Posted 10:55 AM by Ken

The Big Bag Never Opened

Some time in the 1980s The Guardian, then so notorious for misprints that it was nicknamed The Grauniad, published an article that referred to 'the big bag theory' of the origin of the universe. A letter pointing out this mistake was sportingly illustrated with a cartoon of the Greek goddess Cornucopia, shaking the stars and galaxies out of a big bag.

There is in fact a connection between the Big Bang theory and cornucopia, but it's an entirely negative one. Such at any rate is the claim made by Eric J. Lerner, in his book The Big Bang Never Happened, which I recently rediscovered while tidying the workroom.

I first read Lerner's book several years ago. It didn't convince me, but it stimulated me to pay more attention to New Scientist's cosmology articles, which I had hitherto skimmed. Re-reading it after a few years of thus paying (more) attention, it made a lot more sense than it did the first time. Some of it is dated - Lerner was sceptical of galactic black holes, which have now been observed. It's been criticised, defended by its author and others, and I have no competence to comment. However, the technical back-and-forth is becoming increasingly beside the point. Problems with the Big Bang are now so mainstream that Lerner is cited, as a minority viewpoint but by no means a crackpot, in New Scientist itself, which recently devoted an issue to the subject. Even the plasma cosmology, developed by the Swedish physicist and Nobel Laureate Hans Alfven, seems to make more sense these days, with observations of obvious plasma flows and vast electromagnetic phenomena.

While there's little doubt that the observable universe is expanding, and that that expansion had a beginning in some kind of big bang, this does not necessarily imply the full eldritch pantheon of the Big Bang theory. That the entire universe emerged literally from nothing for completely unknown reasons, was inflated in an instant to a much larger size by a completely unknown force, is still accelerating outward under the influence of another completely unknown force, and that nine-tenths of it consists of a completely unknown form of matter, might seem at first glance an odd conclusion for a scientific deduction. If the name hadn't already been taken, the Big Bang theory would be known as scientific creationism.

And, like an earlier creationism, it has increasing difficulty in dealing with the evidence from the past. A cursory search turns up reports of: bafflingly early large-scale structures, old-looking early galaxies and even speculation that the most sacred relic of the Big Bang, the cosmic background radiation, is local in origin:

The most contentious possibility is that the background radiation itself isn't a remnant of the big bang but was created by a different process, a "local" process so close to Earth that the radiation wouldn't go near any gravitational lenses before reaching our telescopes.

The article continues with a brisk summary of the Big Bang's problems:

Although widely accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists as the best theory for the creation of the universe, the big bang model has come under increasingly vocal criticism from scientists concerned about inconsistencies between the theory and astronomical observations, or by concepts that have been used to "fix" the theory so it agrees with those observations.

These fixes include theories which say the nascent universe expanded at speeds faster than the speed of light for an unknown period of time after the big bang; dark matter, which was used to explain how galaxies and clusters of galaxies keep from flying apart even though there seems to be too little matter to provide the gravity needed to hold them together; and dark energy, an unseen, unmeasured and unexplained force that is apparently causing the universe not only to expand, but to accelerate as it goes.

In research published April 10 in the "Astrophysical Journal, Letters," Lieu and Mittaz found that evidence provided by WMAP point to a slightly "super critical" universe, where there is more matter (and gravity) than what the standard interpretation of the WMAP data says. This posed serious problems to the inflationary paradigm.

Recent observations by NASA's new Spitzer space telescope found "old" stars and galaxies so far away that the light we are seeing now left those stars when (according to big bang theory) the universe was between 600 million and one billion years old -- much too young to have galaxies with red giant stars that have burned off all of their hydrogen.

Other observations found clusters and super clusters of galaxies at those great distances, when the universe was supposed to have been so young that there had not been enough time for those monstrous intergalactic structures to form.

No doubt a suitable fix for these will be in shortly, if it isn't already. To the making of epicycles there is no end.

