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I first read about this many years ago, in Olav Stapledon's brilliant Star Maker, about a man who takes a magical mystery tour through the whole of time and spa
by nkoren 12y ago
I first read about this many years ago, in Olav Stapledon's brilliant Star Maker, about a man who takes a magical mystery tour through the whole of time and space:
"Then the Star Maker said, "Let there be light." And there was light. From all
the coincident and punctual centers of power, light leapt and blazed. The
cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers
of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one
retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole;
and each mirrored in itself aspects of all others throughout all the cosmical
space and time.
"No longer punctual, the cosmos was now a volume of inconceivably dense matter
and inconceivably violent radiation, constantly expanding. And it was a
sleeping and infi-nitely dissociated spirit.But to say that the cosmos was
expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate
centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos,
themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical
units and of the wave-lengths of its light. Though the cosmos was ever of
finite bulk, in relation to its minutiae of light-waves, it was boundless and
center-less. As the surface of a swelling sphere lacks boundary and center, so
the swelling volume of the cosmos was boundless and center-less. But as the
spherical surface is centered on a point foreign to it, in a "third dimension,"
so the volume of the cosmos was centered in a point foreign to it, in a
"fourth dimension."
"The congested and exploding cloud of fire swelled till it was of a planet's
size, a star's size, the size of a whole galaxy, and of ten million galaxies.
And in swelling it became more tenuous, less brilliant, less turbulent.
Presently the cosmical cloud was disrupted by the stress of its expansion in
conflict with the mutual clinging of its parts, disrupted into many million
cloudlets, the swarm of the great nebulae.
"For a while these were as close to one another in relation to their bulk as
the flocculations of a mottled sky. But the channels between them widened,
till they were separated as flowers on a bush, as bees in a flying swarm, as
birds migrating, as ships on the sea. More and more rapidly they retreated
from one another; and at the same time each cloud contracted, becoming first
a ball of down and then a spinning lens and then a featured whirl of star-
streams.
"Still the cosmos expanded, till the galaxies that were most remote from one
another were flying apart so swiftly that the creeping light of the cosmos
could no longer bridge the gulf between them."
Written, impossibly, in 1936.
- fsiefken 12y agoYes, I remember that as well, great book by the way. As much as I'd like to attribute clairvoyance to Olaf Stapledon also with regard to his fictional(?) mystical out of body experience, I'm skeptic. There already was a big bang theory and the red- and blueshift of starlight was already discovered. So I'd think speculation that some galaxies are speeding away from us faster then the speed of light was not impossible in 1936, am I right?
- hypertexthero 12y agoStar Maker is great. Available online here: <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/stapledon/olaf/star/chapter1.html> http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/stapledon/olaf/star/chapter1...
- anon4 12y agoShouldn't this still be under copyright?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- fsiefken 12y agoif I interpret this correctly (British) copyright expired in 2000 as Stapledon died in 1950. "In the 1911 Act the term of author's copyright was extended to the lifetime of the author and 50 years thereafter; this remained the case under the 1956 Act and the 1988 Act. The 1911 Act in effect extended the meaning of "author" so that this period of copyright applied to all types of works, not merely printed works. Under the 1995 Regulations (set out below), the period of author's copyright was further extended, to the lifetime of the author and 70 years thereafter." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Kingdom#Copyright_term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Kin...
- nkoren 12y agoGeorges Lemaître had proposed an early version of the Big Bang theory in 1931. In 1936 it was nowhere near the scientific consensus -- that didn't happen until the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, 29 years later. But knowledge of the Big Bang and the Hubble redshift aren't, by themselves, sufficient to explain what Stapledon wrote. Those things just show that the universe has expanded. For most of the 20th century, people assumed that the acceleration of the universe would diminish -- either asymptotically approaching zero, or reversing into a "Big Crunch". For the galaxies to accelerate beyond the point where photons can bridge the gaps between them, they need to not only have been accelerated, but to keep accelerating, which is a very unintuitive notion (what would be driving the acceleration?) My guess is that Stapledon was influenced by Einstein's Cosmological Constant, which predicted exactly this kind of acceleration, but which Einstein himself had repudiated several years earlier, calling it "his biggest blunder". When I first read Star Maker in 1997, I figured that even if Stapledon had been up-to-the-minute about the Big Bang, he somehow hadn't gotten the memo about the Cosmological Constant. So I chalked this passage up as one of several things that Stapledon had definitely gotten wrong. A year later, Dark Energy was discovered, and suddenly it appeared that Stapledon was right all along. This did my head in a bit. Somehow, Stapledon had been spectacularly smart/lucky in crafting his story from a mix of freshly-proposed and freshly-discarded theories. So no, clairvoyance isn't strictly necessary to explain this. But just to be safe, I'll retain that parenthetical question mark after "fictional(?)" when describing Star Maker.