Date of Award

2019

Abstract

I discuss the current literature on the scientificity of cosmology as a field of study, and I include a literary and historical analysis of quantum physics as well as a brief discussion on intelligent design to motivate an operationalization of measurement of the categorical variables predictive power - by dividing it into 4 types - and falsifiability or rejectability of models - by dividing it into 3 types. I then perform the methods on 20 randomly chosen studies from cosmology and 20 randomly chosen studies from quantum physics. The data, while mostly a proof of concept, suggest that there are more studies in quantum physics with new testable predictions (type III), while there are more studies in cosmology that propose models which do currently agree with observed data, but that are prone to falsification due to low precision in known constants in cosmology. Meanwhile, there are less studies in quantum physics that reject models than in cosmology, but both fields have low rates of model rejection according to the data.

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