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Making Universes: Cosmology in Science Fiction
| Article
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13308 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
4,605 Words |
| Author
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Ian Watson
Ian Watson is a former university lecturer in literature in
Tanzania and Japan, and the author of more than twenty books
of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Winner of the French
Prix Apollo, the British Science Fiction Association Award,
and runner-up for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, he
frequently publishes short fiction in American science fiction
magazines, and his stories have been finalists for the Nebula
and Hugoawards. Watson lives in a small village in England,
with his wife and daughter. |
Modern cosmology, in its study of the origin and nature of the universe, provides a rich field of speculative thought for the writer of science fiction. Theories that add general dimensions to time and the three known dimensions of space, or that contemplate time flowing in reverse, give plenty of scope to the imagination.
Current thought portrays the birth of the cosmos occurring some fifteen billion years ago in a great explosion arising from a superdense zone the size of our own solar system, or perhaps even from a singular point source. This dense zone would have comprised the totality of existence, with nothing outside or beyond it.
The speculations of particle physicists link with those of cosmologists in the study of the first instants of this "big bang," when elementary particles were being created. The "physics of the very small" has produced ideas of particular appeal to science fiction authors--for example, the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics where every single particle event gives rise to a whole universe, thus generating an infinite multiplicity of branching universes.
Alternatively, only one particle may exist and its eternal dance back and forth through time might be responsible for the mass of the universe. In this "dance of the particles" theory modern science and traditional Eastern philosophy converge. Then again, the universe we can observe may only be a portion of a macro-universe. In other zones, conditions may be different from what they are here.
After the "big bang," matter rushed away from the center of the explosion. Our universe still continues to expand, but if its mass is great enough, gravitational pull will eventually slow and reverse this explosive expansion. Fifty to a hundred billion years from now all the mass and space of the universe would be crushed back into a superdense zone or point from which a new universe might burst outward, but one which need not possess the same physical constants as ours, and thus need not give rise to galaxies, stars, or life.
Is it, therefore, coincidence that our universe is ideally suited to life capable of observing the phenomena around it? Do barren universes with no observers stretch before and after us? Or is reality somehow "participatory"? We know that the observer's consciousness is bound up intimately with quantum physical events. Does this apply cosmologically as
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