Abstract
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to researchers from the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search Team for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. In this paper, I provide a historical analysis of the supernova cosmology evidence put forward by these teams for the accelerating universe, in terms of an iterative model of scientific progress developed by Hasok Chang in the context of his study of the development of measurement standards. I argue, using the key concept of epistemic iteration, that the iterative model adequately accounts for evidence production in experimental science as well. In order to apply Chang’s model to the experimental evidence for the accelerating universe, I introduce the concept of endorsement as a particular mode of progress, and argue that supernova scientists produced an endorsed measurement system to claim evidence for their discovery. Furthermore, I show that the credibility of the evidence was not based on a particular measurement, rather, what proved to be decisive was the “robust consistency” of many individual results.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
These scientists were Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt from the High-z, and Saul Perlmutter from the SCP.
I intend the endorsement framework as providing a “descriptive account” (borrowing a term from Sullivan (2008)) of how the accelerating universe result was justified by the supernova cosmologists.
My usage of the term “experimental system” follows Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s understanding of it. For Rheinberger, experimental systems are “the smallest integral working units of research,” which scientists manipulate to generate new knowledge (Rheinberger 1997, 28).
To be clear, I do not claim that enrichment or self-correction do not play a role in experimental science. They certainly do. My claim is rather that they are insufficient to account for the transition of a measurement system from a pre-evidential stage to the evidential one.
As one reviewer pointed out, the distinction between “knowledge of the target system” and the “knowledge of the measurement system” may not always be clear-cut. One possible example for this might be the modeling of quantum mechanical measurement processes, in which the measurement apparatus and the target system are treated as a single entangled system. But even in quantum mechanics, I would submit, one starts out with a clear distinction between the apparatus and the system to be measured, and the knowledge that pertain to them. An example for this would be relying on the Schrödinger equation as the correct description of the time development of unobserved particles, while testing for the violations of Bell inequalities. Rheinberger also introduces a similar distinction, between the objects of inquiry that he refers to as “epistemic things,” and the “experimental conditions,” or “technical objects” within which they are studied. Even though he recognizes that this distinction is contextual, in that a “sufficiently stabilized” epistemic object can function as a technical object within an experimental system, he still submits that “their distinctness is clearly perceived in scientific practice” (Rheinberger 1997, 29,30). In line with Rheinberger, my claim is not that this distinction is structurally fixed, but rather in plenty of cases of experimental research, we see that the practitioners do employ a form of it.
Hence, this is a two step procedure: The right conditions for the experiment cannot be known a priori, but require many iterative corrections to be found out. Once the experimental conditions are established, actually implementing them requires further iterative trials
The K-correction is a relativistic term that needs to be calculated in order to “compare the magnitudes and light curves of objects of different redshifts” (Hamuy et al. 1993b, 787). Even though the K-correction is fundamentally a technical issue with a straightforward interpretation, it is an essential part of the formalism of supernova cosmology.
Note that, this set of conditions need not be unique. Thus, two experimental teams working on the same measurement may delineate different sets of accessibility conditions depending on the particular experimental system that they work with. On the other hand, a single team may also choose to vary the specific conditions in order to make their access optimal. For example, if the standardization method is not trustworthy, one can opt for a different search strategy to increase the number of detected supernova, or, if one cannot sufficiently reduce the biases due to the K-correction, one can chose to use additional filters for color.
To repeat, what is at stake in endorsement is not an enhancement of a theoretical virtue such as scope or precision, but the establishment of an experimental system that satisfies the accessibility requirements of the measurement for the target phenomena. Although the construction of the measurement system requires many iterative enrichments, endorsement need not involve any enrichment, as it essentially involves coordinating the different components of the system in such a way that the target becomes accessible.
I use the term “authority” due its normative connotation, following Robert Brandom. In his Making it Explicit, Brandom proposes to explain authority of norms over a community as due to the fact that rules that members of a (rational) community endorse become binding for them. As he writes, “our own acknowledgement or endorsement of a rule is the source of its authority over us… ” (Brandom 1998, 51). In the context of experimental knowledge, what I referred to as the necessary conditions for the execution of the measurement can be seen as norms that are delineated by the scientists. Once the experimental system is judged to obey these norms, i.e., the requirements that the experimentalists delineate in the course of their inquiry are verified to be met by the experimental system, the resulting system is endorsed as evidential, and thereby gains authority for the scientific community.
