Bunch of Amateurs (35 page)

In those fractional advances lie galaxies to discover, new laws of the universe, and if one of the amateurs I talked to is right, maybe even a smart new way to harness this lightbucket brigade to grasp the current Holy Grail of astronomy: contact with extraterrestrials.

John Dobson is lying on a blanket on the top of a hill in Vermont—couchant is the heraldic term—surrounded by a half-dozen young beautiful girls and one jealous boy. He is explaining the whole universe to them—half with jokes, half with iconoclastic science.

“Momentum,” he explains, in his notorious style, “is how heavy you are multiplied by what the hell you are doing.”

The annual Vermont star party, which is where Dobson is holding court, is called Stellafane. Such revelries are held all over the world, and a great deal of their popularity can be traced to this one itinerant telescope maker, John Dobson. At this gathering, campers and RVs are parked in little neighborhoods scattered throughout hundreds of acres of pastures and isolated meadows. Thousands of astronomers are here for a long weekend of stargazing and late-night thoughts on, literally, the entire universe.

By night, the amateurs wander about, illuminating their way with low-intensity, deep-red-spectrum, flat-beam flashlights. The night eye can adapt to darkness in five or so minutes but has to start all over once it gets hit with the daytime-like rays of a standard flashlight. The truly hard-core take no chances and wander about sporting red night-vision goggles like apocalyptic warriors, or covering their “seeing” eye with a patch like midnight pirates, so that the rods and cones in the eye can maintain shift-to-dark sensitivity. When the time comes to look, they flip up their patch, enjoy the feathered detail of, say, Flocculent Spiral Galaxy NGC 4414, and then pop it back down to shelter their eye like a candle in the wind. One lady cooking burgers beneath her Winnebago awning called the gathering “Geekstock.” True, not a lot of drugs here. The high that everyone seeks at Stellafane is quite literal.

Dobson is often a guest at these star parties, and if he’s there, you will no doubt wander into the orbit of his cosmology. I’ve heard it now three or four times. I don’t entirely grasp the nuances of some of his scientific claims. I’m not sure anyone does, or that it matters. Even for the pros, cosmology is the greatest guessing game ever. The facts are precious few and extremely frail. Most of them are derived from highly contentious methods of painstakingly extracted and extremely sensitive data gleaned from a dim smudge of ancient light. Not a lot to go on, in other words. That said, and even though John Dobson is a man who made telescopes out of plywood and porthole glass and therefore is about as qualified to talk cosmology as my plumber is
qualified to discuss the effect of climate change on the Gulf Stream, well, still, Dobson makes a case for a really cool cosmos.

At the edge of the universe, Dobson explains with a knowing tone in his voice, gravitational energy converts to radiation. Now, maybe you understand that last clause in the physics sense, maybe you don’t understand it at all in the experiential sense. In other words, even though you know each word, and even strung together as a sentence, they combine to form a kind of sense, it’s not a kind of sense that relates to anything you, a civilian, have ever actually experienced, and so the words arrive in your ears as a kind of playful poetry. I might even understand the entire sentence, but the whole meaning doesn’t quite snag a hook in my brain. But what carries you along is the way Dobson says it, with an inflection and metric rhythm that makes any other view seem absolutely dopey. When Dobson goes into his full-on cosmology, I often hear what he says as free verse, the astronomical equivalent of reading Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl
or Ezra Pound’s
Cantos
, both of which you’ll recall were always lauded by your grooviest college professor as works that you should allow to flow over you. Dobson’s cosmology is best experienced that way, the way Ginsberg chanted his works, as free-verse poetry practically sung. Does this conversion predict the current temperature of deep space? Well:

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

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:

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”!

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.

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.