The Static Universe: Conclusion

I've been writing here of late about the disappointment I felt upon reading Hilton Ratcliffe's book, The Static Universe. Not only does it fail to make much of a case against the Big Bang Theory, but it tries to do so at the expense of all of modern geometry, going back to the great Gauss himself.

The key line of argument comes late, in chapter 8. One might say Ratcliffe has buried his lede although, this being his lede, it may be natural to try to bury it.

In chapter 8, after praise for Gauss' simple life, teaching skills, and generous spirit, we learn that he had one weakness, an "obsession with the abstract." That would seem to be a job requirement for a geometer, but by calling it an "obsession" Ratcliffe has established to his own satisfaction that it is a weakness.

After working on global cartography, Ratcliffe tells us, Gauss succumbed to his eagerness to abstract and "presented his scientific progeny the gift of Differential Geometry ... stimulating the advent of a consequent field of endeavor which became known by the oxymoron 'mathematical physics.'"  From the fact that the earth is curved came the abstract hypothesis that space might be curved, which turns out to be much the same as the hypothesis that the fifth axiom in Euclid might be false.

Three pages later Ratcliffe is quoting a fellow named Allan Sandage. Sandage only recently passed away (in 2010, the year this book was published) after a long and prominent career in astrophysics, most recently with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calfornia.

In a 1988 paper, Sandage wrote, "The intuitive geometry that is fixed on the senses ... seems Euclidean...The concept of spatial curvature is foreign to the intuition and unreal to the non-scientist." Sandage regrets this, as it is a bias that scientists in the fields concerned have to learn to overcome.

Ratcliffe regrets Sandage's sense of regrets, and hoists the flag of Euclidean intuition. "I tell you right here and now that space curvature is unreal. Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

Thus, the hearty tone of the deliberate philistine. Ratcliffe sounds a bit like the sort of fellow who stands in front of a modernist work of art and says, "My child could do that!" He also reminds me of Bishop Berkeley, who pulled the whole bluff put-that-in-your-pipe thing at the expense of calculus, trying to banish that line of inquiry through ridicule.

That "mathematical physics" is an oxymoron would, BTW, surely have surprised at least one of the inventors of calculus. Wasn't Newton's work on calculus of a piece with his work on the orbits of celestial bodies?  

Back to Ratcliffe: he treats us to a further twist. A paragraph after the "pipe" reference above, we're told that perhaps the math works, perhaps no flaw can be found internally in the geometrical models that have been developed from Gauss to the present, but that taking this as Sandage obviously did, quite seriously, cuts a "vital link" between science and "measured reality." Then in direct address to the reader: ""Please think about this long and hard."

We've come full circle here. We were told a few pages before that Gauss' problem was that he thought too long and too hard -- that is what it means to be obsessed with abstraction (if it means anything at all.) Now we're told that we can see that Gauss and all he has wrought is in error if only we re-enact that sort of obsessiveness. Or something life that.

At my wit's end, I give up as, at his art's end, every artist must.

To adopt a Big Bang free cosmology on the ground that Euclid was the last word in geometry and must forever remain the last word, darn it! seems an excessive price to pay. I will continue to look for less absurd-seeming challenges to the standard model. In the meantime, I'll end today with this: Thank you. Anyone who has stayed with me for this last three posts has come through some heavy material, quite imperfectly expressed. I'm in your debt.