The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity 
by 

Fred Adams, 

 

Greg Laughlin

 

BlackOxford's review 

Aug 29, 2020  ·  edit

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bookshelves: american, science, epistemology-language 

It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over... And Not Even Then

There’s nothing like a little speculative cosmology to provide distraction from Covid, climate change, and Trump. In the end we’re all toast. 

Well not quite, the future of the universe is apparently in the hands of brown dwarf stars. These little buggers will persist indefinitely, perhaps eternally, pumping out the energy of a 40 watt lightbulb long after everything else in the universe has returned to cosmic uniformity. And given that life survives in the most hostile places, perhaps some nasty virus is destined to triumph, even over the cockroaches.

So the eschaton will be delayed indefinitely. This news will not be welcomed by Adventists and others who look forward gleefully to the annihilation of creation. But if the apocalypse doesn’t conform to their expectations, they might find religious solace in the scientific account of the first milliseconds of creation. The story here is even less credible than that contained in the book Genesis.

According to recent scientific thinking (more precisely, as of 20 years ago), the Big Bang occurred in what might be described as an entirely non-evolutionary way. At least the process by which a dense dot of immense energy became a universe billions of light years wide in more or less a millionth of a second is somewhat vague. The hand-waving involved in explaining this preposterous claim doesn’t hold up well against the simple directness of ‘Fiat Lux.’

There are also other oddities which might provoke a rush to the exit from scientific theory. It turns out that even the basic terms have questionable meaning: 

“[T]he existence of a causal horizon leads to some ambiguity regarding what the term “universe” actually means. The term sometimes refers to only the material that is within the horizon at a given time. In the future, however, the horizon will grow and hence will eventually encompass material that is currently outside our horizon. Is this “new” material part of the universe at the current time? The answer can be yes or no, depending on how you define “the universe.” Similarly, there can be other regions of space-time that will never lie within our horizon. For the sake of definiteness, we consider such regions of space-time to belong to “other universes.”

So there are things that can never be known - a comfort perhaps to those who think that this justifies their knowledge of what can’t be known. These enthusiasts can point out scientific faith in the existence of such things as dark matter to rationalise their own prejudices. Of course the difference between theirs and the scientific narrative is that very few people have been burned at the stake for the latter. So although the secular story doesn’t have a demonstrably superior beginning or conclusion, it is certainly less harmful.

I think the real reason for the preferability of science to religious thought, demonstrated in cosmological discussion, is their relative stances toward language. Science treats language - even its own technical language - as an essential but disposable commodity. Individual scientists may believe their own press and become fixated on the terms in which their theories are expressed, but the scientific community as a whole periodically purges itself of concepts, vocabularies, and explanations. Gravity, for example, or empty space really have no fixed meaning. At the start and finish of the universe, time has no meaning whatsoever. The terms are like pieces in a puzzle for which the rules of placement are entirely unknown. Their relationships with each other twist and morph constantly. 

Compare that with the practice and intention of most religious thinking: to fix the language of religion as ‘truth.’ Religion inevitably becomes doctrinal to the extent that it relies on language to express that which is beyond language. If such religious language is taken as more than poetic reference to that ‘beyond,’ it is both disrespectful of reality and false. And nowhere is this clearer than in cosmology. The fight against language within language is one that has to be waged but will always result in defeat. Perhaps the real virtue of scientific thought is the courage to face that inevitable defeat.

Back to Covid, climate change, and Trump...

Postscript 12/11/2020: indeed it will never be over: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswi...

 

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West 
by 

Cormac McCarthy

 

Sordid Origins

The myth of the American Southwest has it that it was the last uncivilised part of the North American continent. This was the frontier of hearty cowboys, stalwart settlers, and other pioneers who, despite the occasional gunfight at the OK Corral, gradually brought law and order, white Protestantism, and eventual prosperity to this benighted land. That huge area between the grassy plains of East Texas and Upper California was not just a place of adventure, it was also the scene of the American mission, as much a symbol of the Republic as the legends of Washington crossing the Delaware and Daniel Boone’s travail with a bear.

