Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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 ...

As I indicated in yesterday's post, I was disappointed by Ratcliffe's book, The Static Universe: exploding the myth of cosmic expansion (2010). He fails to make his case, even to a will-to-believer like me, and he mixes up his case with a polemic against all of modern geometry, going back as far as Carl Friedrich Gauss . [Gauss is the rightwardmost figure in the photo above, a still of the afterlife of great mathematicians as represented in the stage show Fermat's Last Tango.] The wrongness of the paths followed by modern cosmology, then, has its origin prior to the mid-point of the 19th century, when Gauss started working on non-Euclidean space. As some of my readers may have learned at school, Euclid's geometry rests in large part upon the following axiom: "If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet...." This...