In a recent paper proposing an iterative account of data processing, Sabina Leonelli reaches a similar conclusion concerning how data constitutes evidence. Using the concept of evidential space, understood as the “range of phenomena” for which a given body of “data could plausibly serve as evidence,” she writes: “The very process of defining what constitutes acceptable evidence helps researchers to narrow their investigative focus to specific phenomena of interest within that target system … Procedures of data production and processing thus define the evidential space …” (Leonelli 2019, 22). The concept of endorsement aims to capture the normative mechanics of this very process of “defining the evidential space” within empirical practice.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences attested to this fact in the text that accompanied the Nobel Prize announcement, providing the scientific background to the discovery of the accelerating universe: “The fact that both groups independently presented similar - albeit extraordinary - results was a crucial aspect for their acceptance within the physics and astronomy community” (NobelPrize.org 2019, 10, emphasis added).
Until its re-naming in 1983, the Hubble Space Telescope was referred to as the “Space Telescope.” For an early history of its construction, written by one of the pioneers of the project, see Spitzer (1979).
Before the discovery of dark energy, the majority of cosmologists believed that the expansion of the universe was slowing down, due to the attractive nature of gravity. The deceleration parameter (q0) quantified the rate of this slowing down of the universe.
Initially, supernovae were thought to be two types, and it was the Type I supernovae that were the considered to be the best standard candle candidates. In around 1985, Type I supernovae were further classified into Type Ia and Ib, and it was understood that the Type Ia’s were the homogeneous objects (relative to Ib’s) to serve as potential standard candles.
mpg stands for the apparent photographic magnitude.
The term “evolution” denotes the possible difference between supernova in the early universe (high-redshift), and more recent (low redshift) ones.
Malmquist bias is a selection effect that stems from the fact that astronomical observations tend to detect intrinsically bright objects compared to faint ones. It was first described by Karl Gunnar Malmquist in 1922 (Malmquist 1922).
In Hubble’s classification of galaxies, the letter “E” denotes elliptical, and the letter “S” denotes spiral galaxies. “S0” denotes an intermediate type between the E and S classes.
For the comparison images of clusters, the Danish scientists contacted two astronomers at Durham University, namely Richard Ellis and his post-doc, Warrick Couch. These scientists had obtained a big catalogue of clusters for a red-shift survey they were conducting. After Ellis offered to collaborate on the supernova cosmology project, the scientists agreed to “take it in turns to go to Chile,” and image the clusters every month (Richard Ellis, oral history interview with the author).
Coma is a large cluster of galaxies. The idea here is that as the scientists used Tammann’s calculation of supernova occurrence rate, which was based on the assumption that the clusters they observe resemble Coma, the failure of this assumption may be one reason why the expected number of supernovae was not observed.
The notion of “exploratory experimentation” was independently introduced by Richard Burian and Friedrich Steinle as a type of experimentation distinct from a theory-driven one. (Steinle 1997; Burian 1997). For further examination of this concept in the context of cases taken from biology, and particle physics, see Franklin (2005), and (Karaca 2013), respectively.
Being found in the galaxy cluster AC118, the supernova was referred to by the same name.
Even though Ellis found their result encouraging for continuing the project, to his disappointment, the Danish scientists disagreed. Nørgaard-Nielsen and his colleagues thought that the project was too demanding to continue, and showing that supernova cosmology was in principle a feasible endeavor was satisfactory enough for them. As it was “their telescope,” and “they got the observing time,” it was not possible for Ellis and Couch to continue without the Danish scientists (Richard Ellis, oral history interview with the author). The Danish-Durham supernova project ended in 1989.
Here ΩM denotes the mass density of the universe, and ΩΛ denotes the density parameter of the cosmological constant.