What's really intriguing, though, is that Lerner has not been content with theory. In fact, contentment with theory is for him the root of the problem. Like Alfven, he affirms that the best way to understand cosmic processes is through hands-on experimental work with similar processes in the laboratory. As director of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, he has conducted extensive research into plasma physics, particularly the plasma focus device, with the ultimate aim of developing cheap fusion power. He has some US government support and private investment, and a step-by-step business plan.

And Cornucopia? Well, Lerner's thesis is that there's a tight connection between technological devlopment, our understanding of the universe, and the general condition of society. The Big Bang cosmology has an immense ideological appeal in a society without any hopeful vision of the future. The shift from experiment and observation to increasingly arcane theory and the multiplication of epicycles is a further malign twist, digging us deeper into the hole. Fundamental technological developments are slowed down. Apart from biotech, in which great advances in both theory and practice have gone together, the rest of our technology - even the Internet - is an elaboration, refinement and diffusion of developments made half a century or more ago.

And that's why the big bag never opened.

Posted 8:42 AM by Ken

Gigs, etc

I'm speaking and reading at the Edinburgh University SF Soc's Freshers' Week event on Wednesday around about 8 p.m., in the Pentland Room at the Pleasance. On Thursday, 7.30 to 9.30, I'm doing a joint event with another local author, Jenni Calder, at the Priory Church, Hopetoun Road, South Queensferry (opposite the police station stop on the 43 bus rout, if anyone's coming in from Edinburgh). This is part of the Queensferry Arts Festival, which is running all week, mostly at the church.

Daniel Coysh has an interview/profile of me up at the Morning Star, Britain's only socialist daily (in fact, the only English-language socialist daily paper). It's on one of the free pages, so click right through.

Learning the World, published by Orbit last month and due to be published by Tor in November, has had a good response so far. Nova Scotia, the anthology of new Scottish speculative fiction edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson and published by Mercat Press, was launched in August from sites on the east and west coasts and has already sold more than half its print run. Part of a strong recent surge of Scottish SF and fantasy, this superbly-produced book contains many fine stories and my own 'A Case of Consilience', which is without a doubt the best story of Scottish Presbyterian xeno-evangelism yet published in the present millennium.

Posted 8:19 PM by Ken

Where were the black helicopters?

Caligula made his horse a Senator, but he didn't put the stable boy in charge of the aqueducts. The local, state and federal lack of preparation, the gutting of FEMA (previously capable, even under Bush, of acting with rather more despatch) as it was integrated, if that's the word, into Homeland Security present a record for which Michael Brown's replacement on the scene (not even sacking!) is not even the first installment of retribution.

A proper accounting must investigate FEMA's and Homeland Security's part in the sinister seige of New Orleans, in excluding the Red Cross and other volunteers, while allowing in Blackwater mercenaries.

[Added Saturday 10 Sept.]

Like I said before, the best blogging coverage is going on at Making Light and Lenin's Tomb. I found most of the above links there. The World Socialist Web Site are not my kind of socialists, but their daily analyses and reports have been sharp. Some commentary on the libertarian side can also make you think.

What's happened is a disaster all right, but to say that it's a failure presupposes that the plan was to use all available civil and military forces to deliver relief, and that this plan failed. Evidently there was no such plan. Nor, contrary to what some on the left have argued, was the situation left to the market and other forms of voluntary organization. Time and again, volunteer help from outside and self-help and mutual aid within have been blocked.

What the US authorities at every level appear to have settled on by accident or design is a method with wider application. The priority is to control the population. In the event of disaster, seal off the city until a sufficient military force is in place to take it. Exaggerate the degree of disorder within, relying on racism and rumour. Evacuate the city at gunpoint and don't let people back. Disperse the evacuees, humanely it may be, but firmly, with as much of the burden as possible taken by charity. Turn over the reconstruction to Haliburton and favoured real-estate developers. This is the future of Homeland Security. This is what to expect in the event of another natural disaster or mass-casualty attack.

There's no reason to expect anything substantially different in Britain. Civil disaster management and civil defence are very likely just as riddled with private consultancies, workshopping scenarios to their hearts' content, while the real preparation is for military and police occupation.

The time to prepare citizen self-organization from below is now. Some individual self-preparation wouldn't go amiss either.

