The determination with which the supporters of the big bang cling to their positions frequently leads them to perform the most amusing somersaults. Having searched in vain for the 99 per cent of missing “cold dark matter”, they failed to find anything like the quantities required by the theory, to prevent the universe from expanding forever. On 18 December 1993, The New Scientist published an article entitled Universe Will Expand Forever. Here it was admitted that “a group of galaxies in the constellation of Cepheus contains far less invisible matter than had been thought a few months ago,” and that the claims made earlier by American astronomers were “based on faulty analysis”. A lot of scientific reputations are at stake, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Could this fact have some connection with the fanaticism with which the big bang is defended? As usual, they saw what they wanted to see. The facts had to conform to the theory!
The evident failure to find the “cold dark matter”, the existence of which is essential to the survival of the theory, was causing unease in the more thinking sections of the scientific community. An editorial of The New Scientist, published on 4 June 1994 with the suggestive title A Folly of Our Time? compared the idea of dark matter with the discredited Victorian concept of the “ether”, an invisible medium, by which light waves were believed to travel through space:
It was invisible, ubiquitous, and, in the late 19th century, every physicist believed in it. It was, of course, the aether, the medium in which they thought light propagated, and it turned out to be a phantom. Light does not need a medium in which to propagate, unlike sound.
Now, at the close of the 20th century, physicists find themselves in a curiously similar situation to their Victorian counterparts. Once again they are putting their faith in something which is invisible and ubiquitous. This time it is dark matter.
At this point, one would expect a serious scientist to begin to ask himself whether there was not something basically wrong with his theory. The same editorial adds:
In cosmology, free parameters seem to be proliferating like wildfire. If the observations do not fit the theory, cosmologists seem happy to simply add new variables. By continually patching up the theory, we may be missing out on some Big Idea.
Indeed. But, don’t let the “facts” get in the way. Like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat, they suddenly discovered – the neutrino!
The neutrino, which is a subatomic particle, is described by Hoffmann as “fluctuating uncertainly between existence and non-existence.” That is to say, in the language of dialectics, “it is and is not”. How can such a phenomenon be reconciled with the law of identity, which categorically asserts that a thing either is or is not? Faced with such dilemmas, which reappear at every step in the world of subatomic particles described by quantum mechanics, there is frequently a tendency to resort to formulations such as the idea that the neutrino is a particle with neither mass nor charge. The initial opinion, still held by many scientists, was that the neutrino had no mass, and since electric charge cannot exist without mass, the inescapable conclusion was that the neutrino had neither.
Neutrinos are extremely small particles, and therefore difficult to detect. The existence of the neutrino was first postulated to explain a discrepancy in the amount of energy present in particles emitted from the nucleus. A certain amount of energy appeared to be lost, which could not be accounted for. Since the law of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, this phenomenon required another explanation. Although it seems that the idealist physicist Niels Bohr was quite prepared to throw the law of conservation of energy overboard in 1930, this proved to be slightly premature! The discrepancy was explained by the discovery of a previously unknown particle – the neutrino.
Neutrinos formed in the sun’s core at a temperature of 15 million degrees centigrade moving at the speed of light reach the sun’s surface in three seconds. Floods of them stream through the universe, passing through solid matter, apparently without interacting on it. Neutrinos are so small that they pass straight through the earth. So tiny are these elusive particles that their interaction with other forms of matter is minimal. They can pass through the earth, and even through solid lead, leaving no trace. Indeed, trillions of neutrinos are passing through your body even as you read these lines. But the likelihood that one could be trapped there is negligible, so you needn’t worry. It has been estimated that a neutrino can pass through solid lead with a thickness of 100 light-years, with only a 50 per cent chance of being absorbed. That is why it remained undetected for so long. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a particle, which is so small that it was thought to have neither mass nor charge, and can pass through 100 light-years of lead, could ever be detected. But detected it was.
It seems that some neutrinos can be stopped by the equivalent of one tenth of an inch of lead. In 1956, using an ingenious experiment, American scientists succeeded in trapping an anti-neutrino. Then in 1968, they discovered neutrinos from the sun, although only one-third of the amount predicted by the current theories. Undoubtedly the neutrino possessed properties that could not immediately be detected. Given its extreme smallness, that was not surprising. But the idea of a form of matter that lacked the most basic properties of matter was clearly a contradiction in terms. In the event, the problem appears to have been resolved from two completely different sources. First, one of the discoverers of the neutrino, Nobel Prize winning physicist Frederick Reines, announced in 1980 that he had discovered the existence of neutrino oscillation in an experiment. This would indicate that the neutrino does have mass, but Reines’ results were not seen as conclusive.
