Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  It turns out

  that radiation

  running through low mass particles

  gets thermalized

  at three degrees Kelvin!

  He performed the next sentence in a single two-burst strophe that beautifully suggested that we can only pity the other side:

  The amount that we get in my model corresponds to what we measure.

  Then he switched into full-throated astro-diva, actually singing the next sentence so that even if you didn’t understand the astrophysics, you could not resist joining in the general ridicule that you would definitely wallow in if, in fact, you were totally confident in his theory:

  and the amount predicted

  by the Big Bang

  is two orders of magnitude

  over what we see!

  Dobson is rejecting the Big Bang theory, the fundamental metaphor of official acceptable cosmology. He is proclaiming an entirely different metaphor—a recycling universe. Dobson’s cosmos is a giant Mobius strip that feeds back on itself and re-creates itself—half self-resurrecting phoenix, half tail-consuming ouroboros. That’s how he sees the universe—as a kind of particle doughnut in which the trajectory of the outer surface flings matter back toward the center.

  In the course of his exclamations, Dobson happily slaughters nearly every cosmic sacred cow there is. Dark matter—the single most crucial strut holding up our current understanding of the universe? A total “fudge”!

  And they have to patch

  the dark matter

  with dark energy.

  It’s just patches

  on top of patches

  on top of patches

  on top of patches.

  But here’s the thing: That is basically true. The universe may not be turtles all the way down, but it is Band-Aids all the way down. The reason scientists have posited that some 96 percent of the matter and energy is invisible to us is because their equations predict that we need that much matter and energy to exist in order for their equations to work. Not only must these particles exist, but they must do so in such massive intergalactic profusion that most matter must resemble diaphanous webs draped like delicate Halloween gossamer from black hole to black hole. And yet the theory of dark matter is so tenuous that it has become a kind of tradition among science journalists, when writing about the subject, to find the scientist who will admit that the entire notion might be a nauseating typo in the equations, one that has led them all down a gut-wrenching intellectual cul-de-sac for half a century.

  “I have been looking for dark-matter particles for more than 15 years. I’m 42,” Juan Collar of the University of Chicago admitted to the New York Times. “So most of my colleagues, my age, we are kind of going through a midlife crisis.”

  What gets exposed in these discussions is the key feature of all thinking about the universe. Whether we are sitting in the Department of Astrophysics at Cambridge or under the night sky of Stellafane, we’re all amateurs once we get out here. Even the alleged facts that a genius like Stephen Hawking is working with are highly provisional. As I wrote these sentences, for instance, I received an e-mail alert about a new study out of the University of Durham in England that “suggests that the conventional wisdom about the content of the Universe may be wrong.”

  The item goes on to report that the “scientists find evidence that the errors in its data may be much larger than previously thought, which in turn makes the standard model of the Universe open to question.” The release states a possibility that must strike terror in the hearts of scientists the world over, that these calculations “could imply that dark matter and dark energy are not present after all.”

  Imagine a small-town manager of a Gap outlet getting a memo from the London School of Economics explaining that some new research reveals that capitalism doesn’t actually work. Just FYI.

  So we might well live in a recycling universe. And the firm evidence of it might arrive next week in a tweet from Arizona State University.

  VIII. The Oldest Cosmic Wiki

  Even though a reincarnating universe could be argued, Dobson often goes one leap more: “Let’s go back about four to five thousand years. There were some physicists that built their physics into their language and left it there for all to see. Their name for the universe was jarot, ‘the changing.’ ” Dobson tells you that Hindu theology foretold the whole story five millennia ago.

  In the world of astrophysics, if you add a pinch of theology, you’ve jumped the shark. Most scientists stiffen and walk away. And yet Dobson is merely trying to do what everyone obsessed with the outer edge of the universe is trying to do: tell the story. The fact that he has chosen to reach into our cultural past for the narrative elements of his story is, frankly, one more reason why Dobson finds himself marooned on a blanket with a handful of twenty-five-year-old ingénues and one beta male waiting for the cosmic silverback to take a nap so he can make his opportunistic move.

  The fact is, religion is no longer invited to any of science’s jamborees. Part of the reason is because organized religion has ransacked their ancient stories looking for something that resembles a scientific fact. And all that the creation scientists and intelligent designers have been able to come up with is variations of the old God of Gaps argument. Where is God today, according to some ministers? Hiding out in our DNA code, the new genetic Kaballah. This kind of thinking never ends. Fundamentalists have overworked this argument for so long that most scientists are just exhausted with it. And they’ve walked away, shunning in practical ways the need for any story at all.

