6 ms·

Yes, 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(?) mysti

Yes, 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 ago
Star 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 ago
  Shouldn't this still be under copyright?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - fsiefken 12y ago
    if 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 ago
Georges 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.
- mcguire 12y ago
  If I understand correctly, Einstein's cosmological constant was intended to produce a steady-state universe, not an accelerating one. 20th century cosmology could be seen as a long argument over the sign of Einstein's constant.
  - nkoren 12y ago
    I think you're correct about the motivation for the cosmological constant. By adjusting the sign of the sign of the constant, you could produce a universe which was expanding, contracting, or steady-state. When Hubble's constant got nailed down, that definitively meant that the universe was expanding, and Einstein was happy to accept that. The problem was that if you tweak the constant to produce that result, then it also says that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating. Which didn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense, so Einstein dropped it, and Stapledon didn't. (Standard disclaimer: I'm not a cosmologist, and probably have no idea what I'm talking about.)

hypertexthero 12y ago

Star 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 ago
Shouldn't this still be under copyright?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- fsiefken 12y ago
  if 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 ago

Georges 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.

mcguire 12y ago
If I understand correctly, Einstein's cosmological constant was intended to produce a steady-state universe, not an accelerating one. 20th century cosmology could be seen as a long argument over the sign of Einstein's constant.
- nkoren 12y ago
  I think you're correct about the motivation for the cosmological constant. By adjusting the sign of the sign of the constant, you could produce a universe which was expanding, contracting, or steady-state. When Hubble's constant got nailed down, that definitively meant that the universe was expanding, and Einstein was happy to accept that. The problem was that if you tweak the constant to produce that result, then it also says that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating. Which didn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense, so Einstein dropped it, and Stapledon didn't. (Standard disclaimer: I'm not a cosmologist, and probably have no idea what I'm talking about.)