According to Blood Meridian this is all nonsense. The region had been Spanish for 300 years before the Yanquis decided it should be theirs. Much older native cultures - Apache, Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, and Zuni - persisted through colonisation. Into this unstable social equilibrium, America brought not civilisation but dystopia. The folk who felt themselves moved to carry the Stars and Stripes into this vulnerable territory were not noble pioneers but drifters, grifters, chancers, and no-accounts. What they brought was not improved institutions of government but brutal chaos. The gene pool of the Southwest was more or less permanently polluted by the mentally defective and the morally unfit. 

McCarthy’s descriptions of the place itself are unparalleled in the beauty of their language. They evoke precisely the kind of romantic sentiment that dominates popular perceptions: 

“Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor... All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.”

But these dramatic scenes are peppered with grotesque narratives of human senselessness and cruelty: 

“With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight. The ground where he'd lain was soaked with blood and with urine from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself... The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic. Blood lay in dark tongues on the floor and blood grouted the flagstones and ran in the vestibule where the stones were cupped from the feet of the faithful and their fathers before them and it had threaded its way down the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red tracks of the scavengers.”

The book was published 35 years ago but it is a timely reminder of the psychological projection that has always been a part of the culture of white North America. The receptivity of Americans to Trump’s characterisation of immigrants from the South as thieves rapists, and murderers is nothing new. It is America which sent just these as its vanguard of empire. This is a permanent embarrassment and a source of much of present day conflict. As the protagonist is instructed by one of his fellow desperadoes:

“But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better?... No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to.”

It is obvious to the rest of the world that America still does not want to know its own heart, nor its own sordid origins.

The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Transgender Pioneer

God obviously was having a bad day on the creation drawing board when he thought testosterone and its primary effect, the XY chromosome, was a good idea. The substance is a plague on all sexes. Everyone becomes its victim either through its direct compulsive effects or its destructive consequences. What better vision for futuristic fiction than the correction of this fundamental design flaw in the human species? This was Edwin Odle’s mission almost 100 years ago.

Odle knew just how fundamental the transformation of maleness would have to be, and how long it might take. Since it is masculine competitiveness, its barely controllable emotion, the longed-for mate-ship among men, and the aggressive and irrational striving for dominance which forms our global culture, it makes no sense to talk about cultural change without dealing with the source. And since the issue resides in biology itself, the solution must be genetic.

Or, more accurately, the solution, in Odle’s story, is the circumvention of genetics entirely because biological evolution can’t really be trusted to do the job in time. What’s necessary is what has come to be called the Singularity, that point at which man (that is to say the male gender) becomes indistinguishable from machine. It is only through the machine (or what we now call Artificial Intelligence) that the worst excesses of maleness can be mitigated.

Surprisingly, none of the most recent pundits of advanced technology have picked up on Odle’s suggestion that its real function could be the elimination of hormonally-induced insanity. Margaret Atwood’s fiction certainly hints at the need; but even she does not contemplate Odle’s innovative solution to this pressing problem. With leaders like Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro among so many others, the world is on a knife-edge. There is a glut of fragile chromosomes which threatens global destruction. Odle provides a blueprint for salvation.

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The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible 
by 

Jonathan Kirsch

 

Every Day Verses

Like all poetry, what makes the Bible great literature - and rather poorer theology - is its tremendous interpretive density. It is so chocker block full of complex symbols and arcane references that one can find solace, direction, instruction, and insightful comment about almost any situation - in a manner not unlike, I suppose, the I Ching which provokes reflection rather than providing direction. Surprisingly, when it is read as poetry rather than as divine revelation, the Bible can offer far more spiritual food for thought than either religious adherents or their opposing skeptics are likely to recognise.

So Kirsch’s re-telling of some of the most bizarre, filthy, and sometimes incomprehensible biblical tales is edifying as well as entertaining. He extracts psychological as well as literary merit from the most unexpected places - for example, from the story of Lot offering his two daughters to be gang-raped by a rowdy crowd (for which he is rewarded by God) and his intoxicated coupling with his own daughters (with no apparent divine disapproval); to the baffling tales of Abraham (Lot’s uncle) and his son Isaac pimping out their wives to local royalty (to which YHWH takes no note, much less applying his judgment). All have interesting morals that have nothing to do with morality, either when they were written or now.

