Nog eens een boek dat de "wetenschap" in vragen stelt: dit keer over de Big Bang. Heeft die Big Bang eigenlijk wel plaatsgevonden? Eric Lerner beweert van niet, wat hem uiteraard op felle kritiek kwam te staan van de wetenschapssekte (maar ook steun van onder andere nobelprijswinnaar Kary Mullis, de uitvinder van de PCR-test).
- Hoe zien de bedenkers van de Big Bang het universum?
Today Big Bang theorists see a universe much like that envisioned by the medieval scholars—a finite cosmos created ex nihilo, from nothing, whose perfection is in the past, which is degenerating to a final end. The perfect principles used to form this universe can be known only by pure reason, guided by authority, independent of observation. Such a cosmic myth arises in periods of social crisis or retreat, and reinforces the separation of thought and action, ruler and ruled. It breeds a fatalistic pessimism that paralyzes society. - Hoe ziet Eric Lerner het universum?
By contrast, the opposing view, plasma cosmology, is empirical, a product of the scientific method of Galileo and Kepler. Its proponents see an infinite universe evolving over infinite time. The universe can be studied only by observation—there is no final answer in science and no final authority. This approach, binding together thought and action, theory and observation, has proved, over the ages, to be a weapon of social change. The idea of progress in the universe has always been linked with the idea of social progress on earth. - De Big Bang gaat uit van een universum die vijandig staat ten aanzien van menselijke doelen: ofwel eindigt alles in een Big Crunch of in een koud doods eeuwig "niets" :
The present universe, the ashes of that explosion, is a strange one, as cosmology describes it. Most of it is dark matter, exotic particles that can never be observed. It is dotted by black holes, which suck in streams of dying stars, and it is threaded by cosmic strings, tears in the fabric of space itself. Our universe’s future, cosmologists tell us, is grim: it is doomed either to end in a spectacular Big Crunch, collapsing into a universal black hole, or to expand and decay into the nothingness of an eternal night. This striking cosmic vision, built up over the past twenty-five years by hundreds of theoreticians and explained in dozens of books, has sunk deeply into popular consciousness. Many have pondered what meaning life can have in a universe doomed to decay, unspeakably hostile and alien to human purposes. - Wetenschappelijke begrippen zijn nieuw eeuwig (niets staat vast):
The validity of a scientific concept is not determined by its popularity or by its support among the most prominent scientists of the day. Many a firmly held doctrine, from the geocentric cosmos of Ptolemy to the phlogistic theory of heat, has enjoyed the nearly unanimous support of the scientific community, only to be swept away later. - W.F. Hermans zei ooit in een interview met Adriaan Van Dis dat er maar weinige aardige "wetenschappers" zijn. Het is niet de enige met die opvatting:
In 1889 Samuel Pierpont Langley, a famed astronomer, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and soon to be one of the pioneers of aviation, described the scientific community as “a pack of hounds … where the louder-voiced bring many to follow them nearly as often in a wrong path as in a right one, where the entire pack even has been known to move off bodily on a false scent.”1 The only test of scientific truth is how well a theory corresponds to the world we observe. Does it predict things that we can then see? Or do our observations of nature show things that a theory says are impossible? No matter how well liked a theory may be, if observation contradicts it, then it must be rejected. For science to be useful, it must provide an increasingly true and deep description of nature, not a prescription of what nature must be. In the past four years crucial observations have flatly contradicted the assumptions and predictions of the Big Bang. Because the Big Bang supposedly occurred only about twenty billion years ago, nothing in the cosmos can be older than this. Yet in 1986 astronomers discovered that galaxies compose huge agglomerations a billion light-years across; such mammoth clusterings of matter must have taken a hundred billion years to form. Just as early geological theory, which sought to compress the earth’s history into a biblical few thousand years crumbled when confronted with the aeons needed to build up a mountain range, so the concept of a Big Bang is undermined by the existence of these vast and ancient superclusters of galaxies. These enormous ribbons of matter, whose reality was confirmed during 1990, also refute a basic premise of the Big Bang—that the universe was, at its origin, perfectly smooth and homogeneous. Theorists admit that they can see no way to get from the perfect universe of the Big Bang to the clumpy, imperfect universe of today. As one leading theorist, George Field of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, put it, “There is a real crisis.” Other conflicts with observation have emerged as well. Dark matter, a hypothetical and unobserved form of matter, is an essential component of current Big Bang theory —an invisible glue that holds it all together. Yet Finnish and American astronomers, analyzing recent observations, have shown that the mysterious dark matter isn’t invisible—it doesn’t exist. Using sensitive new instruments, other astronomers around the world have discovered extremely old galaxies that apparently formed long before the Big Bang universe could have cooled sufficiently. In fact, by the end of the eighties, new contradictions were popping up every few months. - De Big Bang-theorie is dus een theorie volg met contradicties. Bvb. Als het heelal een begin heeft gehad, hoe kunnen er dan sterrenstelsels zijn die veel ouder zijn dan dit begin? Maar wanneer "wetenschappers" geconfronteerd worden met deze contradicties, gaan ze die uit de weg. De "theorie" moet met alle macht gered worden:
Nonetheless, cosmologists, with few exceptions, have either dismissed the observations as faulty, or have insisted that minor modifications of Big Bang theory will reconcile “apparent” contradictions. - De alternatieve wetenschappers hebben daarentegen een betere benadering:
Instead of working forward from a theoretically conceived beginning of time, plasma cosmology works backward from the present universe, and outward from the earth. It arrives at a universe without a Big Bang, without any beginning at all, a universe that has always existed, is always evolving, and will always evolve, with no limits of any sort.
These objects, by far the largest ever seen, were discovered in 1986 by Brent Tully, a University of Hawaii astronomer and one of today’s leading optical astronomers. Tully found that almost all the galaxies within a distance of a billion light-years of earth are concentrated into huge ribbons of matter about a billion light-years long, three hundred million light-years wide, and one hundred million light-years thick.
His discovery, while stunning, was perhaps to have been expected. For centuries, astronomers have been discovering ever-larger clumps of matter in the universe, and ever-larger stretches of space between them (Fig. 1.1). Since the seventeenth century, astronomers have known that most of the universe’s mass is concentrated in glowing stars like our sun, dense objects separated by light-years of nearly empty space. A hundred and twenty years ago, astronomers realized that groups of a hundred billion or more stars form the great pinwheels we see as galaxies, and that these are separated by larger empty expanses.
telescopes penetrated more deeply into space, observations showed that even galaxies are grouped together into clusters, some containing a thousand galaxies.
