A Master Of Physics And Politics

As an sf writer, Poul Anderson is a master of both physics and politics. He describes a television interview about practical applications of quantum mechanics being recorded during a military coup:

"'...if you hit a speck of dust, wouldn't that be like a nuclear warhead exploding?'
"A jet snarled low above the roof. Thunder boomed through the building. Cameras shivered in men's hands. Fleury tensed. The noise passed, and she found herself wondering whether to edit this moment out of the tapes."
-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), pp. 7-8.

Do not edit it! This is a moment in the history of physics and in the history of the United States. Natural and human events interpenetrate in Anderson's prose. A collision at near light speed is compared to a nuclear explosion while the sound and effects of a low-flying jet fighter are compared to thunder and cold. The coup leader becomes permanent Chief Advisor to any President of the United States while the television crew records an account of the dramatic origin of the universe:

"'...the universe originated as a quantum fluctuation in the seething sea of the vacuum, a random concentration of energy so great that it expanded explosively. Out of this condensed the first particles, and from them evolved atoms, stars, planets, and living creatures.'" (p. 9)

So the sequence was:

virtual particles constantly beginning and ceasing to exist;
a random concentration of energy;
explosive expansion;
condensation of real particles;
evolution of atoms (originally thought to be the smallest particles and most basic realities) etc.

I think that, of the creation myths, the Ginnungagap (see also here), with its dialectical interaction between opposed unconscious forces, is the closest to this scientific model.

What Became Of The Conservation Of Mass?

Operation Chaos, IX.

In Werebeasts, we saw that:

a 180 pound man makes a big wolf;
a large weretiger is a tall, fat man;
a desert fox is a very small man -

- because of the conservation of mass. So how can a spell make a saber-tooth appear out of a test tube in Caton Road? The answer is that the mass of the saber-tooth must have been fetched from somewhere else.

Some students:

"'...want to speak a few words, make a few passes, and get what they desire, just like that, without bothering to learn the Sanskrit grammar or the periodic table. They haven't realized that you never get something for nothing.'" (p. 56)

"...something for nothing..." is in fact one way that the word, "magic," is used. "The Chancellor hasn't got a magic wand" etc.

Is the whole universe something for nothing? No. It emerged from a "seething sea," not from mere nothingness:

"'...the universe originated as a quantum fluctuation in the seething sea of the vacuum, a random concentration of energy so great that it expanded explosively. Out of this condensed the first particles, and from them evolved atoms, stars, planets, and living creatures.'"
-copied from here.

Cosmogony In SF

"'We believe all matter began as a chaos of hydrogen, the smallest atom. Some of it was fused in the primordial fireball to form helium...'"

-Mirkheim, I, p. 42.

 

Does this mean that first there was a chaos of hydrogen, then there was a primordial fireball fusing some of the hydrogen into helium? Whichever way it happened, what preceded or produced either the chaos or the fireball?

 

"'The galaxies were formed by the condensation of monstrous hydrogen clouds. But there wasn't an absolute vacuum between them. Especially not in the beginning, when the universe hadn't yet expanded very far.'"

-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), II, p. 18.

 

This account mentions hydrogen but not the fireball or helium although it does mention expansion which, we understand, began from the fireball.

"'...the universe originated as a quantum fluctuation in the seething sea of the vacuum, a random concentration of energy so great that it expanded explosively. Out of this condensed the first particles, and from them evolved atoms, stars, planets, and living creatures.'"

-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), Prologue, p. 9.

Presumably those first atoms that evolved were hydrogen. Thus, this account presents four earlier stages:

vacuum

quantum fluctuation

expansion

first particles

 

"'The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged...'"

-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities in Flight (London, 1981), CHAPTER SEVEN, 579.

 

So those neutrons were the first particles.

Someone

Poul Anderson, Vault Of The Ages, Chapter 9.

Carl wonders whether the gods "'...aren't just another story.'" (p. 96) Tom replies, "'Someone must have made the world...'" (ibid.) Carl is prepared to accept "'The great God that the time vault spoke of...'" (ibid.) but dismisses the other gods as nonexistent or at least insignificant.

Why must someone have made the world? Why could it not just have grown like a plant? Someone, a person, is a part of the world or at least of a world. A part cannot explain the whole.

Carl and Tom lack our knowledge of scientific cosmogony and natural selection but that information will also be in the time vault. Entropy winds down but how was it wound up? What was the origin of the concentrated energy that exploded into a universe? A quantum fluctuation in a vacuum? Questions that I had thought were beyond the scope of empirical science are now being addressed by theoretical physics.

Tomorrow And Today

"Flight to Forever."

"The hill seemed strangely unreal, after all that he had seen from it, the whole enormous tomorrow of the cosmos. He would never quite fit into the little round of days that lay ahead." (p. 288)

This passage closely echoes the conclusion of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker where the narrator, having mentally traveled through the history of this cosmos and of other creations, returns home and surveys the Earth of his time, the late 1930s - as we know, a momentous period.

I need only add that Poul Anderson's cosmological sf surpasses Stapledon's:

electromagnetic communication between post-organic intelligences spreading through and beyond this galaxy is more credible than "telepathic" communication between multiple organic species in different galaxies;

a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum is a more scientific cosmic origin than a post-Biblical, experimenting "Star Maker."

Two Cosmologies And Two Long Space Voyages

Poul Anderson's Starfarers describes a ten thousand year interstellar round trip. Anderson's Tau Zero describes a voyage that lasts for hundreds of billions of years during which the universe ages, collapses and re-expands. (But the ship cannot possibly survive the period of monobloc formation.)

The two books also present different cosmologies. In Tau Zero, the growing monobloc with its hydrogen atmosphere and single orbiting spaceship is everything that exists and its oscillations are both beginningless and endless? This seems crude and mythical when contrasted with the account in Starfarers (see here):

energetic vacuum;
virtual particles;
quantum fluctuation;
random concentration;
explosive expansion not resulting from any earlier collapse;
similar processes in other space-time regions?