by Umberto Eco
Science Fiction
Modern science fiction, from Verne to the twenty-first century, opens up another chapter of imaginary astronomies, in which theories of astronomy and scientific cosmology are taken to the extreme. My old pupil Renato Giovannoli has written a fascinating book on science in science fiction,2 in which he examines not only all the (often highly convincing) pseudoscientific theories developed in stories about the future, but also shows how science in science fiction consists of a fairly uniform body of ideas and topoi that return from narrator to narrator, with subsequent improvements and developments. These include Verne’s cannons loaded with nitroglycerin and Wells’s antigravitational rooms; time travel and the various techniques for space navigation; traveling while in a state of hibernation; the spaceship as a small, ecologically self-sufficient world, with hydroponic gardening systems; and the infinite variations on the Langevin paradox, whereby the astronaut returns from a voyage in space at the speed of light, only to find himself ten years younger than his twin brother. Robert A. Heinlein, for example, in Time for the Stars, wrote a story involving twins who communicate telepathically during the journey, but Tullio Regge, in his Cronache dell’universo, noted that if telepathic messages arrive instantly, the answer from the brother in space ought to arrive before the question.
Another recurring theme is that of hyperspace, which Heinlein, in Starman Jones, describes using a scarf as a model: “Here’s Mars . . . Here’s Jupiter. To go from Mars to Jupiter you have to go from here to here . . . But suppose I fold [the scarf] so that Mars is on top of Jupiter? What’s to prevent us just stepping across?” So science fiction has been off in search of abnormal parts of the universe where space can fold back on itself. It has also used scientific hypotheses, such as Einstein-Rosen bridges, black holes, and space-time wormholes. Kurt Vonnegut, in The Sirens of Titan, theorized about “chrono-synclastic infundibula,” tunnels in hyperspace, while others have invented tachyons, particles that move faster than light.3
All the problems of time travel have been discussed—with and without the time traveler meeting his own double (including the famous grandfather paradox, whereby if we go back in time and kill our grandfather before he gets married, perhaps we would disappear at that moment)—using also the concepts developed by scientists, such as Hans Reichenbach in The Direction of Time, in relation to closed causal chains whereby, at least in the subatomic world, A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. Philip K. Dick, in Counter-Clock World, theorized about entropic inversion. The first part of Fredric Brown’s short story “The End” makes the supposition that time is a field and that the character Professor Jones has found a machine that reverses it. Jones presses the button, and the second part consists of the same words as the first, but in reverse order.
And finally, using the ancient theory of the infinity of worlds, writers have imagined parallel universes, so that Fredric Brown, in his novel What Mad Universe, reminds us that an infinite number of universes can exist at the same time: “There is, for example, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated, except that you—or the equivalent of you—are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones . . . There are an infinite number of permutations on that variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger, and one in which you have purple horns . . .” But on the logic of possible worlds, philosophers such as D. K. Lewis, in Counterfactuals (1973), has also stated, “I emphatically do not identify possible worlds in any way with respectable linguistic entities; I take them to be respectable entities in their own right. When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally . . . Our actual world is only one world among others . . . You believe in our actual world already. I ask you to believe in more things of that kind.”
How much separates science fiction from the science that preceded it or will come after it? Given that science fiction writers certainly read the work of scientists, how many scientists have nourished their imaginations reading science fiction? How many imaginary astronomies of science fiction are, or will remain, imaginary?
I have found a text by Thomas Aquinas (In primum sententiarum, distinction 8, article 1.2) in which he distinguishes two types of morphological relationship between cause and effect: cause can resemble effect, as a person resembles his portrait, or cause can be different from effect, as happens with fire that causes smoke; and in this second category of causes Aquinas includes the sun, which produces heat but is itself cold. We may laugh, since he reached this model from his theory of celestial spheres, but if one day cold fusion is taken seriously, might we have to reconsider this idea of Aquinas with more respect?
THE COLD SUN AND THE HOLLOW EARTH
Speaking of the cold sun, certain kinds of geo-astronomy have gone beyond the bounds of imagination into the realms of insanity, and yet seem to have influenced some very serious, though scarcely laudable, ideas and decisions.
In 1925, the theory of an Austrian pseudoscientist, Hanns Hörbiger, which was called the WEL, the Welteislehre or world ice theory, began to circulate within Nazi circles.4 This theory was to enjoy the support of men like Rosenberg and Himmler. But when Hitler rose to power Hörbiger was taken seriously even by some members of the scientific community, including people like Lenard, who had discovered x-rays with Röntgen.
According to Hörbiger, the cosmos was the theater of an eternal struggle between ice and fire, which produces not an evolution but an alternation of cycles, or epochs. An enormous hot body, millions of times larger than the sun, had once collided with an immense accumulation of cosmic ice. The mass of ice had penetrated into this incandescent body and, after having worked within it as a vapor for hundreds of millions of years, had made the whole thing explode. Various fragments were propelled into frozen space as well as into an intermediate zone, where they established the solar system. The moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are blocks of ice, and the Milky Way is a circle of ice—traditional astronomy purports that the Milky Way is made up of stars, but trick photography creates this illusion. Sunspots are produced by blocks of ice that break off from Jupiter.