Then, in the early seventies, it became clear that these spherical clusters are strung together into larger filaments termed superclusters. While galaxies are a mere hundred thousand light-years across and clusters not more than ten million or so, a supercluster might snake through a few hundred million light-years of space. - Wanneer men de wetenschappelijke methode toepast, namelijk testen of voorspellingen overeenkomen met observaties, dan blijkt de big bang niet te kloppen:
The test of scientific theory is the correspondence of predictions and observation, and the Big Bang has flunked. It predicts that there should be no objects in the universe older than twenty billion years and larger than 150 million light-years across. There are. It predicts that the universe, on such a large scale, should be smooth and homogeneous. The universe isn’t. The theory predicts that, to produce the galaxies we see around us from the tiny fluctuations evident in the microwave background, there must be a hundred times as much dark matter as visible matter. There’s no evidence that there’s any dark matter at all. And if there is no dark matter, the theory predicts, no galaxies will form. Yet there they are, scattered across the sky. - De alternatieve versie:
By the late seventies many scientists studying the solar system were convinced that electrical currents and magnetic fields do indeed produce a complex, highly inhomogeneous filamentary structure in space, just as Alfvén had theorized. For Alfvén, however, a description of the solar system was only a first step. Plasmas should look similar no matter how big or small they are. “If we can extrapolate from the laboratory to the solar system, which is a hundred trillion times larger,” he asks, “then why shouldn’t plasma behave the same way for the entire observable universe, another hundred trillion times larger?” - Het bijzondere is dat moderne kosmologie alsmaar nauwer begint aan te sluiten op theologie:
The ideas of modern cosmology have, as well, become increasingly tied to theology. In books like Paul Davies’s God and the New Physics, which now fill the science shelves at bookstores, scientists and popularizers argue that the theories of the Big Bang lead to a proof of God’s existence or at least to knowledge of why the universe came into existence. From these bases we can hope, in Stephen Hawking’s words, “to know the mind of God.”
This is more than a scientific discussion about observations and theories. The Big Bang rests on a pair of assumptions that form the core of conventional cosmology’s method: the universe came into existence at a specific moment, created from nothing, and we can learn about creation and the universe as a whole by developing exact mathematical theories—that is, by our own reason, by logical deduction. We can, as Hawking and others argue, determine how the universe must have been formed, by sheer logical necessity, by what laws it must be governed, and we can then divine its “true” properties from that necessary beginning. The mathematical laws we develop are the essence of the universe, the reality behind all the phenomena of the visible cosmos—“the mind of God.” Plasma cosmology, however, assumes that we learn about the universe by observing processes that act in nature today. From the patterns we discern, we can derive generalizations that allow us to guess how these same processes led to the present configuration of the universe. Because today nothing comes from nothing, the reasonable hypothesis is that this has always been true—the universe, in some form, has always existed. - Aangezien we vandaag weten dat niets kan worden gecreëerd uit niets, is de meest aannemelijke hypothese dat dat dat altijd zo geweest is, en dat het universum dan ook altijd heeft bestaan, en niet via een "big bang" uit het niets. Maar net theologen hebben reeds lang geleden beweert dat uit niets, wel iets kan ontstaan. Zoals Augustinus:
Thus by 400 A.D. Augustine had elaborated a cosmology strangely similar to the Big Bang: a universe created in an instant out of nothing, decaying from a perfect origin toward an ignominious end, populated by strange and miraculous creatures, and knowable only by the mind, not the senses. These fundamental conceptions arose as religious and philosophical justifications for a decaying and oppressive society. - De nefaste invloed van overmatig gebruik van wiskunde is ook hier weer evident:
Big Bang cosmology does not begin with observations but with mathematical derivations from unquestionable assumptions. When further observations conflict with theory, as they have repeatedly during the past decades, new concepts are introduced to “save the phenomenon”—dark matter, WIMPs, cosmic strings—the “epicycles” of current astronomy. Of course, just as the nineteenth-century cosmos was not merely a revival of Ionian philosophy, so the modern cosmology of the Big Bang is not a simple echo of Augustine and Ptolemy. It rests on an impressive foundation of elaborate and beautiful mathematical theory. But, like Ptolemy’s theories, it provides few predictions that are confirmed by observation. - De Big Bang en religie: een "match made in Heaven"?
The idea that the universe had a finite lifetime also existed in the mid-nineteenth century, although only on the popular fringes of science. The first suggestion that the universe originated in a creative explosion—the first Big Bang—actually came from the pen of Edgar Allan Poe in 1849. Poe was not only a well-known poet and writer, he was also a scientific popularizer who kept himself up-to-date on the latest in astronomical research. In the book-length essay Eureka Poe rejected the idea of an infinite universe, citing Olbers’s objections. He reasoned that a universe governed by gravitation would collapse in a heap if not kept apart by some form of repulsion. He postulated that God had, in an enormous explosion at the creation, thrust all the stars apart. Like a rocket racing into the sky, the stars and galaxies would first expand, and then contract into a final catastrophe, the end of the world. - De omstandigheden die geleid hebben tot het onstaan van de "big bang"-theorie is ook opvallend: onder een periode van economisch verval namelijk.
Both Cartesian deductive methods and questions about the infinity of the cosmos remained marginal to the mainstream of science through the mid-nineteenth century. The swift advance of technological progress and the equally swift transformation of society convinced most scientists that the basic methods of science correctly yield results proved in practice, and that the thesis of an unlimited, evolutionary universe is valid. It was not until social and economic progress slowed that the corresponding scientific assumptions came under serious attack.
It was in this era of slowing growth that the first real scientific challenge to the unlimited universe appeared. Steam power had developed throughout the nineteenth century, as did the study of heat and its transformation, thermodynamics. In the early part of the century, scientists had discovered that energy can be transformed in various ways, but never created or destroyed, a fundamental principle that came to be known as the first law of thermodynamics. In 1850, Rudolf Clausius discovered another fundamental principle, the second law of thermodynamics. A body’s ratio of its energy to its temperature, a quantity Clausius dubbed “entropy,” always increases in any transformation of energy—for example, in a steam engine.
