Part 2: The Big Black Dark
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”(14).
Steven Weinberg
The dominant cosmology of this society of atomic individuals goes by the somewhat irreverent moniker ‘The Big Bang’. In its current version, unchanged in essence since its proposal in 1927 by the Jesuit cosmologist Georges Lemaitre(15), the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, popping into existence ex nihilo and exploding outwards with youthful exuberance. The physical motivation for the theory was Edwin Hubble’s observation of the cosmic redshift: that the dimmer a galaxy, the redder its spectrum, a phenomenon explained as the result of Doppler shifting. It is notable that Hubble himself was skeptical, and he was not alone ... yet overall, it has been taken up by scientists, and by society, with great enthusiasm.
Acceptance was not immediate, however: Lemaitre’s theory was widely rejected by scientists, who seem to have taken issue with its notion of a bounded time, a concept common to numerous prescientific cosmologies, from the Chinese Cosmic Egg(16) to Yahweh's 'Let there be light'. After all, what does it mean to speak of a time ‘before time’? How can time itself have had a zero-point? Time – considered either quantitatively or qualitatively – would seem to be impossible without events: there must be some set of differentiated things, which interact with one another, which can in some sense change. None of these concepts can easily be disentangled, and so it is difficult to envisage how any event might transpire in a state in which time (and thus, space and matter) did not exist ... including the first event, the Big Bang itself(17). The alternative is unbounded time, which does not seem any less paradoxical: an infinite stretch of events, a chain of cause and effect without any beginning, renders any question as to the universe’s origin unanswerable. Unbounded time is as inconceivable to the human mind – or at any rate the modern mind, accustomed as it is to neatly structured narratives with a beginning, middle and end – as is the notion of a time before time. Either way it seems we are left with an aporia, and perhaps one must conclude that whether one chooses to believe that time is bounded or unbounded is a matter of personal preference.
In the former case, one obtains certainty regarding both a genesis and, by implication, an eschatology (in the particular case of the Big Bang, either a Big Crunch – a final collapse – or an endless expansion into nothingness). The tradeoff one must make is that certainty dissolves at the boundaries. It is all too tempting to bring in some primum mobile to fill the gap, and while of course this is not in general explicitly invoked by mainstream cosmologists – although there are exceptions, as for instance in the work of Frank Tipler(18) – non-scientists often do this without their permission. Undoubtedly this compatibility with a supernatural creator explains part of the Big Bang's appeal to a public still very much attached to their ancestral deisms(19). Another factor may well be the fundamental similarity between the narrative of the Big Bang and the course of a modern human life: birth, growth, and then death, coming either with sudden violence or at the end of a long decay into entropic senescence ... with impenetrable mystery at either end, an emergence from and disappearance into a singularity that marks the boundaries of one's personal timeline.
Singularities are integral to Big Bang cosmology, and are interesting beasts: mathematical constructs that result from the breakdown of mathematical logic(20), they resist all attempts at logical inquiry. It is tempting to observe that they seem to bear many of the properties of the Cartesian ego: a unitary point from which all of reality is perceived, existing outside of time and space, wholly separate from the material world, in one case the source of all meaning, in the other, the source of all that is. We recall Tarnas' suggestion that heliocentrism prefigured the Cartesian subject, but whereas the Sun is easily located – just as it was once thought the 'seat of the soul' had a physical locus in the brain – the singularity is impossible to pin down: a closer resonance with the modern failure to locate the soul's seat in any one place. And just as the Cartesian subject lends itself all too easily to a solipsism that rejects the validity of alternative viewpoints, a cosmos beginning and ending in singularity insists that the narrative of the universe is fundamentally a single narrative, a totalizing and homogenizing statement that brings everything within a single framework which proceeds with impeccable logic from an untouchable axiom. In just such a way do the various fundamentalisms and totalitarianisms seek to draw all of human history – thus all of humanity, and all of the world – into a single narrative. One thinks of Orwell: “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past.”
In contrast, unbounded time admits no certainty regarding ultimate origins or ultimate fate: the universe just is, and there can be no final explanation. Many explanations are possible – perhaps an infinite number – but none are necessarily privileged over any other. Rather than a single narrative, unbounded time would seem to imply a multiplicity of narratives, woven into one another in an ongoing, mutual intercreation. Such a view of time implies a world that is open-ended, that creates itself anew in every moment, and that will resist forever attempts to fully know or control it, for no sooner is it known, than it changes again. In compensation for this uncertainty, however, one obtains an eternal universe in which there need be no eschatological anxiety.