The error introduced by the subtraction process can be measured by applying it galaxies which contain no supernova. In this case, the subtraction of the galaxy light should give a flat light-curve. Deviations from this ideal case show the scientists how much error is introduced.
Hubble Space Telescope.
The raw supernova data for each object must be “standardized” since not all supernova have exactly the same brightness. This is a technically important point but further explication is beyond the scope of this paper. The method SCP used for supernova standardization is known as the “stretch” method, as this involved stretching the width of a template light curve to fit individual objects.
In other words, in supernova cosmology, each value of the parameters (ΩM,ΩΛ) correspond to a different model of the universe. Thus, in (Fig. 1) each point in the graph corresponds to a model of the universe.
i.e., the stretching of the template.
As the leader of the SCP, Saul Perlmutter, put to me in an oral history interview: “What it felt like was constant iteration and revision, so there was learning from error all the time.”
Although submitted a few months before Riess’s, Schmidt’s paper appeared last in print. Schmidt drafted the paper in 1997, yet its completion and submission was delayed due to many responsibilities he had within the group (Schmidt 2007).
The paper was published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. According to its website, this journal “is a peer-reviewed express scientific journal that allows astrophysicists to rapidly publish short notices of significant original research” (APJ 2018).
A very similar relationship exists for the SCP papers as well.
The High-z used two prescriptions for light curve fitting, known as the Multicolor Light-Curve Shapes (MLCS) and the template-fitting methods. The former was formulated by Adam Riess in his doctoral thesis, and the latter was utilized by the members of the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey, some of whom later joined the High-z. Calán/Tololo was a supernova search conducted at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory during the years 1990-1996 (Hamuy et al. 1993a).
According to Chang, epistemic iteration differs from computational iteration in two crucial ways. First, “the latter is used to approach the correct answer that is known, or at least in principle knowable, by other means” (Chang 2004, 45). And second, as opposed to epistemic iteration, “mathematical iteration relies on a single algorithm to produce all successive approximations…” (Chang 2004, 46). As the computation of the K-correction is not “in principle” knowable by other means, and many different algorithms must be innovated depending on the particular filter system that one uses, an epistemic iteration underlies the computational one in this case.
The idea expressed here can be understood as follows: On the two-dimensional parameter space, there are regions which contain parameter values that correspond to different types of universes, such as decelerating universes, re-collapsing universes etc. In order to quantify these regions probabilistically, one needs a function that can assign a probability value to each point on the parameter space. This is achieved with the use of the Bayes’ theorem.
According to Hudson, the supernova cosmologists employed a form of reasoning that he calls “reliable process reasoning,” which involves “targeted testing.” Whereas robustness deduces the reliability of a process, or a result, from the convergence of the test outcomes, reliable process reasoning “assumes the reliability of a process and then, on this basis, infers the truth of an observed result” (Hudson 2013, 68). Targeted testing is a form of reliable process reasoning in which scientists decide between two competing hypotheses by targeting a specific aspect of the empirical situation that is sufficient to break the underdetermination. The assessment of Hudson’s arguments against robustness in general, as well as the issue of whether “targeted testing” does capture the reasoning of the two teams’ is beyond the scope of this paper. Here, my modest aim is to show that a form of robustness argument played a significant role in the argument of both of the teams—and justifiably so.
Strictly speaking, this “convergence” cannot be characterized as robust detection, as these results are not the same. The supernova data constrains ΩM −ΩΛ, whereas the CMB measurements quantify ΩM + ΩΛ. Finally, the galaxy cluster measurements were made with the assumption that ΩΛ = 0. Due to this reason, the SCP referred to these results as “complementary” and the High-z characterized them as “orthogonal” to their results, and did not invoke a robustness claim.
This acronym stands for “massive (astrophysical) compact halo object,” a hypothetical candidate for dark matter.
I discussed how the group presented this improvement, and its consequences for their measurement program, in Section 3.2 above.