But scientists had other reasons for not accepting the second law’s implication that the universe necessarily had a beginning from which it was now running down. The predictions of thermodynamics appeared to contradict what was known of geological and biological evolution. In the 1890s a debate broke out between thermodynamicists and geologists over the age of the earth. The physicist Lord Kelvin argued that, from the cooling rate of the earth as estimated from measurement of heat in mines, the earth must have been nearly molten as recently as twenty million years ago. Geologists countered that the formation of certain rock deposits must have taken at least twenty times as long, four hundred million years. Backed up not by theory but by a vast accumulation of observation, geologists doubted the physicists’ theories.
In addition, some thermodynamicists pointed out that Boltzmann had proved far less than he claimed. He assumed that gas began in a high degree of disorder, close to equilibrium, and never got far from it. Moreover, he only allowed for atomic collisions, but took no long-range forces, such as electromagnetism or gravity, into account. In most real physical situations, though, these restrictions aren’t valid, so Boltzmann’s proof is not applicable. A century later scientists were to demonstrate that, in the general case, Boltzmann’s law of increasing disorder simply isn’t true.
The reality of progress in science and society was so apparent to the average scientist that Boltzmann’s vision of a universe in continual decay seemed too bizarre. In practice, Boltzmann’s laws were very useful in dealing with steam engines and simple gaseous systems, and were widely applied. But his broad generalizations about cosmology, which implied that the universe must have had a beginning, must have been “wound up,” had no significant impact for more than a generation. - En toen kwam een heilige genaamd Albert Einstein met zijn algemene relativiteitstheorie, een wiskundig "mooie" theorie van een eindig maar grenzeloos universum, een theorie met religieuze ondertonen en niet toevallig ontwikkeld in een periode van groten onrust en verval (tijdens de eerste wereldoorlog):
Einstein’s new theory appealed to scientists, reporters, and editors because it brought a vision of the universe as a whole, a vision that appeared as a solace to a tormented society. The cosmology Einstein developed in 1917, two years after formulating his general theory, had, for many scientists, a terrific aesthetic and philosophical attraction. In part, this was based on the appeal of general relativity itself. As Alfvén has written, “No one can study General Relativity without being immensely impressed by its unquestionable mathematical beauty.” And, moreover, it was demonstrated not only in its prediction that light near the sun would be bent by gravity, but by subtle variations in the orbit of Mercury which Newtonian gravitation couldn’t explain. Newton and other scientists had always been bothered that gravity appeared to act “at a distance,” a magical influence in empty space. General relativity eliminates this problem, showing that mass curves the space around it like a weight resting on a sheet pulled taut at the edges. It is this curvature of the space that results in gravity, not the direct action of one object on another. But beautiful as it was, this change in gravitational theory was not what captured the imagination of scientists and the press. It was instead Einstein’s cosmological speculations of a closed, finite universe. Gravity, Einstein argued, would curve the entire cosmos around into a four-dimensional sphere, finite, yet without boundaries. Einstein’s spherical universe is static, eternally unchanging, ruled by his elegant equations. To a society shattered by World War I, this vision of a calm, ordered universe must have been tremendously reassuring. When mankind is progressing, the dynamic changing infinite universe, the “restless universe,” as Sir James Jeans called it, seems exciting and challenging. But when human affairs are in shambles, and change no longer means progress but can mean upheaval and death, a finite and static universe like Einstein’s can appear a balm to tortured souls, just as Augustine’s hierarchical cosmos seemed to offer refuge from the confusion and misery of the fourth century.
As one of Einstein’s biographers, physicist Abraham Pais, wrote, “Einstein’s discovery appealed to deep mythic themes. A new man appears abruptly, the suddenly famous Dr. Einstein. He carries a message of a new order in the universe.… His mathematical language is sacred, … the fourth dimension, light has weight, space is warped. He fulfills two profound needs in man, the need to know and the need not to know but to believe.”1 In a time of death and uncertainty, “he represents order and power. He became the divine man of the twentieth century.” - Wat was er mis met de theorie van Einstein? Einstein's theorie is gebaseerd op de aanname dat het universum overal homogeen is, een aanname die tegen wordt gesproken door observaties:
In his cosmology he again departed from standard method by adopting a fundamental premise that was actually contradicted by observation—a hypothesis that would become basic to all subsequent relativistic cosmology. Einstein assumed that the universe as a whole is homogeneous, that matter is, on the largest scale, spread evenly throughout space. Given this, Einstein used his general theory of relativity to prove that space would be finite. Simply put, the larger a mass of a given density is, the more it curves space. If it is big enough it will curve space entirely around onto itself. So if the universe is homogeneous, with the same density everywhere, it must be finite. But by 1919 there was enormous evidence that the universe is not homogeneous. Back in Newton’s time, scientists knew that almost all matter is concentrated into stars, separated from each other by vast, nearly empty spaces. Subsequent observation (prior to Einstein) showed that nearby stars form an aggregate galaxy, the Milky Way. Even by the 1850s astronomers had noted that the spiral nebulas, which many rightly believed to be other galaxies, are themselves concentrated in a broad band across the sky, a formation much more recently called a galactic super-cluster. So Einstein knew that observation indicates the universe at all scales was inhomogeneous. Yet purely for philosophical and aesthetic reasons he proposed a homogeneous cosmos, thus laying the basis for a revival of a finite universe. But for an inhomogeneous universe, when the density of a large section of space is less than that for smaller regions, the universe need not be closed over into a sphere.
Einstein’s assumption of homogeneity had three profound effects on cosmology. First, it introduced the idea of a finite universe, which resuscitated the medieval cosmos—previously considered obsolete and antithetical to science itself. Second, the aesthetic simplicity of the assumption of homogeneity, combined with Einstein’s prestige, embedded this assumption in all future relativistic cosmology. Third, and perhaps most significant, it set a precedent by allowing the introduction of assumptions contrary to observation, in the hope that further observation will justify the assumption. In the case of Einstein’s cosmology it was the hope that, on scales larger than clusters and superclusters of galaxies, the universe would become smooth. - Nog meer problemen met de theorie van Einstein:
A static, closed universe could not remain static, because its own gravitation would cause it to collapse. This was a problem not only of his theory, but of any theory of gravity, including Newton’s. As Poe had noted seventy years earlier, unless a body of matter rotates, it will collapse under its own gravity—only rotation stabilizes bodies such as the galaxy and the solar system. But Einstein ruled out a rotating universe on philosophical grounds. First, he believed that rotation itself is relative, like all other motion, and the universe could not rotate relative to anything else. Second, rotation implies a central axis, but such an axis would be a distinct direction in space, different from all others—this contradicted his belief that space is the same everywhere and in every direction. Third, Einstein believed his equations dictated a closed universe. A universe with such a powerful gravitational field would not be stabilized by rotation, even if it were rotating at the speed of light—and any faster rotation is prohibited by the special theory of relativity.
