"Sherlock Holmes, Smoking Guns, and Consilience: The Methodology of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics"
In this talk I will analyse the epistemic situation and epistemic resources of gravitational-wave astrophysics in light of the new “multi-messenger” era in astronomy. The main goal will be to provide a philosophical analysis of the arguments that are made on the basis of multi-messenger observations—that is, observations of a single event via multiple “messengers”, such as electromagnetic and gravitational radiation—and how these differ from what is possible on the basis of gravitational wave (or electromagnetic) observations alone. In doing so, I draw on analogies with historical sciences such as geology and palaeontology and recent philosophical work explicating the methods of these sciences.
Jamee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University and recent graduate of the HPS program.
For more information, including the Zoom meeting ID, please contact Sam Hall (shall9@nd.edu).
Originally published at reilly.nd.edu.