what does it take for them to be "equal"? What does "prefer" mean? (Believe? Believe more likely to be true? Adopt as a working hypothesis?) Leaving all of that to one side, there will certainly be cases where the simpler explanation turns out to be false. Suppose a patient has a large collection of symptoms. Perhaps there is one disease that often produces just that collection of symptoms. But there may also be a pair of diseases, the first of which often produces the first half of those symptoms and the second of which often produces the second half. Arguably, parsimony favors the first hypothesis: that all of the symptoms...

That is a great question! Of course, all of the relations among the parts of my right hand are the same as the relations among the parts of my left hand. (We might have to imagine slightly idealized hands here, since someone might happen to have a cut on their right hand but not on their left.) But there are relations to external things that differ between your right and left hands. For instance, my left hand is currently nearer to the "a" key on my typewriter than my right hand is. Because my hands can stand in different relations to other things, I can learn which is "right" and which is "left". For example, my mother presumably held my right hand and not my left when she said "That's your right hand, Marc." In this way, I learned which of my hands was "right". However, let's turn from the question of how we know which hand is right and which is left (an epistemological question -- a question about knowledge) and ask a metaphysical question (a question about reality). Suppose there were a...

Someone who plays the lottery more than once stands a greater chance of winning than someone who plays it on only one occasion. Compare: The chance of rolling "six" once with a fair die is greater if you roll the die twice than if you roll it once. The chance of your rolling "six" on one toss is (naturally!) 1/6. Your chance of rolling "six" once in two tosses is 1 minus your chance of rolling 1-5 on the first toss and 1-5 on the second toss, i.e., 1 - (5/6)(5/6), which equals 11/36 -- which is 5/36 more than 1/6. However, you said that given enough trials of the lottery (having a finite number of tickets), every ticket will eventually win. That's not true. It's like saying that if you are tossing a fair coin, then it is guaranteed that a head will eventually appear. That's not true. You *could* get all tails. As the number of throws increases, the chance of getting all tails diminishes, and with an infinite number of throws, the chance of getting all tails is zero. But that does not mean that it...

Generally, when philosophers write about scientific reasoning, they are interested in how scientists (or, more broadly, how anyone) ought to reason. For example, they might be interested in specifying what it takes for a piece of evidence to count in favor of a given hypothesis, and why certain pieces of evidence should count for more than others. They are generally not interested in explaining why scientists in fact regarded a given piece of evidence as counting for more (that's for historians to figure out) except insofar as this explanation goes via some account of why that piece of evidence *should* have counted for more. It is sometimes said that philosophers are trying to give a "rational reconstruction" of scientific reasoning. But the history of science is not at all irrelevant to this task. For example, any account of scientific reasoning that regards as unjustified some renowned episode of scientific reasoning has a great (though not impossible) hurdle to climb, just as any...

I have heard this said as well. In the history of science, there are many examples in which several researchers independently came up with the same new idea. Schrodinger and Heisenberg independently came up with the same theory (quantum mechanics) and presented it in such different forms that someone else (Born) had to figure out that they were equivalent. Darwin and Wallace (both from reading Malthus!) independently came up with the theory of natural selection. Adams and LeVerrier independently predicted the existence of the planet Neptune. Lavoisier and Priestley independently discovered oxygen. The examples are legion. These cases of simultaneous discovery are good evidence that once a problem reaches a certain point, it is widely recognized as a problem and the same solution would soon have been found even if the actual discoverer had not found it. Einstein's theories of special and general relativity are sometimes cited as exceptions to this general rule. One reason for this view is that the ...

Good question. I'm not sure that there's any answer "science aside", since the notion of being a member of a given biological species (in this case, some sort of rabbit) is a scientific concept. It is up to science to tell us what species are, whether there are any such things, why they arise and go extinct, and so forth. One popular conception of a biological species is that a species is a group of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups. In other words, members of the same species form a united gene pool, so that a beneficial adaptation appearing in that pool could spread throughout it, whereas barriers prevent its spreading outside of the species. On this view, which is obviously motivated by evolutionary considerations, the mere fact that the creature you have mentioned differs from all (other) rabbits in possessing certain genes that allow it to glow in the dark does not rule out the possibility that it is a...

Many beginning students of philosophy are led to ask questions of this kind. I can sympathize: a philosophy course can seem to consist of arguments and counterarguments, intuitions and counterexamples, with no final resolution offered to any of the questions taken up, and simply an array of failed proposals littering the playing field. How depressing. But any course that leaves students with this impression has failed. Utterly. Arguments and counterarguments, intuitions and counterexamples reveal a lot that was not known before. A good counterexample can reveal features of the phenomenon that would never otherwise have been noticed. So even if the philosophical theory that has been "counterexampled" has thereby been defeated, we come away from the process learning something important that we did not know before. Such is certainly the case with, for instance, Gettier counterexamples to theories of knowledge as justified-true-belief, or counterexamples to various simple counterfactual theories...