Clearly, Einstein reasoned, something prevents the collapse of the universe, something like the centrifugal force of rotation, but not rotation itself. This force must somehow increase with distance: it had never been observed on earth or in the solar system, but it must be strong enough at cosmological distances to overcome gravity. He introduced a new term into his equations of gravity, “the cosmological constant,” a repulsive force whose strength increases proportionally to the distance between two objects, just as the centrifugal force of a rigidly rotating body increases proportionally to its radius. But this force, he thought, acts in all directions equally, like gravity, so it does not disturb the symmetry of the universe. - De fameuze "red shift":
In 1924 new observations changed the picture radically. For a decade, astronomers had been measuring the spectra of stars in nearby galaxies. In nearly all cases, the spectra shifted slightly toward the red. Scientists had long known the simplest explanation for these redshifts is that the galaxies are moving away, shifting the frequency of light to the red (an analogous phenomenon makes the pitch of a train whistle rise as it approaches and fall as it recedes). It seemed strange that, rather than moving randomly, the galaxies all seemed to be moving away from each other and from us.
This news was of immense interest to a young Belgian priest and budding relativist, Georges-Henri Lemaître. Born in 1894, Lemaître received his doctorate in physics in 1920, and shortly thereafter entered a seminary to study for the priesthood. While at the Seminary of Maline, he became fascinated with the new field of general relativity, and after being ordained in 1923, went to England to study under Eddington. He then spent the winter of 1924–1925 at Harvard Observatory, where he heard Hubble lecture, and learned of the growing evidence for the redshift-distance relation.
This is as far as general relativity alone could take the cosmological problem. A repulsive force, of unknown origin, is counterbalancing gravity and causing the universe to expand, as Hubble’s data confirmed. In 1928, Sir James Jeans, one of the most prominent astronomers of the time, revived Boltzmann’s old arguments about the fate of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics, Jeans reasoned, shows that the universe must have begun from a finite time in the past, and must move from a minimal to a maximal entropy. Incorporating Einstein’s equivalence of matter and energy, Jeans argued that entropy increases when matter is converted to energy, because energy is more chaotically dissipated. Thus the end state of the universe must be the complete conversion of matter to energy. “The second law of thermodynamics compels the materials in the universe to move ever in the same direction along the same road, a road which ends only in death and annihilation,” he wrote gloomily.
Once the core is entirely converted to helium, no more fusion of hydrogen can take place; there is nothing to support the weight of the star, so it rapidly contracts, and as it does, the temperature swiftly increases at the core. Hoyle calculated that the temperature would soon reach the billion or so degrees needed to start the fusion of helium to carbon. Once again, the energy pouring out of the core would support the weight of the star, stopping its contraction, until the helium is consumed. This process would continue, producing oxygen from carbon, and so on, eventually building up all the elements, either by fusion or by the same neutron-capture process Gamow used in the Big Bang. And with each contraction the star would spin more rapidly, eventually spewing much of its mass into space. Hoyle accounted for the production of heavy elements by a process that continues into the present-day universe, and thus can—unlike the Big Bang—be verified. Moreover, he calculated that this process would produce the elements in roughly the observed proportions. Had the Big Bang occurred, the two processes together would have produced more heavy elements than are actually observed.
In 1957, after years of steady work—aided by advances in nuclear physics and stellar observations—Margaret and Gregory Burbridge, William Fowler, and Hoyle published a comprehensive and detailed theory showing how stellar systems could produce all the known elements in proportions very close to those observed to exist. In addition, the theory accounted for the growing evidence that the elementary composition varies from star to star, something that would not be possible if the elements were produced by the Big Bang. The new theory was rapidly accepted as substantially correct.
The Big Bang that triumphed was, to be sure, quite different from the one cosmologists had been used to. It was, in fact, a third version, far less dense—an open universe, expanding indefinitely. The vexing problem of what could have propelled this vast explosion, a hundred or more times greater than gravity could contain, was quietly swept under the rug. The new Big Bang became the standard model. - Een derde en laatste versie van de Big Bang werd dus ontwikkelend die nogal afweek van de eerdere versies. Van een gesloten universum (zoals onder Einstein) kregen we nu plots een open universum, dat op een oneindige manier zou expanderen. Wat deze "explosie" zou kunnen veroorzaken, bleef echter een onoplosbaar probleem, zonder verklaring (turtles all the way down?). Maar wat dan met de fameuze achtergrondstraling?
But with hundreds of researchers engaged in examining theoretical, mathematical, hypothetical universes, the case is different. It took no great insight to realize that if the Big Bang theory was basically wrong, as had been thought as recently as the early sixties, then these researchers were simply wasting time and talent. A challenge to Big Bang theory would threaten the careers of several hundred researchers. It could hardly be surprising that by the end of the seventies virtually no papers challenging the Big Bang in any way were accepted for presentation at major conventions or for publication in major journals. It became simply inconceivable that the Big Bang could be wrong—it was a matter of faith. Yet in the course of this golden age, not a single new confirmation of the theory had emerged. No new phenomena predicted by theoreticians had been observed, or any additional feature of the universe explained. In fact, serious conflicts between theory and observation were developing. The first and most serious was the problem of the origin of the galaxies and other large-scale inhomogeneities in the universe. The extreme smoothness of the microwave background posed another, more theoretical problem. According to Big Bang theory, points in the universe separated by more than the distance light can have traversed since the universe began (about ten or twenty billion light-years) can have no effect on one another. As a result, parts of the sky separated by more than a few degrees would lie beyond each other’s sphere of influence. So how did the microwave background achieve such a uniform temperature?
This simple question demonstrates that one of the basic parameters of the theory, the number of photons per proton, is wholly arbitrary. Why should there be twelve billion photons for every proton, rather than twelve thousand or thirty-six? Why is the temperature of the microwave background 2.7° K rather than some other temperature?