Posted 6:38 PM by Ken

Why Didn't They Walk?


The now famous account by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky of their experiences in New Orleans makes two points very clear. One is that much of the 'looting', including armed 'looting', was entirely legitimate and necessary salvage of food, water, and other supplies. The other is that people were forcibly prevented from walking out of the city:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads.

[...]

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their city.

Other groups, time and again, got the same response.

Here's another account, again from a generally not-making-shit-up left-wing paper, of what went on in and around the Convention Center. It corroborates these two points, and seems interesting enough to quote at length. Lisa Moore is telling the story of her cousin Denise:

From what she told me, her mother, a licensed practical nurse, was called into work on Sunday night at Memorial Hospital (historically known as Baptist Hospital to those of us from NO). Denise decided to stay with her mother, her niece and grandniece; she figured they’d be safe at the hospital.

[...] Tuesday the levees broke, and water began rising. They moved patients upstairs, saw boats pass by on what used to be streets. They were told that they would be evacuated, that buses were coming. Then they were told they would have to walk to the nearest intersection, Napoleon and South Claiborne, to await the buses. They waded out in hip-deep water, only to stand at the intersection, on the neutral ground (what y’all call the median) for three and a half hours. The buses came and took them to the Ernest Morial Convention Center (yes, the one you’ve all seen on TV).

Denise said she thought she was in hell. They were there for two days, with no water, no food, no shelter - Denise, her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years old), and two-year-old grandniece. When they arrived, there were already thousands of people there. They were told that buses were coming. Police drove by, windows rolled up, thumbs-up signs. National guard trucks rolled by, completely empty, soldiers with guns cocked and aimed at them. Nobody stopped to drop off water. A helicopter did, but all the bottles exploded on impact due to the height of the helicopter.

The first day (Wednesday) four people died next to her. The second day (Thursday) six people died next to her. Again, nobody stopped. The only buses that came were full; they dropped off more and more people, but nobody was being picked up and taken away. They found out that those being dropped off had been rescued from rooftops and attics; they got off the buses delirious from lack of water and food. Completely dehydrated. the crowd tried to keep them all in one area. Denise said the new arrivals had mostly lost their minds. They had gone crazy.

Inside the convention centre, the place was one huge bathroom. In order to shit, you had to stand in other people’s shit. the floors were black and slick with shit. most people stayed outside because the smell was so bad. But outside wasn’t much better: between the heat, the humidity, the lack of water, the old and very young dying from dehydration... and there was no place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk. they slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass.

Denise said, yes, there were young men with guns there. But they organised the crowd. They went to Canal Street and ‘looted’, and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. When the police rolled down windows and yelled out, 'The buses are coming', the young men with guns organised the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back. Just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first.

Denise said the fights she saw between the young men with guns were fist fights. She saw them put their guns down and fight rather than shoot up the crowd. But she said that there were a handful of people shot in the convention centre: their bodies were left inside, along with other dead babies and old people.

Denise said the people thought they were being sent there to die. Lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. Cops passing by, speeding off. National guard rolling by with guns aimed at them. And, yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all. She saw a young man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit; he crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot him in the back, in front of the whole crowd. She saw many groups of people decide that they were going to walk across the bridge to the west bank, and those same groups would return, saying that they were met at the top of the bridge by armed police ordering them to turn around, that they weren’t allowed to leave.

This added to the belief they were sent there to die. Denise’s niece found a pay phone, and kept trying to call her mother’s boyfriend in Baton Rouge, and finally got through and told him where they were. The boyfriend, and Denise’s brother, drove down from Baton Rouge and came and got them. They had to bribe a few cops, and talk a few into letting them into the city ('Come on, man, my two-year-old niece is at the convention centre'), then they took back roads to get to them.

After arriving at my other cousin’s apartment in Baton Rouge, they saw the images on TV, and couldn’t believe how the media were portraying the people of New Orleans. She kept repeating to me on the phone last night: make sure you tell everybody that they left us there to die. Nobody came. Those young men with guns were protecting us. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have had the little water and food they had found.

