Even were a luminary of the physics of that day to have countenanced the possibility of a great upheaval in cosmology and physics, an upheaval, moreover, involving the existence in the Universe of intelligent beings, it would have been only under the following condition: provided cosmic civilizations are discovered, provided their signals are received and from these is gained entirely new information about the laws of nature, then, yes, in such a way—but only in such a way!—might there come about fundamental modifications in Earth’s science. That an astrophysical revolution could take place in the absence of such contacts—more, that the very lack of such contacts, signals, manifestations of “astroengineering,” could initiate the greatest revolution in physics and radically change our views of the Universe—this certainly never entered the head of any of the authorities back then.
And yet it was in the lifetime of more than one of those eminent scholars that Aristides Acheropoulos published his New Cosmogony. His book fell into my hands when I was a doctoral candidate in the Mathematics Department at the University of Switzerland, the very place where Albert Einstein once worked as a clerk for the patent office, in his spare time engaged in laying the foundations of the theory of relativity. I was able to read this little book because it had been put out in an English translation—an abominable translation, I might add. Moreover, it was a title in a science-fiction series whose publisher printed only such literature and no other. The original text, as I learned much later, had been subjected to an abridgment practically by half. Undoubtedly, the circumstances of this edition (over which Acheropoulos had no control) gave rise to the opinion that although he had written A New Cosmogony he himself did not take seriously the theses contained in it.
I fear that now, in these days of haste and ephemeral fashion, none but a science historian or a bibliographer will open the pages of A New Cosmogony. An educated man knows the title of the work and has heard of the author; that is all. Such a man robs himself of a unique experience. It is not only the substance of A New Cosmogony that has remained as fresh in my memory as when I read it twenty-one years ago, but all the emotions that accompanied the reading. It was a moment like no other. Once he has grasped the scope of the author’s conception, and in his mind there takes shape, for the first time, the idea of the palimpsest Cosmos-Game with its unseen Players who are perpetually alien to one another, the impression will never leave the reader that he is in communication with something sensationally, staggeringly new—and at the same time, that here is a plagiaristic repetition, translated into the language of natural science, of the oldest myths, those myths that make up the impenetrable bedrock of human history. This unpleasant, even vexing impression derives, I think, from our regarding any synthesis of physics and the will to be inadmissible—I would even say, indecent—to the rational mind. For myths are a projection of the will. The ancient cosmogonic myths, in solemn tones, and with a simple-hearted innocence that is the lost paradise of humanity, tell how Being sprang from the conflict of demiurgic elements, elements clothed by legend in various forms and incarnations, how the world was born of the love-hate embrace of god-beasts, god-spirits, or supermen; and the suspicion that precisely this clash, being the purest projection of anthropomorphism onto the blank space of the cosmic enigma, that this reducing of Physics to Desires was the prototype the author made use of—such a suspicion can never be altogether overcome.
So viewed, the New Cosmogony proves to be an unutterably Old Cosmogony, and the attempt to expound it in the language of empiricism smacks of incest, of a vulgar inability to keep separate concepts and categories that have no business being joined in an indiscriminate union. The book, at the time, found its way into the hands of a few prominent thinkers, and I know now, having heard as much from more than one, that it was read with impatience, irritation, with a contemptuous shrug; probably no one read it through to the end. We should not wax too indignant over such apriority, such inertia of preconceived ideas, for in fact the thing does at times appear sheer rot, and doubly so: it presents us with masked gods, gods in the dress of material beings, and presents them in the dry language of logical propositions; at the same time, it calls the laws of nature the outcome of their conflict. The result is that we are stripped of everything at once: both of our faith, conceived as Transcendence culminating in perfection, and of our science, in its honest, secular, and objective sobriety. In the end, nothing is left us; all premises, on either side, reveal themselves to be completely inapplicable. One gets the feeling that one has been dealt with barbarously—robbed in the context of a mystery neither religious nor scientific.
The devastation that this book produced in my mind I cannot describe. Certainly, the obligation of the scholar is to be a doubting Thomas in science; he may challenge its every assertion. But surely it is not possible to call into question everything at once! Acheropoulos eluded the recognition of his greatness not deliberately, perhaps, but all too effectively! Completely unknown, the man was the son of a small nation; he had no professional credentials in either physics or cosmology; and finally—and this capped everything—he bad no predecessors. A thing unheard of in history! For every thinker, every revolutionary of the spirit possesses teachers of some sort, whom he surpasses but, at the same time, to whom he refers. This Greek, however, appeared on the scene alone; to the isolation that had to have been the lot of such precursorship, his entire life is testimony.