  When Dobson riffles through the glossary of Hindu 101 and finds evidence of an ancient recycling universe, he’s no different from the nice liberal Episcopalian minister who argues that the Big Bang, quantum entanglement, and entropy can all be found in the Bible as creation, miracle, and sin. And all of them are missing what Galileo’s real discovery was—not the moons of Jupiter, but the elements of a new story to describe our place in the universe. He literally moved us out of the center of God’s loving estate and into the suburbs of a moderately sized star—a change of location that would require an entirely novel account of the universe’s origins, or cosmogony.

  The Bible is a Bronze Age attempt by society’s most learned men to cobble together a working cosmogony. Looked at that way, maybe the Bible deserves a different kind of reading. Even the philosopher Daniel Dennett, one of the most popular of the current atheists, has acknowledged that from an evolutionary perspective, the Bible has to be the most competent Darwinian text in history. If literary works were species, the Bible would be the coelacanth, the horseshoe crab, or the dung beetle of cosmogonies. That alone should make the book worthy of study. These stories—however musty and dull they might sound now to fresh skeptics in graduate school—have adapted and survived while Greek mythology, the Viking Eddas, Sumaria’s Gilgamesh, the Mayan Popol Vuh, Shinto’s Kojiki, and Ancient Egypt’s Pert Em Hru (Book of the Dead), along with thousands of other Scriptures, have been marginalized or have perished.

  When Richard Dawkins says that Christians are all atheists with respect to the Roman gods or the Viking pantheon and that Christians just need to go one atheism further, one question he might want to ask as a scientist is: What accounts for this one stubborn bit of cultural mythology hanging on so well? What is the panda’s thumb of the Bible?

  The much rewritten and retranslated Bible is the longest-running, most successful cultural wiki of amateur cosmic theory in Western history. And science has at least one thing to learn from the Bible: how to tell a story. In the current wave of debates between religionists and atheists, the most favored approach by the scientists is a form of reductionist ridicule. For instance, Stephen Hawking has famously scoffed at our cosmic irrelevance, saying that humans are nothing more than “chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” That idea sounded a lot more profound when I first heard it from the guy in
my dorm with the bong.

  This rhetorical tactic of attempting to awaken the somnolent masses by trashing revered ideals is an old one. Marcus Aurelius, who helped establish the philosophical school of the Stoics, was fond of dismissing a good meal as nothing more than “dead fish.” Aurelius’s definition of sex was “the rubbing together of pieces of gut, followed by the spasmodic secretion of a little bit of slime.” (Sadly, Mrs. Aurelius’s meditations did not survive.) Another skeptic snarked that Christianity is the belief that a “cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically flash and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so that you can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.”

  There’s something kick-ass in these tweaks, but there’s also a smarty-pants quality to all this, one that perhaps culminated in a 2003 op-ed piece by Daniel Dennett. He proposed that modern educated skeptics should begin to refer to themselves as “brights.” Thankfully, for everyone, that movement died before it was born. On a radio broadcast, I heard the skeptic and scientist PZ Myers refer to the Bible as little more than “poetry.” I don’t disagree with him. It was the withering contempt for “poetry” that made me realize once again how feeble a grasp some skeptics have of how to communicate outside the amen choruses at academic conferences and Ted Talks. One misses the point—and it’s a really big point—by calling religion, as one skeptic recently did, a “a spandrel piggybacking on adaptations such as the orgasm.”

  A spandrel is the nonfunctional space above a weight-bearing arch. But it’s also the place where, say, Michelangelo did most of his work in the Sistine Chapel. That is the problem with this point of view. It scorns the part of life most people care about: the poetry, the spandrels, the baroque cultures we shape—the stories we tell.

  If Stephen Hawking visited Notre Dame Cathedral tomorrow and declared that what he saw was nothing more than “a stone-based structure whose horizontal distribution of off-vault compression directed lines of pressure-thrust to load-bearing piers,” I am not sure most people would consider him a genius. They’d think he was a putz.

  IX. E.T.’s Area Code

  Funny, because as so many, like Dobson, scour the ancient tales looking for a story that might resonate today, the elements of a grand science narrative—new discoveries—arrive daily. Hang out long enough with amateur astronomers and eventually the conversation steers toward exoplanets and extraterrestrial life. It’s no secret among the Russ Genet enthusiasts that one of the goals of the one-meter telescope crowd is to find new exoplanets and perhaps figure out which has life on it and how to communicate with that life. It’s only a matter of very little time before one of these earth-sized exoplanets is theorized to contain some kind of life and, in being so theorized, refocuses the thoughts of our cosmogony in a way not seen since Galileo moved us all to the solar suburbs.