That’s Denise Moore’s story.

Posted 2:07 PM by Ken

Katrina Comments

I'm belatedly posting some comments on my previous post. I apologise for the belatedness, because these correspondents were ahead of the curve.

Erudite American Marxist Jim Farmelant wrote, back on Wednesday 31 August:

I think we are seeing in the Gulf states, especially Louisiana, the results of some massive incompetence, starting from the Federal level (read Bush Administration) down to the state and local levels.  The Bush Administration had taken away Federal funds that had been slated to pay for New Orleans disaster funds and used them pay for the Iraq war and for tax cuts.  As a result, New Orleans was not able to get its levees in shape to withstand a major storm of the sort just experienced.  Louisiana has found itself shorthanded in terms of manpower in its National Guard, since so much of the Louisiana National Guard is, you guessed it, over in Iraq. Indeed, even much of the equipment that the National Guard uses in flood relief is over in Iraq, just in case that country should suffer a flood.
 
And things are not too much better at the state and local levels. While almost all major American cities suffer greatly from corruption, New Orleans is especially notorious on that score.  No doubt when the billions of Federal dollars being to flow in to rebuild the city, a lot of well connected people are going to become fabulously wealthy. Whether any of that will trickle down
to the rest of the people in New Orleans is anyone's guess. Meanwhile, watching television one got to see the consequences of lax building codes, as one got to see buildings that probably
would have had trouble standing up to a 75 mph wind, get whacked with 175 mph winds.  Naturally, a lot of these buildings simply collapsed.  Since, New Orleans is a city that normally gets hit with a hurricane or major tropical storm every few years, one might have thought that the city's building codes would have taken that into account.  Yes, one might have thought that.
 
Yes, this is going to be a major national disaster.

British SF fan Alison wrote, the same day:

Lots of things about the US become easier to understand if you consider it as a very rich third world country... Not just now, but generally. Like enormously high and rising inequity (including reducing real-terms median income over the last 30 years!), lack of adequate healthcare, housing, education for the poor, and a belief that richer states have no responsibility to improve the living conditions of poorer ones, diversion of national wealth into warfare rather than welfare. That sort of thing.

Lots of examples at the moment; eg general notion that Texas helping out refugees from Louisiana is a 'stunningly generous offer' rather than you know, standard operating practice, or the proportion of US military strength being used to sort out Katrina cleanup (and you know, they could have been shipping in troops to safe nearby areas over the weekend), or just a general 'oh well, of course it's individuals' responsibility to look after themselves and their property', or the Red Cross explaining that it's their largest aid effort ever (because, you know, American Red Cross is the world).

Not to mention police and other rescue personnel actively looting (apparently this happened after 9/11 as well), something which I think we can safely say Would Not Happen Here.

 
Today, David Moles wrote:

This part of America didn't just fall off and drop into the Third World; it was left there, a long time ago. (One of our great national shames, though
there's plenty of competition.) There's a good summary here[.]

Of course, this sort of thing doesn't happen in at least one actual Third World country.

Star blogging coverage (practical as well as argumentative) can be found at Making Light. China Mieville has done some sterling online investigative journalism at Lenin's Tomb (as has the tomb's titular inhabitant).

Posted 3:17 PM by Ken

Katrina

Excuse me, but did part of America just fall off and drop into the Third World?

Maybe I'm missing something, but from here there seems to be a gulf between the news reports and the framing of them. What it looks like is an ever-expanding disaster that could eventually have a body count in the thousands. Lack of clean water and electricity could do that on their own. The rescue efforts look awfully piecemeal, brave though each one is. In New Orleans the water is still rising. Thousands are still stranded. Tens or hundreds of thousands in the Gulf coast states are homeless and without electricity or communications. The news networks are maintaining a remarkable calm. The reporters sound stressed, the anchors sombre but unfazed. It's unreal.

To stop this from turning into major national catastrophe would seem to require a massive mobilization of ... oh, never mind.