(Basso 2017) analyses measurements of migraine prevalence and material poverty by social and behavioral scientists, and argues that scientists can avoid basing their robustness claim on a “simple convergence of the measurement results,” by examining the “fit between the expected and actual convergence” of their results (Basso 2017, 58). This is compatible with my account, as the construction of the robust data acquisition procedure requires an endorsed measurement system, which, in turn, depends on assessing the “fit” between the system and the target phenomena. In each case, a robustness claim requires the assessment of whether a measurement system behaves as it should.
In a paper examining the issue of interpreting and validating raw-data produced by a new technique, Gandenberger identifies an argumentative strategy that can be seen as aimed at constructing a robust data acquisition procedure. This strategy, which he refers to as “direct causal inference,” was used by the scientists Erlanger and Gasser to demonstrate that their cathode-ray oscillograph “could follow rapidly changing voltages with fidelity” (Gandenberger 2010, 388). In order to test this, the scientists varied the voltages applied to the apparatus, using AC currents, constant voltages, or brief voltage spikes (Gandenberger 2010, 388-389). Similarly, in another test of the reliability of their apparatus, scientists varied the pressure applied to nerves and recorded the resulting voltage changes in the nerve (Gandenberger 2010, 390). In each of these cases, that the outcome of the tests were “as expected constituted a successful experimental check of their apparatus for rapidly changing voltages” (Gandenberger 2010, 388). Even though Gandenberger situates direct causal inference within the general context of experimental strategies that Franklin refers to as “the epistemology of experiment,” introducing variations in inputs to check whether the apparatus functions as intended indicates that a robust procedure strategy was in play as well (Franklin 2002, 2-6).
Recall that Adam Riess also alluded to this distinction in his interview when he compared the two light-curve fitting methods of the High-z giving consistent results, with both teams obtaining the same result.
An example to illustrate this distinction between robustness and robust consistency is the contemporary measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe, known as the Hubble constant. Here several distinct and robust measurement protocols, including supernova, cosmic microwave background, and gravitational lensing measurements, give inconsistent results, at the 4.4σ level (Riess et al. 2019). Instead of choosing the “most reliable” of these measurements, and declaring the Hubble constant problem to be solved, scientists talk about a “Hubble tension,” and suspect that new physics might be lurking behind the discrepancy (ibid.) This indicates that for cosmologists consistency between individually robust measurements is required before a measurement result can be deemed conclusive.
Another example that illustrates the distinction is the 1995 discovery of the top quark. There were two experimental teams involved in the search for the top quark, namely, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), and the DZero (DØ), collaborations. As (Staley 2004a) demonstrates, the CDF group resorted to robustness arguments as part of their evidence claim for the top quark (robust detection.) This is distinct from the fact that both teams reported evidence for the top quark on the basis of their separate data, and methods of analysis (robust consistency.)
See Section (3.5.2).
References
Abbott, T.M.C., & et al. (2018). Dark Energy Survey year 1 results: Cosmological constraints from galaxy clustering and weak lensing. Physical Review D, 98, 043526.
APJ. (2018). The Astrophysical Journal Letters. http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205. Accessed: 02-03-2020.
Barwich, A.-S., & Chang, H. (2015). Sensory measurements: Coordination and standardization. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A.
Basso, A. (2017). The appeal to robustness in measurement practice. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 65-66, 57–66. The Making of Measurement.
Brandom, R.B. (1998). Making it explicit: reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Burian, R.M. (1997). Exploratory experimentation and the role of histochemical techniques in the work of jean brachet, 1938-1952. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 19(1), 27–45.
Calcott, B. (2011). Wimsatt and the robustness family: Review of wimsatt’s re-engineering philosophy for limited beings. Biology and Philosophy, 26(2), 281–293.
Chang, H. (2004). Inventing temperature: measurement and scientific progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chuang, C.-H., Prada, F., Cuesta, A.J., Eisenstein, D.J., Kazin, E., Padmanabhan, N., Sànchez, A. G., Xu, X., Beutler, F., Manera, M., Schlegel, D.J., Schneider, D.P., Weinberg, D.H., Brinkmann, J., Brownstein, J.R., Thomas, D. (2013). The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements and the strong power of f(z)σ8(z) on constraining dark energy. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 433 (4), 3559–3571.