The power of the original explosion is now diminishing and each planet does not revolve elliptically, as official science erroneously believes, but is (imperceptibly) spiraling toward the planet that most attracts it. At the end of the cycle in which we are living, the moon will move closer and closer to Earth, gradually raising the level of the oceans, submerging the tropics, and leaving only the highest mountains above water. The cosmic rays will become more powerful and will produce genetic mutations. In the end our own satellite will explode and be transformed into a ring of ice, water, and gas, which will then precipitate onto Earth. As the result of a complex series of events caused by the influence of Mars, Earth will also become a globe of ice and in the end will be reabsorbed by the sun. There will then be a new explosion and a new beginning. In the same way, the Earth in the past has already had, and then reabsorbed, three other satellites.
This cosmogony obviously presupposed a sort of eternal return, which harked back to ancient myths and epics. What Nazis today call “knowledge of tradition” was once again contrasted with the “false knowledge” of liberal and Jewish science. A glacial cosmogony, moreover, seemed very Nordic and Aryan. Pauwels and Bergier, in their Le matin des magiciens,5 attribute this great belief in the frozen origins of the cosmos to the faith, encouraged by Hitler, that their troops would cope very well in frozen Russia. But the authors also suggest that the need to test how cosmic ice would react had also delayed experiments on the V-1 flying bombs. Someone writing under the name of Elmar Brugg6 published a book in 1938 in which he paid tribute to Hörbiger as the twentieth-century Copernicus, claiming that the world ice theory explained the profound links between earthly events and cosmic forces and concluding that the silence on the part of democratic-Jewish science to Hörbiger’s ideas was a typical case of the conspiracy of mediocrity.
The fact that the Nazi party was surrounded by followers
of magical, hermetic, and neo-Templaristic practices, such as the disciples of the Thule Gesellschaft founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, has already been amply studied.7
Another theory was taken seriously in Nazi circles: that the Earth is hollow and that we do not live outside, on the convex external crust, but inside, on the concave internal surface. This theory was first proposed in the early nineteenth century by a certain Captain John Cleves Symmes of Ohio, who wrote to various scientific societies, “To all the World: I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees.” The wooden model of his universe can be seen today at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
The theory was taken up again fifty years later by Cyrus Reed Teed, who declared that what we believe to be the sky is a mass of gas that fills the interior of the globe with areas of brilliant light. The sun, the moon, and the stars were not, he said, celestial globes but visual effects caused by various phenomena.
After the First World War the theory was introduced into Germany by Peter Bender, and then by Karl Neupert, who founded the movement based on the Hohlweltlehre, the hollow earth theory. According to some sources,8 the theory was taken seriously among members of the German hierarchy, and in certain parts of the German navy it was believed that the hollow earth theory made it possible to fix the positions of English ships more accurately because, if infrared rays were used, the curvature of the Earth would not have obscured observation. It is even said that some of the V-1 firings were wrong because the trajectory was calculated on the basis of a concave and not a convex land surface. If this is true, then the historical and providential utility of insane astronomies is perfectly apparent.
IMAGINARY GEOGRAPHY AND TRUE HISTORY
During the second half of the twelfth century, a letter reached the West telling how in the Far East, beyond the regions occupied by the Muslims, beyond those lands that the Crusaders had tried to take from the dominion of the infidels but had nonetheless returned to their dominion, there flourished a Christian kingdom, governed by the legendary Prester John, or Presbyter Johannes, re potentia et virtute dei et domini nostri Iesu Christi. The letter began as follows:
Hear and believe: I, Presbyter Johannes, the Lord of Lords, surpass all under heaven in virtue, in riches, and in power; seventy-two kings pay us tribute . . . In the three Indies our Magnificence rules, and our lands extend beyond India, where rests the body of the holy apostle Thomas; they reach toward the sunrise over the wastes, and extend toward deserted Babylon near the Tower of Babel . . . In our domains live elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotami, crocodiles, metagallinari, cametennus, tinsirete, panthers, onagers, red and white lions, white bears and blackbirds, mute cicadas, griffins, tigers, jackals, hyenas, wild oxen, centaurs, wild men, horned men, fauns, satyrs and women of the same species, pygmies, men with dogs’ heads, giants forty cubits tall, monocles, cyclopes, a bird called phoenix, and almost every kind of animal that lives beneath the vault of the heavens . . . In one of our provinces the river known as Indus flows. This river, whose source is in Paradise, winds its way along various branches through the entire province and in it are found natural stones, emeralds, sapphires, garnets, topazes, chrysolite, onyx, beryl, amethyst, sardonyx, and many other precious stones.