The certainty allowed by bounded time is far more compatible with the technological project, which, as Charles Eisenstein argues(21), seeks mastery over the processes of nature and thus, necessitates the ability to predict it. The history of modern astrophysics has been one of drawing ever more celestial phenomena within the realm of predictability, as though driven not just by an open-ended curiosity, but by an imperative to establish a cosmic empire of human understanding. The great ambition of a Grand Unified Theory – a description of the universe in an equation that will 'fit on the back of a t-shirt' – would reduce all phenomena to a calculation. The very possibility of this is implicit in the Big Bang, assuming as it does that in some remote past the whole of the universe was contained within a supersymmetric, perfect, and unified point ... small enough to grasp, small enough to control.
In 1946 the Big Bang theory was revived by George Gamow, a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Gamow himself drew a direct analogy between the detonation of a nuclear bomb and that of Lemaitre’s Primeval Atom(22). With so many physicists having recently helped bring mankind into the nuclear age, it is perhaps no surprise that the Big Bang now found purchase with them, for it called upon a set of concepts – a hot, dense state of matter in which otherwise impossible nuclear reactions could take place – with which they were intimately familiar. In similar fashion, perhaps the Big Bang offered the wider culture the chance to sublimate the trauma of the nuclear age: the catastrophic power that had been unleashed in Los Alamos, deployed to such horrific effect in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which threatened (and still threatens) the destruction of all earthly life, could now be considered as not just destroyer but also as creator.
A further resonance is economic, namely the capitalist assumption that economic growth is an endless process. We see this in the expanding universe, a universe which does not expand into anything – for there can be nothing outside of it – but rather creates the expansion inwardly, through the growth of its own internal space, much as economic growth is held to be a consequence, not of the utilization of an ever-greater fraction of the Earth’s resources, but rather of the ever-provident ingenuity of the plucky human mind. This is closely bound up with notions of progress, of an ascent of humanity from the primal darkness of ignorance to the exalted enlightenment of modernity. The narrative of progress resonates with the evolving universe: initially simple, chaotic and homogeneous, later structured and complex ... at the same time, the countervailing shadow narrative of an ongoing fall from some primal state of purity and oneness with nature, is equally well represented, both by the expansion itself, and the splitting of the original superforce into gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Significantly, the balance of light elements created in the Big Bang is referred to as the 'pristine' state, whilst the heavier elements contributed by supernovae are 'pollution'. Finally, mankind’s emergence from the darkness of pre-Enlightenment superstition appears in the epoch Big Bang cosmologists refer to as the ‘cosmic dark age’, a time when the universe was too dense to be transparent. Following the end of this period the horizon of the universe has steadily increased: every year, the maximum distance one might see has increased by a light-year, a concept known as the ‘Hubble volume’.
Let us now consider the stars. Of note is their profound isolation from one another: with the exception of binary systems, stars are separated by so wide a gulf, and are so minute relative to the spaces they inhabit, that even in the densest galactic nuclei they do not interact save by the weakest of gravitational nudges. They are in essence gigantic nuclear furnances, their individual properties and indeed almost every salient event of their lives – how bright they shine, how long they live, how they die – determined at birth, purely by the amount of mass they are able to gather in their protostellar nebulae ... mass which they must compete with other protostars to accrete. While this description predates the Big Bang – it was first put forward by the mathematical physicist Sir Arthur Eddington in 1926(23) – and so is not properly a feature of Big Bang cosmology per se, it is a central feature of astrophysics and deserves inclusion for its close resemblance to liberal individualism: each entity reliant upon its own resources, essentially closed in on and complete within itself, only minimally influenced by its peers. We also see the competition for scarce resources, combined with what almost seems like a genetic determinism, indeed a social darwinism of sorts ... and cannot help but point out that, when the theory was first put forward, eugenics was at the height of its intellectual respectability(24).