Posted 10:09 PM by Ken

1688 and all that

Nicholas Whyte has replied to my reply. To take this further would, pending further research, be likely to descend to nit-picking or ascend to a contest of grand narratives. (At least, that's how I would be inclined to go, to nobody's profit or pleasure.) This not being Usenet I'm happy to leave the historical question to the judgement of the wide and discerning body of enlightened opinion that undoubtedly makes up the readership of both our blogs.

The question this all started as an aside to is something neither of us has pursued, and it's this: if you are going to limit free speech at all, is it more illiberal to do so by making the proclamation of certain specific and narrowly defined doctrines illegal, or by making administrative decisions based on broad and vague provisions? Which - if pressed to choose - would you prefer as a precedent in the hands of your political opponents, whoever they may be, who are of course much less wise and just than you and your friends? Which, for that matter, would you trust your side to use wisely? That too I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Posted 8:47 PM by Ken

Glorious Indeed

In the previous post I referred to the Iraq-based Iranian MEK and the KLA as 'jihadists'. A couple of emails have flooded in to call me on this. And yes, in this instance I can only put my hands up and say this was unjust and I retract it. Thre is plenty to be said against both organizations but calling them jihadists only confuses things.

Nicholas Whyte, a very intelligent guy and so influential that his name has been mentioned in conspiracy theories, has kindly overlooked my trespasses on his own patch and taken me to task for my historical references below:

I'm going to detach this completely from the context of present day argument because I think Ken's history is wrong (or, perhaps, I have failed to see the joke). I'm frankly surprised by his blithe acceptance of a) the 1688-92 revolution being a Good Thing and b) the "international conspiracy of religious and feudal reaction" which lasted "for centuries". I realise that this is because I come at this from an Irish Catholic perspective, from which the Penal Laws appear as a crucial instrument of suppression of the rights and powers of the majority of Ireland's inhabitants in order to entrench the power of a minority, with assistance from England. (And that's the moderate version; the more hard-line version would deny that there was any "real" Irish person who benefited from the Penal Laws at all.) I don't know much about Scotland at this period, so it may just be that Ken and I are talking past each other. But I've met enough otherwise sensible people from across the water who don't, for example, realise that Cromwell was a Bad Thing, that I think it's worth expanding on why I think Ken's history is wrong.

Let's indulge in a little counterfactual speculation. What if James II had not been overthrown? I carry no particular brief for him; he was obviously not the greatest king England (or Scotland, or Ireland) ever had, and was largely the architect of his own downfall; but before you start to rejoice at his overthrow, just bear in mind that the straw that broke the camel's back was his enactment of the Declaration of Indulgence - ie that Catholics and Dissenters should have the same civil rights as Anglicans. Shocking, eh? The argument at the time was that this was part of the slippery slope to a Catholic absolute monarchy, but really, any leftist should find this about as convincing as Pinochet's justification for overthrowing Allende in Chile in 1973. In fact, it's difficult to believe that a continuing Jacobite regime would have done anything other than summon a new Parliament, which would this time have had significant Catholic and Dissenter membership, ie been more representative of the people, and come to a modus vivendi between the three groups based on rights rather than repression. (See for a supporting argument the Catholic Encyclopedia's interesting nuances on the Revolution.)

Sure, under my scenario James would probably have continued to mismanage his politics, and may very well have ended up forced to abdicate later rather than sooner, if he didn't die first. But it is absurd to argue that that he could have reversed the Reformation, and I don't believe that was ever his plan. (if it had been, he certainly could not have kept the loyalty of invaluable aides like Samuel Pepys, who was a conforming Anglican and whose wife was a Huguenot refugee.)

I realise that part of the reason I don't see much worth celebrating in the events of 1689-92 is that the people who I did see celebrating it as I grew up gave me every reason to believe that I personally had lost rather than gained as a result. I think my views have now moderated, to the point where I can relatively calmly argue that it didn't make much difference, rather than that it was an actively Bad Thing. (My views on Cromwell, however, have not moderated.)