However, Soviet physicists, involved in an entirely separate experiment, showed that electron-neutrinos have a mass, which could be as much as 40 electron volts. Since this is only 1/13,000th of the mass of an electron, which in turn is only 1/2,000th of a proton, it is hardly surprising that the neutrino was for so long believed to have no mass.
Up till recently, the general view of the scientific establishment was that the neutrino had no mass and no charge. Now, all of a sudden, they have changed their mind and declared that the neutrino does indeed have mass – and, perhaps, quite a lot of it. This is the most astonishing conversion since Saint Paul fell off his horse on the road to Damascus! Indeed, such indecent haste must raise serious doubts about the motivation behind this miraculous conversion. Can it be that they were so desperate at their signal failure to deliver the goods with “cold dark matter” that they finally decided to do an about-turn on the neutrino? One can just imagine what Sherlock Holmes would have said to Doctor Watson!
Despite the enormous advances in the field of particle research, the present situation is confused. Hundreds of new particles have been discovered, but as yet there is no satisfactory general theory capable of introducing some order, as Mendeleyev did in the field of chemistry. At present, there is an attempt to unify the fundamental forces of nature by grouping them under four headings: gravity, electromagnetism, and the “weak” and “strong” nuclear forces, each of which functions at a different level.
Gravitation works on the cosmological scale, holding the stars, planets and galaxies together. Electromagnetism binds atoms into molecules, transports photons from the sun and stars, and fires the synapses of the brain. The strong force binds together protons and neutrons inside the nuclei of atoms. The weak force is expressed in the transmutation of unstable atoms during radioactive decay. Both the latter forces only operate at very short range. However, there is no reason to suppose that this arrangement represents the last word on the subject, in some respects it is an arbitrary notion.
There are big differences between these forces. Gravitation affects all forms of matter and energy, whereas the strong force only affects one class of particles. Yet gravitation is one hundred million trillion trillion trillion times weaker than the strong nuclear force. More importantly, it is not evident why there should be no opposite force to gravity, whereas electromagnetism is manifested both as positive and negative electrical charge. This problem, the solution of which was attempted by Einstein, remains to be solved, and has a vital bearing on the entire discussion about the nature of the universe. Each force is accounted for by a different set of equations, involving some twenty different parameters. These give results, but nobody knows why.
The so-called Grand Unified Theories (“GUTs”) put forward the idea that matter itself might only be a passing phase in the evolution of the universe. However, the prediction made by the GUTs that protons decay has not been borne out, thus invalidating at least the simplest version of the GUTs. In an attempt to make sense of their own discoveries, some physicists have got entangled in ever more weird and wonderful theories, like the so-called supersymmetry theories (“SUSYs”) which purport that the universe was originally built on more than four dimensions. According to this notion, the universe could have started with, for example, ten dimensions, but unfortunately all but four of them collapsed during the big bang, and are now too small to be noticed.
Apparently, these objects are the subatomic particles themselves, which are alleged to be quanta of matter and energy that condensed out of pure space. Thus they stagger from one metaphysical speculation to the next in a vain attempt to explain the fundamental phenomena of the universe. Supersymmetry postulates the universe as beginning in a state of absolute perfection. In the words of Stephen Hawking, “the early universe was simpler, and it was a lot more appealing, because it was a lot simpler.” Some scientists even try to justify this kind of mystical speculation on aesthetic grounds. Absolute symmetry is alleged to be beautiful. Thus we find ourselves back in the rarefied atmosphere of Plato’s idealism.
In reality, nature is not characterised by absolute symmetry, but is full of contradictions, irregularities, cataclysms, and sudden breaks of continuity. Life itself is a proof of this assertion. In any living system, absolute equilibrium signifies death. The contradiction that we observe here is as old as the history of human thought. It is the contradiction between the “perfect” abstractions of thought and the necessary irregularities and “imperfections” which characterise the real material world. The whole problem stems from the fact that the abstract formulae of mathematics, which may or may not be beautiful, most certainly do not adequately represent the real world of nature. To suppose such a thing is a methodological error of the first magnitude, and necessarily leads us to draw wrong conclusions.