I never knew the man and know little about him. How he earned his bread was ever a matter of indifference to him; he wrote the first version of A New Cosmogony at the age of thirty-three, already a Doctor of Philosophy, but could not publish it anywhere; the failure of his idea—the failure of his life—he bore stoically; he quickly abandoned his efforts to publish A New Cosmogony, realizing their futility. He became a janitor at the same university where he had earned the doctorate for his brilliant work on the comparative cosmogony of ancient peoples; then he was a baker’s assistant, then a water carrier, and in the meantime studied mathematics through a correspondence course; none of those with whom he came into contact ever heard a word from him about A New Cosmogony. He was secretive and, to all accounts, without regard for those closest to him or for himself. Now, this very lack of regard in uttering things to the highest degree profane with respect both to science and to faith, this panheresy, this universal blasphemousness that sprang from intellectual courage, could not but cut off all readers from him. I imagine that he accepted the offer of the English publisher much as a castaway on a desert island throws into the waves of the sea a bottle with a call for help inside; he wished to leave behind some trace of his idea, because he was certain of its truth.
Mutilated as it is by a paltry translation and senseless cuts, A New Cosmogony is an awesome work. In it Acheropoulos overturns everything—absolutely everything—that science and faith have established over the course of centuries; he leaves a waste strewn with the rubble of the notions he has smashed, in order then to set to work from the beginning, that is, to build the Universe anew. This hair-raising spectacle puts us on the defensive: the author has to be, we think, either a complete madman or a complete ignoramus. His academic titles simply cannot be believed. Those who dismissed him in this way regained possession of their mental equilibrium. The only difference between me and all the other readers of A New Cosmogony was that I was unable to do so. He who does not reject the book in its entirety, from the first syllable to the last, is lost: he will never free himself from it. Here, if ever there was one, is an excluded middle: if Acheropoulos is not a lunatic and not a dunce, then he must be a genius.
It is not easy to accept such a diagnosis! The text changes continually before the reader’s eyes; he cannot help noticing that the matrix of the conflict-encounter—that is, of the Game—is the formal skeleton of any religious faith that has not completely cast off its Manichean elements—and where is the religion with no vestige of those? By inclination and training I am a mathematician; it was on account of Acheropoulos that I be
came a physicist. I am quite sure that any contact I might have had with physics would have been desultory and tenuous, but for this man. He converted me; I can even point to the place in A New Cosmogony that accomplished this. I refer to Section Seventeen of the sixth chapter of the book, the one which speaks of the marvelment of the Newtons, Einsteins, Jeanses, and Eddingtons at the fact that the laws of nature were amenable to mathematical expression, that mathematics—the fruit of the pure exercise of the logical mind—could prove a match for the Universe. Some of those greats, like Eddington and Jeans, believed that the Creator Himself was a mathematician and that we descried, in the work of creation, the signs of this His characteristic. Acheropoulos observes that theoretical physics has put the phase of such fascination well behind itself, having learned that mathematical formalisms tell either too little of the world or too much at once. Mathematics, an approximation of the structure of the Universum, somehow never quite manages to hit the nail squarely on the head but is always just a little off the mark. We have considered this state of affairs to be temporary, but Acheropoulos replies: the physicists were unable to create a unified field theory, they did not succeed in connecting the phenomena of the macro-and the microworld, yet this will come. Mathematics and the world will converge, but not owing to further reconstructions of the mathematical apparatus—nothing of the kind. The convergence will come about when the work of creation has reached its goal, and it is still in progress. The laws of nature are not yet what they are “supposed” to be; they will become such not as a result of the perfecting of mathematics, but as a result of actual transformations in the Macrocosm!
Ladies and gentlemen, this greatest of all the heresies I ever came across in life, it bewitched me. And later in the same chapter Acheropoulos says nothing more or less than that the physics of the Universum is the result of its (the Universum’s) sociology.... But to understand properly such a piece of outrageousness we must go back to a number of basic matters.
The isolation of Acheropoulos’s idea is without parallel in the history of thought. The concept of the New Cosmogony breaks with—despite the appearance of plagiarism, of which I spoke—every metaphysical system, as well as with every method of natural science. The impression of having to do with a plagiarism is the fault of the reader, of the reader’s conceptual inertia. For it is purely by reflex that we think of the entire material world as yielding to the following sharp logical dichotomy: either it was created by Someone (and then, standing on the ground of faith, we name that Someone the Absolute, God, the First Cause) or, on the other hand, it was created by no one, which means, as when we deal with the world as scientists, that no one created it. But Acheropoulos says: Tertium datur. The world was created by No One, but all the same it was created; the Universe possesses Makers.