Though profoundly isolated, stars are associated in great whirling galaxies, held together by one force, and one force alone: gravity. It is gravity that rules the Big Bang cosmos, which might perhaps be best characterized as a gravitational universe. The only other contender – electromagnetism – is thought to cancel out at large distances, since its effect can be both attractive and repulsive, unlike gravity which is exclusively attractive; thus (while far weaker than electromagnetism), it is gravity which dominates. A cosmos ordered exclusively by this unidirectional force seems strikingly similar to a society governed exclusively by the economic imperatives of supply and demand, where material and labor are deployed always under the direction of the greatest concentration of capital, heading in the direction of greatest capital returns, 'gravitating' towards the lowest prices and highest efficiencies. To what degree is the invisible action of gravity akin to the invisible hand of the market? As mentioned above, Adam Smith himself drew an explicit analogy. While it has generally been assumed that it has been economists who wish to take for themselves some of the prestige of physics, the 'queen of the sciences', one wonders if the insistence of modern cosmology that gravity alone is of consequence at cosmological scales is a resonance with the governing dogma of an ungoverned free market.
The connection between gravity and market forces may run deeper yet. At the center of nearly every galaxy is said to reside a supermassive black hole ... another singularity. This hungry maw provides the gravitational anchor point for the galaxy: it is the axis around which all else rotates. There is a remarkable similarity between the black hole and the consumer ego, ensconced at the centre of our economic structure as the primary engine driving all growth. The black hole eats, and gives nothing back; its hunger is never sated, but indeed grows with feeding; yet somehow, it thereby becomes an engine of high efficiency, indeed the most efficient engine it is theoretically possible to build for the conversion of matter into energy (or should that read, capital into profit?) Some physicists have suggested that black holes may, due to their capacity to warp space and time, provide a portal to other universes, a device that has been deployed in numerous works of science fiction. This seems to resonate with the transcendance of the human condition that is implied in almost every advertisement: that with consumption, one's problems and dissatisfactions in the world can be escaped.
It is perhaps one of the deeper ironies of modern astronomy that no black hole has ever been observed: evidence of their presence is found in highly energetic jets of matter and radiation pouring out from the centres of various galaxies, behaviour which seems in stark contradiction to the black hole's bottomless hunger ... and indeed, to this day theorists are unable to explain precisely how a black hole might generate these jets, though so tight has become their presumed association that merely to find a jet is to note the discovery of a black hole. It is almost as though the image was so compelling, in such strong resonance with societal metaphor, that when these theoretical entities were first proposed to make sense of an unexplained observation they were instantly and uncritically reified. Astrophysicists fell in love with the black hole, and their civilization followed suit. Virtually nothing else in the modern celestial pantheon evokes such fascination ... just as there is no force in modern society more powerful than the consumer, and no process that holds our attention so strongly as the opportunity to consume.
Recent decades have seen creeping problems in the gravitational universe, inconsistencies with observations that threatened its theoretical integrity. In the 1970s it was noted that the actual motions of galaxies, both individually and en masse, could not be reconciled with gravity alone if the mass of stars and gas were all that was available25. Thus was born 'dark matter', matter that of its nature cannot be observed, that interacts only gravitionally, and which – because it greatly outmasses visible matter – utterly dominates the dynamical evolution of the universe. This decoupling between ordinary matter and gravitation arose just at the time the Bretton Woods agreement broke down, unmooring the global monetary system from the gold standard, which is to say, with the domain of matter.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this sundering of the money supply from the material economy, together with the ongoing need of the US government to pay its foreign creditors, inevitably led to inflation, an economic crisis which was resolved – however imperfectly – by the expansion of credit. In the same period, it was noted that the Cosmic Microwave Background – thought to be the afterglow of the Big Bang – was far more regular than should have been possible since, given both the finite time since the Big Bang and the expansion of space, widely separated parts of the universe could not have been in causal contact early enough for them to come into equilibrium(26). This was solved by Alan Guth with the concept of cosmic inflation: in the first few fractions of an instant, the universe grew in size exponentially faster than light, thus allowing far-flung parts of the universe to maintain causal contact. Later, Guth was to take his notion of inflation even further, suggesting his posited theoretical physics as the causal origin of the Big Bang itself and proclaiming(27), “It is said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch”: thus, contrary to Democritus' assertion that 'nothing comes from nothing', everything came from nothing (in truth, this assumption of a cosmic 'free lunch' is implicit in most formulations of the Big Bang and may be an additional factor in its appeal.) In similar fashion, citizen-consumers of the Western world were at this time being led to believe that prosperity could be a free lunch: credit cards and mortgages would provide what had once
been obtained through savings accounts and jobs.