As described in Chapter One, this isotropic microwave background created other problems as well. The anisotropies, or irregularities, in the background were supposed to reflect tiny clumps in the matter of the early universe, which eventually grew to become galaxies. But the observed anisotropy was so small that these fluctuations would not have had time enough to grow into galaxies unless there was far more matter—and thus much more gravity—than there appears to be. The microwave background was simply too smooth to fit into the Big Bang theory. And then there was the “flatness problem”—why omega, the ratio of the universe’s density to that needed to “close” it, was so near to, but not equal to, 1. If omega were exactly 1, it would remain constant as the universe expands, creating a perfect universe, a four-dimensionally flat universe neither positively curved like a sphere nor negatively curved like a saddle—hence the “flatness problem.” But if omega were less than 1, as it seemed to be, the disparity would increase as the universe expands and its relative density decreases. Conversely, as we go back in time toward the Big Bang, omega would get closer and closer to 1. If, for example, we know that omega is .01 now, in a universe twenty billion years old, omega would have been about .95 at two hundred million years, .99995 at twenty thousand years, and so on. Cosmologists had calculated that at 10−43 seconds of age omega would vary from 1 by one part in 1058—and even to theoretical cosmologists a crucial number fine-tuned to fifty-eight decimal places seemed suspiciously convenient. A discrepancy of only one part in 1040 would have caused the universe to collapse or disperse in less than a second, which it evidently hasn’t done. So why was omega “in the beginning” equal to .999999999 … ?
All these problems derive from the basic premise of the Big Bang, that the universe originated as a “perfect” world, an Eden of symmetry whose characteristics conform to pure reason. Cosmologists had to explain how such perfection—isotropy, a perfect omega of 1—came to be. Yet they also had to explain how their perfect world gave birth to the present clumpy and “imperfect” one. On both sides there were difficulties, and success on one side tended to lead to defeat on the other. - Was "inflatie" (Alan Guth) de oplossing voor de contradicties?
Inflation solved the flatness problem, because the universe blew up to such a huge size, far bigger than the part we can observe, that it must appear flat (omega equal to 1), just as the earth appears flat because we see only a minute part of it, up to an apparent horizon. Moreover, inflation explains the smooth microwave background: because inflation proceeds far faster than the speed of light, regions at one time in contact with each other, and thus at the same temperature, are blown farther away from each other than the distance light can have traveled in the duration of the universe. All the observable universe had once been contained in such a small region, so it should all have the same temperature.
Finally, since inflation dictated that omega is 1, cosmologists could happily use this value to calculate how the galaxies formed from the tiny anisotropies in the microwave background. But that’s not all. Since Gamow, the source of all the matter and energy of the universe, and the impulse driving the Big Bang itself, had remained a mystery. In the laboratory, matter and energy can be transformed into each other but never created or destroyed. In Guth’s theory, the Higgs field, which exists in a vacuum, generates all the needed energy from nothing—ex nihilo. The universe, as he put it, is one big “free lunch,” courtesy of the Higgs field.
Guth’s theory wasn’t perfect, though. It did not say what that missing 99 percent of the universe is, but only gave theoretical justification to the cosmologists’ desire for it. And the theory had, it turned out, internal inconsistencies. But both these problems were of minor importance in light of its major result—the link between particle theory and cosmology had been made. - Inflatietheorie had dus zijn eigen problemen, maar er was nu wel een link gelegd met deeltjestheorie. En nu werden zaken pas echt vreemd; maar het publiek had niets in de gaten. Wetenschap werd nu een echte propagandashow:
A period of enormous theoretical ferment now began. Every year, or even twice a year, theorists from around the world would replace existing inflationary theories with newer versions—inflation was followed in 1983 by New Inflation, and then by Newer Inflation. At the same time, new GUTs were formulated by particle theorists at a similarly frantic pace, generating new ideas like superstrings and supersymmetry. Reputations were made and unmade in a twinkling as some of the young theorists like Guth and Edward Witten at Princeton became media figures, subjects of features in national newsmagazines.
Many writers used the Big Bang cosmology and the idea of universal decay to buttress the argument that consumption has to be restrained. In his 1976 book The Poverty of Power Barry Commoner begins from the cosmological premise that “the universe is constantly, irretrievably becoming less ordered than it was,” and concludes that, given this overall tendency, Americans must make do with less in order to postpone the inevitable day when total disorder reigns on earth. The faltering universe of the Big Bang became a metaphor for the faltering economy—both equally inevitable processes, beyond the control of mere mortals. - De Big Bang theorie is ook een zeer negatieve pessimistische opvatting over de toekomst van de mensheid:
For Weinberg, as for others, the universe of the Big Bang is irreconcilable with human progress. The end may come billions of years from now, but in the end all that the human race accomplished in aeons will be nothing, of no consequence. Progress, then, is an illusion, as it was for Augustine sixteen hundred years ago. The only question is when it will stop—now, or at some point in the future. It is thus no surprise that the Big Bang flourished simultaneously with the social ideas, like zero growth, that deny the reality of progress, and with a growing economic crisis that, at least in the short term, had stalled that progress. Once again, cosmology justified the course of events on earth. - Het begin van een andere visie: Ilya Prigogine, themodynamica en een nieuwe opvatting van tijd (geen extra dimensie)
The basic answers to these questions have been formulated by Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues over the past twenty years. Prigogine, a Russian-born chemist raised in Belgium, received the Nobel Prize for his work in reconceptualizing thermodynamics. In his view, the paradox arises from a misunderstanding of time and of nature. He believes that there is no real tendency toward decay in the universe—on the contrary, order tends to arise out of chaos, the universe tends to move toward greater complexity and faster rates of evolution. The universe doesn’t need to have been wound up because it isn’t running down. Nor is there a contradiction between the time-reversible laws that operate on the atomic and subatomic levels, and irreversible laws that operate on larger scales. Time, Prigogine argues, is irreversible at all levels—the reversible laws of physics are only approximations. In reality, temporal irreversibility is “built into” the universe from the tiniest particle to the mightiest galaxy. Time is not merely another dimension, it is the history of the universe.
Yet these notions of time are generalizations derived from physical laws based on millions of observations, laws that form the basis of present-day technology. They work spectacularly well: electromagnetics, quantum mechanics, and both Newton’s and Einstein’s laws of gravity are clearly time-reversible—without true time. In the case of gravitation, the laws are actually used as time-reversible. The planets’ trajectories really do look just as reasonable run backward as forward. The laws of thermodynamics have perhaps even wider use. In nearly every technology, engineers take into account the dissipation of heat and the very real limits on the way energy, including heat, can be put to use, such as in generating electricity. Used together with the laws of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, thermodynamics can accurately predict a huge range of phenomena.