Collins, H. (2004). Gravity’s shadow: the search for gravitational waves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Franklin, A. (1986). The neglect of experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Franklin, A. (2002). Selectivity and discord: two problems of experiment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Franklin, L. (2005). Exploratory experiments. Philosophy of Science, 72(5), 888–899.
Galison, P. (1987). How experiments end. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gandenberger, G.S. (2010). Producing a robust body of data with a single technique*. Philosophy of Science, 77(3), 381–399.
Garnavich, P.M., Kirshner, R.P., Challis, P., Tonry, J., Gilliland, R.L., Smith, R.C., Clocchiatti, A., Diercks, A., Filippenko, A.V., Hamuy, M., Hogan, C.J., Leibundgut, B., Phillips, M.M., Reiss, D., Riess, A.G., Schmidt, B.P., Schommer, R.A., Spyromilio, J., Stubbs, C., Suntzeff, N.B., Wells, L. (1998). Constraints on cosmological models from hubble space telescope observations of High-z supernovae. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 493, L53–L57.
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and intervening: introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hamuy, M., Maza, J., Phillips, M.M., Suntzeff, N.B., Wischnjewsky, M., Smith, R.C., Antezana, R., Wells, L.A., Gonzalez, L.E., Gigoux, P., Navarrete, M., Barrientos, F., Lamontagne, R., della Valle, M., Elias, J.E., Phillips, A.C., Odewahn, S.C., Baldwin, J.A., Walker, A.R., Williams, T., Sturch, C.R., Baganoff, F.K., Chaboyer, B.C., Schommer, R. A., Tirado, H., Hernandez, M., Ugarte, P., Guhathakurta, P., Howell, S. B., Szkody, P., Schmidtke, P. C., Roth, J. (1993a). The 1990 Calan/Tololo Supernova Search. The Astronomical Journal, 106, 2392–2407.
Hamuy, M., Phillips, M.M., Wells, L.A., Maza, J. (1993b). K corrections for type IA supernovae. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 105, 787–793.
Hansen, L., Jorgensen, H.E., Norgaard-Nielsen, H.U. (1987). Search for supernovae in distant clusters of galaxies. The Messenger, 47, 46–49.
Hudson, R.G. (1999). Mesosomes: a study in the nature of experimental reasoning. Philosophy of Science, 66(2), 289–309.
Hudson, R.G. (2009). The methodological strategy of robustness in the context of experimental wimp research. Foundations of Physics, 39(2), 174–193.
Hudson, R.G. (2013). Seeing things: the philosophy of reliable observation. London: Oxford University Press.
Karaca, K. (2013). The strong and weak senses of Theory-Ladenness of experimentation: Theory-Driven versus exploratory experiments in the history of High-Energy particle physics, Science in Context, 93–136.
Karaca, K. (2018). Two senses of experimental robustness: result robustness and procedure robustness. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
Knop, R.A., Aldering, G., Amanullah, R., Astier, P., Blanc, G., Burns, M.S., Conley, A., Deustua, S.E., Doi, M., Ellis, R., Fabbro, S., Folatelli, G., Fruchter, A.S., Garavini, G., Garmond, S., Garton, K., Gibbons, R., Goldhaber, G., Goobar, A., Groom, D.E., Hardin, D., Hook, I., Howell, D.A., Kim, A.G., Lee, B.C., Lidman, C., Mendez, J., Nobili, S., Nugent, P.E., Pain, R., Panagia, N., Pennypacker, C.R., Perlmutter, S., Quimby, R., Raux, J., Regnault, N., Ruiz-Lapuente, P., Sainton, G., Schaefer, B., Schahmaneche, K., Smith, E., Spadafora, A.L., Stanishev, V., Sullivan, M., Walton, N.A., Wang, L., Wood-Vasey, W.M., Yasuda, N. (2003). New constraints on ΩM, ΩΛ, and w from an independent set of 11 High-Redshift supernovae observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. Astrophysical Journal, 598, 102–137.