That these biblical stories are serious accounts reflecting profound understanding of the strangeness of human behaviour (and a tolerance for it) is certainly alien to the fundamentalist idea of the ‘inerrancy’ of the Bible as a guide to correct living. These stories are an embarrassment that even the most casual believer would like to forget about as a trivial misunderstanding of an ancient culture. That they are neither trivial nor culturally obsolete is what Kirsch is out to show. His thoughtful exegesis is first rate, at least as good as that of the majority of biblical scholars. His exposition is wonderfully direct, a lesson in style to those same academics. And his punctuating wit is something never found at all in scholarly papers.*

As Kirsch says, “The biblical authors were master storytellers, and the Bible survives precisely because its stories are so powerful and so resonant.” Narrative mastery is the antithesis of moralistic preaching. In fact, according to Kirsch, “the Bible describes and even seems to encourage a range of human conduct that goes far beyond what is permitted in the Ten Commandments.” In a sense the Bible represents both the best and the worst of the gift of language. It simultaneously offers an expression of a wealth of human experiences, only to have that treasure stolen and made into shackles intended to prevent similar experiences. 

*Kirsch’s inclusion of a quote from Warren Kliewer’s stage play “The Daughters of Lot,” which refers to the descendants of Lot’s daughters, reported in Genesis, as the non-Jewish inhabitants of Israel is priceless: “[T]he story of Lot and his desperate daughters ought to be told in a Yiddish accent ending with: ‘So, after all that work what happened? Their kids were goyim!’”

The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“No More West, Boys”

Like most who know of Ambrose Bierce, his Devil’s Dictionary was the sum of what I knew about him. That and his disappearance in the deserts of Chihuahua in 1913. His book became a companion of my young adulthood, confirming my own less than positive attitude about things as diverse as military life, patriotism, and so-called family values in America. I suppose the mystery of his final months provided an excuse to consider him as ‘taken up’ rather than dead, a sort of literary Elijah whose prophecies were being fulfilled. I think Carlos Fuentes may have had similar feelings when he wrote this fictional ending to Bierce’s life.

That life spanned a crucial transition in American culture. Not only did Bierce experience the horror of the Civil War, he also watched as the country subsequently was transformed into a dominantly corporate society controlled by men like Leland Stamford and Randolph Hearst, that is to say by finance and information (Bierce had investigated the former on behalf of the latter). Bierce knew both intimately and hated that he had worked in and for the system that fostered them and the other corporate robber barons who ran the country for their benefit (and largely still do). His frequent journalistic sarcasm was self-directed as much as it was comment on American society.

Manifest Destiny, the idea that white Northern Europeans were entitled to expand across the North American continent to the Pacific, was the prevailing policy of the American government during all of Bierce’s life. And the policy-objective had been achieved by the end of the 19th century. There was no more Western frontier. The American Dream had been realised: “In his own lifetime, the old gringo... had seen an entire nation move from New York to Ohio to the battlegrounds of Georgia and the Carolinas and then to California, where the continent, sometimes even destiny, ended.” What had been produced was not the predicted utopia of Calvinist pre-destination but a cultural cesspit. “My country 'tis of thee, Sweet land of felony...,” Bierce sings. His mere presence in Mexico as an escapee from his own country is a mockery of “God, his Homeland, Money.”

Like the Dutch building dikes, perhaps, America doesn’t know how to stop its successful expansionism. Among other things, it invades Cuba on a pretext, sends troops into Mexico to fight ‘bandits,’ and shells the port of Veracruz for ‘insulting the flag of the United States.’ The cultural imperialism and racism of America cannot contain itself. “We are caught in the business of forever killing people whose skin is of a different color,” the old gringo muses. And, of course he is right. The momentum of American hatred for what is ‘other’ continues unabated more than a century after Bierce’s self-exile.

The Mexicans know why Bierce has come: “The old gringo came to Mexico to die... He wanted us to kill him, us Mexicans.” A running theme throughout the story is the mirrored ballroom of a hacienda captured by Pancho Villa’s troops. The locals had never seen a mirror before and don’t know what to make of the images; but the gringo (and a rather stupid gringa who could well be the United States in a skirt), see themselves as never before. The vision in the mirrors is disconcerting and it changes the self-images of the Americans. They recognise that “each of us carries the real frontier inside.” The dream had been a delusion. To recognise the inherent inferiority of this delusion is why “to be a gringo in Mexico is one way of dying”

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