As for the "international conspiracy" lasting for centuries - well, when James lost the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, a Te Deum in thanks for William's victory was sung in Vienna and the Vatican was lit up in celebration, so it looks to me as if the agents of the international Catholic conspiracy won rather than lost the war! Especially since the French recognised James' overthrow as early as 1697; and I'll bow to any Scot's superior knowledge of the events of 1715 and 1745, but would be surprised to learn that an international conspiracy of feudal and religious reaction was the sole cause of conflict in either case. Certainly the British government doesn't seem to have thought so; the Penal Laws as applied - especially in England - were clearly designed more to entrench the monopoly on legitimacy of the Church of England than to root out loyalists of foreign powers.

No fair-minded person could dispute that in England the various laws against Catholics and Dissenters were prolonged by popular prejudice and Anglican interest well beyond any point where they could be justified by reasons of state; nor that they were an instrument of oppression against the majority population of Ireland. To say that they 'worked' in England wasn't on my part any considered historical judgement, merely to note that the auto-da-fe never became one of the crowd-pulling entertainments of London. Maybe they weren't needed. The Jacobite conspiracies were real and produced two uprisings. Possibly with a less severe repression against Catholicism the uprisings would have met with more success.

Nicholas makes two points which I hope he won't take offence if I call debating points. The first is that the immediate occasion of James II's overthrow was his Declaration of Indulgence. The second is that the Pope was on the same side as William of Orange. Now nobody, from Macaulay to the author of the Catholic Encyclopaedia article cited, allows that James was a sincere convert to toleration. He had been, right up until that point, a relentless persecutor of Presbyterians and other Dissenters. The Declaration of Indulgence was indisputably unconstitutional. James had no authority to annul laws, however odious, that had been passed by Parliament and accepted by the courts. It didn't take long for the Dissenters to be persuaded that the risks to them from an arbitrary Catholic monarchy far outweighed whatever temporary relief it might bestow. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was hot in the memory. (If, to take up the Allende analogy, the (counter-factual) constitutional Marxist president of a neighbouring state, say Argentina, had withdrawn previous solemn guarantees and used great violence against the Argentine middle classes, and Allende was in the meantime busy promoting hard-line revolutionaries to positions of power, Pinochet would have been even more widely hailed than he was.) Indulgence was a tactical manouevre, and as Macaulay shows it was recognised as such in widespread debate at the time.

My counter-factual speculation is this: If James II had succeeded in drawing Catholic and Dissenter into a pincer movement against the Established Church and the limits placed on the monarchy, it is doubtful to say the least that he would have established religious pluralism. (And, let me say again, the Catholic Encyclopaedia produces no supporting argument for this.) More likely there would have been a Catholic monarchy (now with a guaranteed succession) and a immense increase in Catholic power in the state. That after all had been his consistent course and aim. He had used his limited prerogative to place Catholics in every key position he could. What he would have done with an unlimited prerogative was expected to be more of the same. He might not have reversed the Reformation or even aimed to but there is no doubt at all that most of the population would have suspected him, with good reason, of such a design. James might well have had to rely on aid from France to hold power. A second Civil War seems a likely consequence. Defeat for the Protestant majority would have meant national subjugation; victory, a massacre and expulsion of Catholics. It is as well for England that it was spared either.

That the Pope celebrated William's victory at the Boyne may for a moment nonplus an opponent who has never heard of this (and we've all met them), but it won't wash as a serious historical argument. The Pope was allied with the other European powers, Catholic and Protestant, against the overweening ambition of France. That does not at all affect the point that William's victory advanced the Protestant interest, and that his defeat would have favoured the Catholic interest. The Orangemen are no more deluded on that than the Irish Catholics were who supported James.

Was the Glorious Revolution a Good Thing? I'll try to emulate Nicholas's candour and admit that I come to it from a perspective of having heard from childhood of the sufferings of the Covenanter martyrs, and later finding the same martyrs extolled in Marxist and Liberal histories. All the same, I find that I agree with the final 'nuance' of the Catholic Encyclopaedia:

But on the other hand we can now realize that the Revolution had the advantage of finally closing the long struggle between king and Parliament that had lasted for nearly a century, and of establishing general principles of religious toleration in which Catholics were bound sooner or later to be included.

These achievements seem glorious enough.