Kuorikoski, J., & Marchionni, C. (2016). Evidential diversity and the triangulation of phenomena. Philosophy of Science, 83(2), 227–247.
Leonelli, S. (2019). What distinguishes data from models? European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 9(2), 22.
Malmquist, K.G. (1922). On some relations in stellar statistics. Meddelanden fran Lunds Astronomiska Observatorium Serie, I(100), 1–52.
Mayo, D. (2005). Evidence as passing severe tests: highly probable versus highly probed hypotheses, pp. 95–128. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
NobelPrize.org. (2019). Advanced Information. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/advanced-physicsprize2011-1.pdf. Accessed: 02-03-2020.
Norgaard-Nielsen, H.U., Hansen, L., Jorgensen, H.E., Aragon Salamanca, A., Ellis, R.S. (1989). The discovery of a type IA supernova at a redshift of 0.31. Nature, 339, 523–525.
Nugent, P., Kim, A., Perlmutter, S. (2002). K-Corrections and extinction corrections for type ia supernovae. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 114, 803–819.
Perlmutter, S., Gabi, S., Goldhaber, G., Goobar, A., Groom, D.E., Hook, I.M., Kim, A.G., Kim, M.Y., Lee, J.C., Pain, R., Pennypacker, C.R., Small, I.A., Ellis, R.S., McMahon, R.G., Boyle, B.J., Bunclark, P.S., Carter, D., Irwin, M.J., Glazebrook, K., Newberg, H.J.M., Filippenko, A.V., Matheson, T., Dopita, M., Couch, W.J. (1997). Measurements of the cosmological parameters Ω and Λ from the First Seven Supernovae at z ≥ 0.35. Astrophysical Journal, 483, 565–581.
Perlmutter, S., Aldering, G., della Valle, M., Deustua, S., Ellis, R.S., Fabbro, S., Fruchter, A., Goldhaber, G., Groom, D.E., Hook, I.M., Kim, A.G., Kim, M.Y., Knop, R.A., Lidman, C., McMahon, R.G., Nugent, P., Pain, R., Panagia, N., Pennypacker, C.R., Ruiz-Lapuente, P., Schaefer, B., Walton, N. (1998). Discovery of a supernova explosion at half the age of the universe. Nature, 391, 51.
Perlmutter, S., Aldering, G., Goldhaber, G., Knop, R., Nugent, P., Castro, P., Deustua, S., Fabbro, S., Goobar, A., Groom, D., et al. (1999). Measurements of Ω and Λ from 42 High-redshift Supernovae. The Astrophysical Journal, 517(2), 565.
Planck Collaboration, Aghanim, N., et al. (2018). Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters. ArXiv e-prints.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997). Toward a history of epistemic things: synthesizing proteins in the test tube (writing science). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Riess, A.G. (2017). Nobel Lecture: My Path to the Accelerating Universe. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/riess_lecture.pdf [Online; accessed October, 2011.
Riess, A.G., Casertano, S., Yuan, W., Macri, L.M., Scolnic, D. (2019). Large magellanic cloud cepheid standards provide a 1% foundation for the determination of the hubble constant and stronger evidence for physics beyond Λ CDM. The Astrophysical Journal, 876(1), 85.
Riess, A.G., Filippenko, A.V., Challis, P., Clocchiatti, A., Diercks, A., Garnavich, P.M., Gilliland, R.L., Hogan, C.J., Jha, S., Kirshner, R.P., Leibundgut, B., Phillips, M.M., Reiss, D., Schmidt, B.P., Schommer, R.A., Smith, R.C., Spyromilio, J., Stubbs, C., Suntzeff, N.B., Tonry, J. (1998). Observational evidence from supernovae for an accelerating universe and a cosmological constant. The Astronomical Journal, 116(3), 1009.