We’ve seen plasma behave similarly, even neglecting gravity. With sufficiently high initial energy, plasmas will naturally evolve from a homogeneous, evenly distributed state with small currents and energy flows, to a highly inhomogeneous, filamentary state with large currents and energy flows. Energy has not been created—it has simply been organized by the natural self-pinching of electrical currents.
the true laws of the universe have no temporal direction, as Einstein believed—“past, present, and future are but an illusion”—then they are the products of human perception. There is no real “now” except insofar as our consciousness deceives us. But, as Prigogine points out, almost everything we observe in the world either grows or decays. In particular living organisms, including ourselves, are clearly the products of an evolutionary process that is unidirectional, that somehow separates past from future. “Are we ourselves—living creatures capable of observing and manipulating—mere fictions created by our imperfect senses?” he asks in Order Out of Chaos. “Is the distinction between life and death an illusion?” Whatever physicists may argue in their journals or classrooms, it is a rare one that can honestly answer “yes.”
As I discussed in Chapter Four, neither the conception of time as decay nor the notion of a timeless world based on eternal mathematical laws evolved in isolation from general, cultural, and political history. In the late nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century, these concepts arose from a society in the midst of titanic convulsions, one in which the progress of previous centuries seemed to have been superseded by a return to chaos. The world of decay seemed a pessimistic description of the real, historical earth, while the timeless world seemed a refuge.
As Einstein put it, “one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is flight from everyday life with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness and from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires.… Man seeks to form for himself a simplified and lucid image of the world and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image.”1 By trying to flee from the all too real world of the present century, of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, however, the conventional view of time has sharply restricted science’s ability to describe the universe—the ultimate purpose of all science.
The result, as Prigogine emphasizes, is to alienate man from nature. If there is no tendency toward evolution or progress in nature, then human existence itself is nothing but a meaningless accident, and humans are isolated in an indifferent and incomprehensible universe. In either a timeless or a decaying cosmos there is no room for anything that has value for humanity, no room for consciousness, joy, sadness, or hope. The universe becomes, in the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless, merely the hurrying of matter, endless, meaningless. - Terug naar de achtergrondstraling: wat is het nu werkelijk als het geen bewijs is van de big bang:
This background radiation presses the filaments and plasmas of a given agglomeration of matter—a supercluster complex or a collection of such complexes—outward at several thousand kilometers per second. (This expansion, by the way, can contribute to the observed Hubble expansion.) As the plasma crosses existing magnetic fields it generates tremendous new electrical currents. Possibly as much as a tenth of all energy now being liberated in the stars’ nuclear fires is thus converted to electricity. This is a colossal thermonuclear generator. The expanded electrical currents now complete the cycle by pinching new supplies of plasma together to create new galaxies and to generate new quantities of fusion power. The magnetic fields as well help to create the filaments in existing spiral galaxies which lead to the formation of new stars in old galaxies. As with the gravity-driven stage of evolution, nuclear-powered evolution involves a series of substages. When hydrogen is exhausted within individual stars, its by-product helium then becomes, at higher temperatures and pressures, fuel for the production of carbon and oxygen. When all the fuels for a star are exhausted, its explosion in a supernova scatters the elements to the surrounding interstellar medium—fuel for new stars. - Natuurlijke processen = hergebruik en recycleren van energie:
In technology, we recycle energy to a limited extent, although as a rule energy is used only once, as in a car engine. However, in taking the salt from sea water (an extremely energy-intensive process), one method is to evaporate some water by heating it, and to channel the resulting steam around pipes containing incoming sea water, thereby preheating it. In this way a single unit of energy does work repeatedly until all the water has evaporated and recondensed as fresh water, leaving a salt precipitate. Natural processes do the same thing—reusing and recycling energy, creating new flows of energy. Thus there is no inherent limit to evolution away from equilibrium, even with a fixed supply of energy, so long as a process can continually increase the efficiency with which it recycles the energy. - Zijn er lessen te trekken voor sociale evolutie?
In social evolution, as in biological evolution, progress is not a smooth and automatic process but a long-term trend. Human progress is a fact as much as biological evolution is—not only by the objective measures of energy flow, population, or longevity, but by any rational yardstick human society is far better off today than in Roman times, when half the population was enslaved, or in ancient Egypt, when practically every member of the population was a serf. At the same time, there are no guarantees if and when any given crisis in human history will be resolved. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the battle between lords and merchants led to the bourgeois revolutions and a new expanding capitalistic society. In sixteenth-century Japan, a somewhat similar clash ended in the triumph of feudalism and a long period of stagnation. Yet the long-term trend still exists. When new, faster-evolving societies emerge, they spread everywhere—as did agricultural societies thousands of years ago, and as did capitalistic societies during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The upward curve is real despite the catastrophes and Dark Ages that litter human history. This rate of evolution, of the creation of new interactions, depends directly on the number of different interactions already existing. Over the past twenty-five thousand years the increase in energy use has accelerated at a rate more or less proportional to the size of the population. Over that entire time it has taken on average about a billion human lifetimes to double the energy use. When the population was small this meant a slow rate of technological and social development. Now that it is far larger, the pace of change has vastly accelerated (Fig. 7.6). This is an entirely reasonable relation. It means in essence that it takes just so much human labor to come up with the innovations needed for a given amount of technological change. Naturally, societies that make poor use of human intelligence, such as slaveholding societies, have relatively slower rates of social development, while those in which the opportunities for individual innovation are great, such as Elizabethan England, advance more swiftly in relation to their population. Thus tested against what we know of three modes of evolution—physical, biological, and social—Prigogine’s model stands up well. Progress is real. The movement away from equilibrium, the growth of energy flow as a process without limits, emerges as a natural, comprehensible phenomenon. Interactions grow by capturing energy, eventually reaching the natural limits for any given mode. They become unstable, and new interactions arise on the basis of the old, manifesting themselves initially as small fluctuations. Some of these fluctuations grow, capturing energy faster than the old interactions, and in sudden revolutions replace them with those that are more complex, capture more energy, and recycle it more efficiently.