The final feature of Big Bang cosmology to which we turn our attention is also the most recent: dark energy. In the early 21st century, observations of the most distant supernovae showed that their redshifts increased very rapidly with distance, indicating that the universe's expansion must actually be accelerating: not only will the universe eventually thin out into cold, empty darkness, but from this time onwards it will do so faster and faster. At the same time we see the technological transhumanist notion of the technological singularity (there's that word again) as proselityzed by Ray Kurzweil(28), amongst numerous others: the runaway growth of technical prowess arising from Moore's Law, which would elevate humanity to the status of posthuman gods. We also see unprecedented economic growth in the 'developing world', especially in China and the other Asian Tigers, driven by the sudden mobility and vast expansion of global capital. Of note is that dark energy accounts for a greater fraction of the universe's mass than even dark matter: between the two of them, they make up some 96% of the mass of the universe. Similarly, we see the ephemeralization and financialization of the economy: the conviction that future economic growth, in the Western world at least, can be accomplished purely through information management, 'knowledge industries', and especially financial speculation, leading to an endless series of fast-growing bubbles driven by the derivatives market ... all a series of complex abstractions, understood not even by those who profit from them but which, due to the geometrically proliferating quantity of intricate contracts, have in an historical eyeblink come to wholly dominate the material economy, indeed render it – if its proponents can be believed – utterly irrelevant to the future prosperity of the species.
Is it any accident that it is just at that historical time in which the pace of life seems faster than ever before; in which crisis after crisis piles up in the headlines at an ever accelerating pace; in which paranoia drives rampant conspiracy theories and apathetic cynicism seems to swallow civic life whole; in which the planet is engulfed in a global empire that has spread by stealth and denies its imperialism at every opportunity; in which the very notion of a 'human nature' is called every more strongly into question, all our most cherished beliefs about ourselves and our uniqueness evaporating as science reduces them to biochemistry and neuropsychology; as our lives become sucked into an abstracted cyberspace; as our long-promised destiny in the techno-utopian paradise of the future recedes ever further amidst the ashes of the real ... is it any accident, as we stare into this abyss, that our cosmos is dominated by a mysterious dark energy that hurls it implacably into the void?
14 Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, 1977, p 154
15 Georges Lemaitre, "A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae", Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels, 1927
16 A description adopted by Lemaitre himself.
17 In some formulations of the theory, a quantum field preceding the Big Bang gave rise to it through a quantum fluctuation ... however, such fluctuations themselves would seem to be a form of time (since there was something, and that something is subject to change).
18 Frank Tipler, one of the fathers of the famous Anthropic Principle, scandalized the scientific community with his publication of the The Physics of Immortality (1994), which derived the whole of Christian theology from the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, and certain assumptions regarding self-replicating nanobots and artificial intelligence.
19 It was also appealing to Pope Pius XII, who – much to Lemaitre's embarrassment – publically endorsed the theory (Lemaitre was worried such pontifical support would undermine its scientific credibility ... although Lemaitre himself was privately well aware of the theological compatability, writing in an unpublished 1922 that he believed that the universe had begun in light “as Genesis suggested it.”)
20 They are essentially divide by zero errors.
21 Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity, Chp 1 – The Triumph of Technology, part 1: Gee Whiz – the Future!
22 Or so goes the legend. The internet is full of references to this, without any direct references to where Gamow actually used this analogy. Nor was I able to locate it in his books (although he does mention the Bomb several times in One, Two, Three, Infinity.)
23 Sir Arthur Eddington, The Internal Constitution of Stars, 1926. Of note is that an alternative possibility – that stars might be externally powered – was rejected out of hand by Eddington and has not been revisited by mainstream astrophysicists since. However, it has been given a second look by plasma cosmologists, with interesting metaphorical implications: in this view, the properties of stars are contingent upon their environment, and can change drastically throughout their lives with changes in that environment.
24 It is only fair to note that Eddington himself, who moonlighted as a quaker activist, was no friend to the eugenics movement.
25 Actually, the first suggestion of dark matter arose due to Fritz Zwicky's 1933 observation of the Coma galaxy cluster; however, the theory was not generally accepted until Vera Rubin's observations in the early 1970s of the rotational velocities of spiral galaxies.
26 The notion of 'equilibrium' is nearly an obsession, not just within astrophysics but within physics as a whole. A similar obsession with equilibrium obtains within economics.
27 As quoted by Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988, p 134
28 See, for instance, Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 2005