How is it that Acheropoulos had no predecessor? His basic idea was quite simple. And it is not consistent with the truth to say that it could not have been articulated prior to the rise of such disciplines as game theory or the algebra of conflict structures. His fundamental idea could have been formulated as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, if not earlier. Then why did no one do it? For the reason, I believe, that Science, in the course of emancipating itself from the yoke of religious dogma, acquired its own conceptual allergy. Originally Science collided with Faith, which produced well-known, often ghastly results that the churches to this day are somewhat ashamed of, even though Science has silently forgiven them those former persecutions. At last a state of cautious neutrality was reached between Science and Faith, the one endeavoring not to get in the way of the other. It was as a result of this coexistence, touchy enough, tense enough, that the blindness of Science came about, evident in Science’s avoidance of the ground on which rests the idea of the New Cosmogony. This idea is closely connected with the notion of intentionality—in other words, with what is part and parcel of a faith in a personal God. For intentionality constitutes the foundation of such a faith. According to religion, after all, God created the world by an act of will and design—that is to say, by an intentional act. And so Science declared the notion to be suspect and even forbade it outright. It became, in Science, taboo; one was not permitted even to make the least mention of it, lest one fall into the mortal sin of irrationalistic deviation. That fear not only sealed the lips of the scientists; it sealed their brains as well.
Let us now go back once more to what might be called the beginning. By the end of the nineteen-seventies the puzzle of the Silentium Universi had acquired some measure of fame. The general public took an interest in it. After the first preliminary attempts to pick up cosmic signals (the work of Drake at Green Bank), other projects followed—in both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. But the Universum, listened to with the subtlest electromagnetic instruments, maintained a stubborn silence, a silence filled only with the buzz and crackle of elemental discharges of stellar energy. The Universe showed its lifelessness in all its abysses together. The absence of signals from “Others,” and in addition the lack of any trace of their “astroengineering feats,” became a worrisome problem for science. The biologists had discovered the natural conditions favoring the birth of life from inanimate matter; they even succeeded in carrying out biogenesis in the laboratory. The astronomists demonstrated the frequent occurrence of planet formation; a multitude of stars possessed—it was established incontrovertibly—planetary systems. So, then, the sciences joined in the unanimous conclusion that life orginates in the course of natural cosmic changes, that its evolution ought to be a common event in the Universe; and the crowning of the evolutionary tree by the intelligence of organic beings was judged to be dictated by the Physical Order of Things.
The sciences thus held up the image of a populated Universe; meanwhile, their conclusions were being obstinately contradicted by observational fact. The theories said that Earth was surrounded by—granted, at stellar distances—a throng of civilizations; actual observation said that a lifeless void yawned on every side of us. The first researchers of the problem went on the assumption that the average distance between two cosmic civilizations ran from fifty to one hundred light-years. This hypothetical distance was later increased to one thousand. In the seventies, radio astronomy was improved to the point where one could search for signals coming in from tens of thousands of light-years away, but there, too, all that could be heard was the static of solar fire. In seventeen years of continuous monitorings, not a single signal was detected, not a single sign to give some basis to the supposition that an intelligent purpose stood behind it.
Acheropoulos then said to himself: The facts must be true, for facts are the foundation of knowledge. Can it be that it is the theories of all the sciences that are false? That organic chemistry, and biochemical synthesis, and biology both theoretical and evolutionary, and planetology, and astrophysics have been, every last one, in error? No, they cannot all be so very much mistaken. And therefore the facts that we observe (say, rather, that we do not observe) clearly do not contradict the theories. What we need is a reinterpretation of the set of data and of the set of generalizations. This synthesis Acheropoulos undertook.
The age of the Universe and its size had to be revised by Earth’s science several times in the course of the twentieth century. The direction of the changes was always the same: both the antiquity and the dimensions had been underestimated. When Acheropoulos sat down to write A New Cosmogony, the age and magnitude of the Universe had undergone yet another revision: its duration was, then, set at about twelve billion years; its visible dimensions, at ten to twelve billion light-years. Now, the age of our solar system is five billion years. Our system, therefore, does not belong to the first generation of stars begotten by the Universum. The first generation arose far earlier, a good twelve billion years ago. It is in the interval of time separating the rise of that first generation from the rise of the subsequent generations of suns that the key to the mystery lies.
A situation resulted, as peculiar as it was amusing. What a c
ivilization might look like, what it might occupy itself with, what goals it might set itself, when that civilization had been prospering for billions of years (and civilizations “of the first generation” would have to be that much older than Earth’s!)—this was something no one could picture, not even in his wildest dreams. That which was beyond anyone’s ability to imagine, being therefore a thing most inconvenient, was therefore conveniently ignored. In fact, none of those who studied the problem of cosmic psychozoics wrote one word about such long-lived civilizations. The more bold among them sometimes said that the quasars, the pulsars, were perhaps manifestations of the activity of the most powerful cosmic civilizations. Yet simple calculation showed that Earth, if it continued to develop at the present rate, could attain the level of such extreme “astroengineering” activity within the next several thousand years. And after that? What might a civilization that lasted millions of times longer do? The astrophysicists who dealt with such questions declared that such civilizations did nothing, seeing they did not exist.
A Perfect Vacuum Page 21