As Prigogine himself notes, it is no coincidence that his physical theory, with its emphasis on progress and revolutionary change, arose in the late sixties—a time of rapid and turbulent social transformation, within a troubled century. The sixties were marked by conflict between progress and decay, between those demanding social transformation and those who viewed it as impossible. The latter drew their conclusions from the slowing of material progress that began in the sixties, and they found congenial the gloomy prognostications of the second law of thermodynamics and the Big Bang universe. Others, though, inspired by the renewal of social advance, developed ideas integrating progress into the scientific world view. - Big Bang theorie voorspelt ook dat neutronen vergaan. Maar ook dit blijkt niet het geval te zijn:
The Big Bang also requires interchangeable protons and positrons. Because matter and antimatter are created symmetrically, at the extremely high densities postulated by the Big Bang, all matter and antimatter would annihilate each other, leaving only energy—no universe. If, however, some positrons were to turn into protons, there would be an excess of protons and electrons left over after all the antimatter had been annihilated (Figs. 8.2b, c). This is another slender thread on which the Big Bang cosmos hangs. But do protons decay? The GUTs predicted that they should, after an average life of 1030 years. So experimenters watched tons of water buried deep in mines for any sign of proton decay. They found none. The experiments showed that protons don’t decay in even a hundred times the lifetime predicted by the GUTs. Protons are forever. GUT theorists shrugged off these results. Obviously, they reason, the first theories were too simple. We now must come up with new theories that predict lifetimes longer than the lifetimes ruled out by experiment. Why won’t they just admit that the proton is absolutely stable? Because the Big Bang tells us that there must have been conversion between protons and positrons. The proton must decay. - Ook de quantummechanica is ten prooi gevallen aan hetzelfde euvel van de big bang: de scheiding van theorie en realiteit:
Quantum mechanics arose as a result of efforts to overcome contradictions of experiment and theory. Yet for the sixty years since the development of QED scientists have evaded such fruitful contradictions. As in cosmology, beginning a decade earlier, quantum theorists moved steadily away from a concern with reality and observation, toward the sterile contemplation of mathematical purity. Over the decades the deductive method became dominant and the effort’s underlying philosophy became more pessimistic. No longer was it the aim of science to make sense of the world, but merely to create abstract mathematical theories which had less and less contact with nature.
In turn, when renormalization swept the contradictions of point particles out of sight, older theoreticians condemned it as a mathematical trick. Heisenberg later dismissed quarks as nonsense. A further step was taken with the GUTs, whose only verifiable prediction—proton decay—was ignored when it wasn’t confirmed by observation. And with string theory, the last tenuous link with reality is broken and the theorists arrive at a hypothesis which makes no predictions about the real world. Again, it is denounced by those who have paved the way for it: Sheldon Glashow, one of the architects of ethereal GUTs, writes, “Contemplation of superstrings may evolve into an activity … to be conducted at schools of divinity by future equivalents of medieval theologians.… For the first time since the dark ages we can see how our noble search may end with faith replacing science once again.”
The result of this divorce of theory and reality has been, as in ancient times, a growing sterility and stagnation of fundamental science. There have been tremendous advances in most areas of physics, such as materials science and hydrodynamics, which remain tied to experiment; but since the development of QED, the discovery of the neutrons and antimatter in 1928 to 1930, there have been no major gains in our understanding of the underlying structure of matter. We still do not know how the nuclear force works. Our progress in nuclear technology is based on a combination of basic quantum mechanics and a vast body of experimental knowledge gained over fifty years—not on any application of theoretical advances. This stagnation has had a major, if delayed, impact on technology. The theoretical breakthrough of quantum mechanics led thirty years later to the technological breakthroughs of the transistor and the laser. And the subsequent lack of discoveries has contributed to the cessation of major technological revolutions in the past thirty years—and in turn, to the stagnation of living standards globally. - Deze scheiding van theorie van de realiteit heeft op zijn beurt geleid tot een stagnatie in wetenschappelijke vooruitgang en bijgevolg ook in de ontwikkeling van nieuwe technologieën. Dit op zijn beurt heeft mee bijgedragen aan de stagnatie van de levensstandaard wereldwijd. Dit moet stoppen. Rationaliteit moet opnieuw aansluiting vinden met observatie en empirie:
Ultimately, rationality must be tied to observation of the real world. Without the test of empirical reality, one man’s reason can be another’s madness. Despite his fond hopes that “pure thought can grasp reality as the ancients dreamed,” Einstein never accepted the Platonic duality of idea and reality, nor did he abandon the test of observation. “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world,” he concluded in 1933. “All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.” Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics’ dismissal of causality. He did not merely object to an abandonment of a world of strict determinism. As we saw in Chapter Seven, even strictly causal laws, like that of Newtonian gravity, can lead to indeterministic systems. He objected to the idea that an event can occur with no cause whatsoever. But the founders of the Copenhagen interpretation, Heisenberg and Bohr, clung to dualism at the expense of rationalism. To them, rational understanding can penetrate only so far, can only predict the average behavior of large numbers of particles. Beyond that lay the Platonic world of ideas, in which quantum particles would come into, and out of, existence in unfathomable ways. - Reden voor optimisme (maar enkel als we de big bang theorie met zijn pessimistische conclusies loslaten):
From a scientific standpoint we have seen that these pessimistic conclusions are false. Cosmologically, a universe with as little matter as ours will never collapse. Nor does thermodynamics even demand that the universe run down: Prigogine has demonstrated that there is no inherent limit to the order the universe will attain, or to its increasing energy flows. Our universe is speeding away from the “heat death” of total equilibrium.
What all ignore, and what is emphasized in the new view of cosmology and thermodynamics, is the natural tendency of all matter, both animate and inanimate, to evolve continuously toward higher rates of energy flow, toward the capture of greater currents of energy. At the simplest level, laboratory experiments have shown that simple molecules important to life, such as amino acids, necessarily form when chemical mixtures similar to those of the primitive oceans are exposed to bursts of electromagnetic energy. Why do they form? Because they most efficiently trap the energy briefly available to the system. Experiments have not yet demonstrated how the next steps toward a living system actually took place, but as Prigogine emphasizes, the new structures arising from instabilities set the stage for more complex instabilities, further capture of energy, and further elaboration of structure. Life did not arise as an accidental, wildly improbable leap from molecules to cells or even to viruses, but through a step-by-step evolution, just as humans did not evolve in a single leap from one-celled creatures. James Lovelock and others have shown entirely plausible natural mechanisms whereby the biosphere as a whole, through feedback responses, adjusts the components of the earth’s atmosphere to favor a greater biomass and a faster overall rate of evolution. No particularly delicate balance is needed, either—the temperature of the earth has fallen over the past six hundred million years.