  The discovery of intelligent life in space, of course, would change everything, rewrite all of our assumptions and create not just a new story about the cosmos but a proliferation of them. We don’t have the slightest idea how that story will get told or the manifold ways it will rewrite our world, but we are anxious for it. Every day more and more exoplanets are added to the great list of known places where life might exist. A number of different NASA-launched space telescopes are downloading petabytes of unexamined data. Algorithms have already been developed to sift this growing mountain of data into piles that amateurs will be invited to poke through in hopes of finding gems of possibility. Eventually, some hope to spot the exoplanet whose light signature implies a slight elevation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor—indicating possibly that something there is breathing.

  Only a few years ago, the obsession of the mainstream media was asteroids and NEOs that might strike earth. Those are still sources of excitement, but the shift in pop culture toward fascination with exoplanets is under way, although the topic remains to go mega-public. That may be because exoplanets don’t blow anything up or because Will Smith hasn’t made a movie about them yet.

  Among professional astronomers, there may well be more intellectual interest in, say, the questions of dark matter, and possibly some quiet resentment that the exoplanet types so easily garner widespread pop culture coverage anytime there is a hint that a newly discovered planet might have some kind of life on it. (Plus, the kind of people who get overexcited by such discussions also include crackpots, oddball theorists, and those who swim in oceans of woo.)

  To go to a Stellafane gathering and just listen to the telescope hounds discuss the variety and complexity of theories is to get the sense of what it must have been like at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella after Columbus returned and the discussions grappled with the notion of a possible New World. There exists a kind of orthodoxy about these delicate issues—represented by the official organization SETI—run by high-profile, mainstream astronomers and partly funded by the digital generation’s most out-there philanthropist Paul Allen. (The digital revolution has provided our age with new Medicis and Borgias—the software billionaires devoting their treasure to building a space elevator, or downloading the brain into a computer program, or promoting immortality via the lecture circuit of Ray Kurzweil.)

  When I first started contacting amateur astronomers, I kept hearing about this one guy who had a unique system for contacting aliens. Russ Genet had mentioned him, and a telescope manufacturer in Utah had told me about him too.

  There are numerous methods already employed to try to scour the universe for broadcast signals from outer space aliens. The systematic way we’ve done this has been to sweep the sky looking for patterned signals among radio waves. Jim Edwards, a radar developer who often works with the Pentagon, has been involved in the signal corps and he’s brought to this issue the start-from-the-beginning thinking so indicative of the amateur’s faith.

  His theory is reminiscent of the mid-nineteenth-century search for the Northwest Passage. The ships would sail far north of the Hudson Bay to the Barrow Strait, where there was no regular human traffic. In the vast expanses of shore, the sea captains would look for conspicuous spits of land that were noticeable from a distance. There on the flat shore, they would pile rocks into an unnatural—i.e., obviously man-made—cairn, and in the rocks they might put a note saying little more than “We were here” and the date. In the accounts of nineteenth-century voyages, the captains describe how they’d hug the coast, looking for noticeable land features, hoping to see the unnatural rock pile, inside of which would often be a bottle with a note, maybe a small flag. In the famous search for the lost explorer John Franklin, Lieutenant William Hobson sailed along the northwestern coast of King William Island to a place named Victory Point, where he spotted a pile of rocks. In it he found a note written on an old bureaucratic admiralty form that read simply, “All well,” and the date “May 28, 1847.” Many of these cairns became landmarks. Sailors would know where they were and would check them in their passages through a strait to see if any other traffic had sailed by recently.

  Over a beer in a local hamburger joint in Redondo Beach, Edwards said he started by assuming that alien life forms far more advanced than us don’t exist. “If anybody out there were vastly ahead of us,” he said, “we’d pick them up on our car radio.” So Edwards presumes that any alien life that is intelligent and is trying to communicate with us is probably as advanced as we are, more or less. To think like them means we only have to think like us.

  Or like an Antarctic explorer. If you enter a massive bay, and you are looking for a message from a previous explorer, where to look? Well, first, as you scan the horizon, look for the unusual, eye-catching land formation.

  For Edwards, the “odd spit of land” in space appears the moment when a giant like Jupiter passes in front of a sun. From our perspective it is a very noticeable event. It turns out many solar systems have gas giants like Jupiter (whe
ther they have habitable planets or hot Venus-like planets is another question). But it appears that the natural history of planetary formation often resembles our own—with small hot planets in tight orbit, then habitable planets in what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, and finally the big outer planets like Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn.

  The existence of these gas giants is how we know that exoplanets exist. They are the easiest for us to see because when they pass in front of their star (from our perspective), they block some light, causing the star to dim—and to dim on a fixed schedule—i.e., planetary orbit.

  Both professional and amateur astronomers focus on a star, and if they notice a periodic dip in the light’s intensity, then they know there is a high likelihood that something is moving in front of that sun to block the light. This was one of the main methods used to detect many of the nearly six-hundred-plus exoplanets discovered to date.