And so it went on, listing other wonders. Translated and paraphrased many times during the following centuries, up to the seventeenth century, and in various languages and versions, the letter was to be highly influential in the expansion of the Christian West toward the East. The idea that a Christian kingdom might exist beyond the Muslim lands justified all enterprises in expansion and exploration. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, William of Rubruck, and Marco Polo all mentioned Prester John. Toward the middle of the fourteenth century, Prester John’s kingdom moved from a vague Orient toward Ethiopia when Portuguese mariners began their African campaign. Attempts to contact him were made in the fifteenth century by Henry IV of England, by the duc de Berry, and by Pope Eugene IV. In Bologna, at the time of the coronation of Emperor Charles V, there were still discussions about Prester John as a possible ally for the recapture of the Holy Sepulcher.
How did Prester John’s letter come into being, and what was its purpose? Perhaps it was a piece of anti-Byzantine propaganda, produced in the scriptoria of Frederick I, but the problem is not so much its origin as the way it was received. Through geographical fantasy a political project gradually gained strength. In other words, the specter evoked by some scribe inclined to forgery (a highly respectable literary genre at the time) was used as an excuse for expanding the Christian world toward Africa and Asia, a friendly gesture in supporting the white man’s burden.
And thus we have a case of imaginary geography that has produced real history. And it is not the only case. I would like to finish with the sixteenth-century Typus orbis terrarum by Ortelius.
Ortelius had already portrayed the American continent with remarkable precision, but he still thought, like many before and after, that Terra Australis, an immense cap covering the southern part of the planet, existed. It was in search of this hypothetical austral land that indefatigable mariners like Mendaña, Bougainville, Tasman, and Cook explored the Pacific. Thanks to an imaginary map, the real Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand were eventually discovered.
Spare a thought, then, for those who fought at the frontiers of infinity and the future. Remember the greatness of those imaginary geographies and astronomies, and those errors that often bore fruit.
[Revised version of two lectures, one given in 2001 at a conference of astronomers and the other in 2002 at a conference of geographers.]
Living by Proverbs
NO COPY IN THE NUC. And not only that: not mentioned in Brunet or Graesse; not to be found, despite its subject, in the bibliographies on occultism (Caillet, Ferguson, Duveen, Verginelli-Rota, Biblioteca Mágica, Rosenthal, Dorbon, Guaita, and so on), so that it is difficult to obtain information about this anonymous pamphlet, which, apart from bearing no date, was published in one of the usual phantom cities (Philadelphia, printed by Secundus More), with a very appealing title: On the New Utoppia [sic] or de Insula Perdita, wherein a most Ingenious Legislatore had created the Republik of Happiness following the Principle by which Proverbes are the Wisdom of Mankind, 8vo (2) 33; 45 (6) (1 white).
The book is divided into two parts: the first sets out the basic principles on which the Republic of Happiness was founded; the second lists its disadvantages and the misfortunes that followed the constitution of that state, and the reasons why this utopia failed after only a few years.
The fundamental utopian principle from which the Legislator started was that proverbs are not only the wisdom of humanity, but that the voice of the people is the voice of God; the perfect state must therefore be based on this single wisdom; all other moral, social, political, or religious ideologies and designs having previously failed because intellectual hubris had distanced them from ancient wisdom (learn from the past, believe in the future, and live for the present).
A few months after this Republic of Happiness had been established, it was quickly realized how the utopian principle complicated daily life. Difficulties arose at once when it came to hunting and obtaining basic supplies, since people followed the principle that those with no dog must hunt with a cat (with poor results). They had originally restricted themselves to fishing, but the fishermen used to take excessive quantities of stimulants, convinced that those who sleep don’t catch any fish, so that they were worn out in body and spirit and ended their careers at an early age. Agriculture was in continual crisis, since it was said that when the pear is ripe it falls by itself. It was impossible to make or sell cooking pans due to a deep-rooted mistrust of coppersmiths, given, as we know, that it’s the devil who makes the pots (so the coppersmiths tried to make and sell just the lids, for which there was a complete lack of demand since no one was buying any pa
ns).
Traveling by road was difficult: assuming that he who leaves the old road for the new knows what he’s left but not what he’ll find, U-turns were prohibited (there’s no going back to where you began) as well as junctions (he who follows every path will discover many dangers). In any event, all vehicles were banned (slow and steady wins the race) and people were generally discouraged not only from traveling but also from industry, since he who dreams much needs little (which also encouraged the use of drugs). Even the postal services were abolished, since those who want something serve themselves; those who don’t send someone else. It was difficult to protect property: a dog that barks doesn’t bite, so they were muzzled to stop them from barking and the muzzles were so restrictive that burglars could come and go as they pleased.
A misinterpreted principle of cooperation had established that for a well-dressed salad you want a miser for the vinegar, a wise man for the salt, and a spendthrift for the oil (it was well-known that oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper make even an old boot taste better): so that every time they wanted to do any cooking (since it is easy to play with fire using someone else’s hand) they had to work with someone they considered suitable (or whoever applied for the job). It wasn’t difficult to find a spendthrift to make the dressing—a born idiot is the source of perpetual amusement—but it was difficult finding a miser, since no one wished to be described as such and, what is more, a miser is also stingy with his own time (and a miser, like a pig, is excellent after he’s dead). In the end, they usually gave up dressing salad since, after all, hunger is the best sauce.