The Limits of Reductionism

When your chain of explanation gets too deep, let me say another reason it breaks down. When we experiment with small parts of the universe, we do experiments over and over again. That's part of the scientific method. You have to reproduce the results of an experiment. But when it comes to the universe as a whole, we can't do that. There's one universe, and it runs one time. We didn't start it. And indeed, in working cosmology in inflationary theory, there's a big issue because you can't separately test hypotheses about the laws from hypotheses about the initial conditions. So we need a new methodology. The second idea is that a good place to look