Riess, A.G., Filippenko, A.V., Liu, M.C., Challis, P., Clocchiatti, A., Diercks, A., Garnavich, P.M., Hogan, C.J., Jha, S., Kirshner, R.P., Leibundgut, B., Phillips, M.M., Reiss, D., Schmidt, B.P., Schommer, R.A., Smith, R.C., Spyromilio, J., Stubbs, C., Suntzeff, N.B., Tonry, J., Woudt, P., Brunner, R.J., Dey, A., Gal, R., Graham, J., Larkin, J., Odewahn, S.C., Oppenheimer, B. (2000). Tests of the accelerating universe with Near-Infrared observations of a High-Redshift type IA supernova. The Astrophysical Journal, 536, 62–67.
Riess, A.G., Nugent, P.E., Gilliland, R.L., Schmidt, B.P., Tonry, J., Dickinson, M., Thompson, R.I., Budavarí, T., Casertano, S., Evans, A.S., Filippenko, A.V., Livio, M., Sanders, D.B., Shapley, A.E., Spinrad, H., Steidel, C.C., Stern, D., Surace, J., Veilleux, S. (2001). The farthest known supernova: support for an accelerating universe and a glimpse of the epoch of deceleration. The Astrophysical Journal, 560, 49–71.
Riess, A.G., Strolger, L.-G., Tonry, J., Casertano, S., Ferguson, H.C., Mobasher, B., Challis, P., Filippenko, A.V., Jha, S., Li, W., Chornock, R., Kirshner, R.P., Leibundgut, B., Dickinson, M., Livio, M., Giavalisco, M., Steidel, C.C., Benítez, T., Tsvetanov, Z. (2004). Type Ia supernova discoveries at z > 1 from the Hubble Space Telescope: evidence for past deceleration and constraints on dark energy evolution. The Astrophysical Journal, 607, 665–687.
Sandage, A. (1961). The ability of the 200–INCH telescope to discriminate between selected world models. Astrophysical Journal, 133, 355.
Schmidt, B. (2007). Interview of brian schmidt by ursula pavlish. Niels bohr library & archives, american institute of physics, college park, MD USA. Conducted at the california institute of technology, July 25.
Schmidt, B.P., Suntzeff, N.B., Phillips, M.M., Schommer, R.A., Clocchiatti, A., Kirshner, R.P., Garnavich, P., Challis, P., Leibundgut, B., et al. (1998). The High-z supernova search: measuring cosmic deceleration and global curvature of the universe using Type Ia supernovae. The Astrophysical Journal, 507(1), 46.
Schupbach, J.N. (2018). Robustness analysis as explanatory reasoning. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 69, 275–300.
Soler, L., Nickles, T., Trizio, E., Wimsatt, W.C. (2012). Characterizing the robustness of science: after the practice turn in philosophy of science. Dordrecht: Springer.
Spitzer, L. Jr. (1979). History of the space telescope. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 20, 29.
Staley, K. (2004a). Robust evidence and secure evidence claims. Philosophy of Science, 71(4), 467–488.
Staley, K. (2004b). The evidence for the top quark: objectivity and bias in collaborative experimentation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Staley, K. (2018). Securing the empirical value of measurement results. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
Stegenga, J., & Menon, T. (2017). Robustness and independent evidence. Philosophy of Science, 84, 414–435.
Steinle, F. (1997). Entering new fields: exploratory uses of experimentation. Philosophy of science, 64, supplement, Proceedings of the 1996 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association: S65–S74.
Steinle, F. (2016). Exploratory experiments: ampère, faraday, and the origins of electrodynamics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Sullivan, J.A. (2008). The multiplicity of experimental protocols: a challenge to reductionist and non-reductionist models of the unity of neuroscience. Synthese, 167 (3), 511.
Tal, E. (2016). Making time: a study in the epistemology of measurement. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 297–335.
Tammann, G.A. (1979). Cosmology with the space telescope. In Macchetto, F., Pacini, F., Tarenghi, M. (Eds.) ESA/ESO Workshop on Astronomical Uses of the Space Telescope.
Wimsatt, W.C. (2007). Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Woodward, J. (2000). Data, phenomena, and reliability. Philosophy of Science, 67, S163–S179.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Guralp, G. The Evidence for the accelerating universe: endorsement and robust consistency. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 10, 21 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-0276-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-0276-2