Finally, the idea that the evolution of humankind is purely an accident, divinely engineered or otherwise, ignores the vast mass of evidence that there are long-term trends in biological evolution. Over these millions of years there has been an irregular but unmistakable tendency toward adaptability to a greater range of environments, culminating in human adaptation to virtually any environment. Over this period the intelligence of the most developed animals on earth has risen with increasing speed, from trilobites, to fish, to amphibians, to the dinosaurs, to mammals, to primates, to the hominid apes and the direct ancestors of humankind. Of course, through this long period there have been many chance events, many zigs and zags, advances and setbacks, which determined the exact timing and mode of the development of a creature capable of social evolution. Yet this unpredictability in no way erases the long-term tendency that makes the development of higher levels of intelligence, and eventually something resembling human beings, all but inevitable—as inevitable as the development of amino acids in a primal chemical soup.
Historical processes don’t evolve linearly from advance to advance, as I have emphasized. But it is entirely wrong to thus conclude that there are no trends in evolution at all. As Prigogine’s work and indeed the entire history of the biosphere and the cosmos as a whole show, the development of intelligent life is but the latest phase in a long acceleration of evolution itself. - De opnieuw benadrukken van observatie zal de wetenschap ook terug opnieuw losmaken van religieuze doctrines:
With its emphasis on observation, the new scientific revolution brings with it a revival of a scientific outlook not dependent on, or entangled with, religious doctrines. Like any worldview, such an approach will have philosophical implications. But its philosophical premises are only a cosmos knowable to the senses and governed by cause and effect. The empirical conclusions of this new science show a cosmos without beginning or end, one whose fundamental characteristic is progress. Any philosophy or theology that assumes a contrary reality will inevitably fight the new science, as the medieval church fought Galileo and Copernicus long ago. - Deze herijking zal nodig zijn om opnieuw maatschappelijke vooruitgang te kunnen boeken:
As in past epochs, a sharp drop in living standards has led toward a halt in population growth. In the advanced countries birth rates have plummeted: in the sixties the average American family had three or four children and the average European family two or three, but today even two children per family is atypical. In Germany the population has begun to fall, and in Europe as a whole its increase has effectively ended for the first time in three hundred years (Fig. 10.3). If present fertility rates continue, Europe’s population will decline by 15 percent in the next generation. The great explosion of population that began with the capitalist epoch has, it appears, come to an end. The advance of science and technology has radically slowed too. While biology remains vibrant, physical technology has been limited to mere quantitative advance for nearly thirty years, again a situation unprecedented in over two hundred years. - Het is ook nodig om te voorkomen dat we terug hervallen in irrationalisme en occultisme:
It is no coincidence that the ideas of such science are now used to lend credence to the “channeling” of departed spirits and other such occult matters. Jane Roberts, communicating the opinions of the ethereal being “Seth,” uses the multiple world hypothesis of quantum philosophy to justify “paranormal” phenomena. Other occultists assert that the notion that observation can affect events that happened billions of years in the past (such as the emission of a photon from a distant quasar) is evidence for psychokinesis. Such inferences are by no means absurd. If one accepts the illogic of current ideas about quantum mechanics, one is ill prepared to reject such claims. Cosmologists and fundamental physicists may scorn the use of their theories by popular writers on the occult and the irrational. But their own methods, by rejecting the tests of observation, by rejecting the inductive method of science, leave them defenseless against the assault of the irrational. In a similar way German scientists like Heisenberg, by accepting acausality, negated science as an intellectual counterweight to the rise of irrationalism. To the extent that the “deductive” methods of cosmology and particle theory remain the most popularized view of science, science will remain impotent in the face of a new irrationality and its political consequences. - Vooruitgang is mogelijk, dat heeft het verleden geleerd, maar is niet automatisch. We moeten leren uit de fouten die de wetenschap heeft begaan (instrumentalisering, overdreven vertrouwen op de rede ten nadele van empirie...). Ook mogen we ons lot niet in handen leggen noch van de staat noch van een zelfbenoemde "elite":
Without doubt, the period of the most rapid human development relative to population size was the period of neolithic revolution and the immediately following urban revolution; this period saw the invention of the technologies basic to civilization—agriculture, animal husbandry, writing, mathematics, spinning, potting, weaving, and metallurgy. They emerged from a society that had not yet ossified into separate classes, where communal agriculturists were free to develop new techniques of immediate benefit to their community and themselves. Next was the brief Ionian period, when small craftsmen and merchants developed new ways of writing and thinking, before the rise of chattel slavery. Two millennia later came the late Renaissance, from 1550 to 1650, when the small population of Europe gave rise to genius after genius; Digges’s “mechanics,” artisans, small manufacturers, reading of the latest in scientific developments, gave birth to an explosion of new technology before the resurgence of aristocratic power. Finally, there was the nineteenth century, when inventors, entrepreneurs, skilled workers, and scientists—the Edisons, Marconis, Maxwells, and Faradays—combined to transform the world while Beethoven and Brahms composed, Monet and van Gogh painted, Tolstoy, Dickens, and Conrad wrote.
Each of these periods gave rise to a greater or lesser degree of political democracy, but all were characterized by a close link between hand and mind, by a democratization of at least major sectors of the economy. By contrast, the periods of slowest development were in the later Bronze Age, the slave societies of 300 B.C. to A.D. 700, and to a lesser extent the feudal society of the Middle Ages. These societies squandered the minds of the population, reducing them to mere tools of a small ruling class.
From the standpoint of the underlying theory of evolution it’s reasonable that this relationship should hold. The freest societies are those that most directly allow the individual to make changes in the mode of production and thus in the society as a whole, that most readily encourage innovation. In Prigogine’s terms these are the most “unstable” and therefore the fastest-evolving.
Today the economic democracy essential to progress has almost disappeared, and progress cannot resume unless those who do the work decide what work is to be done and how it is to be done. Neither a few thousand immensely wealthy capitalists nor a few thousand party bureaucrats have the wisdom to run the vast and complex world economy. That task can be accomplished only by those who work, by the people themselves.
