The Big Bang Never Happened

■ COSMOS AND SOCIETY ■slavery and Russian serfdom, were wiped out only two lifetimesago; and the last serious effort to reestablish slavery, in NaziGermany, was destroyed only a half-century ago.The antidote to such irrationality has always been the appealto observation, the evidence of the senses, and reason. Traditionalscience and the new cosmology, both rooted in such wellfoundedmethods, can provide a scientifically educated populationwith the means to judge the claims of authority, and to rejectthose claims if they prove unfounded. Not only do such methodsundercut a belief in the occult, they also discredit all blind relianceon authority, the willingness to "let the experts decide." Apopulation that understands in practice how a theory's final testis its results in practice would, for example, be unlikely to accepta prescription of wage cutting and austerity to promote futureprosperity, when every such policy in the past has led only tofurther falls in living standards. For this reason, the scientificmethod, the inductive method, remains as in Galileo's day a subversiveforce.By contrast, the authority of deductive science is used to defendthe rule of the "experts" in society. For example, Aleksei N.Boiko, an economic advisor to then—Soviet President Gorbachev,contemptuously dismissed a proposal for a referendum on priceincreases and a market economy as akin to "trying to solve aproblem in higher mathematics by voting on it." What need isthere for voting when the correct policies can be derived throughthe pure reason of those in authority? (Similar arguments havebeen used in the United States to defend the decisions of theFederal Reserve Bank from the interference of the electorate.)Moreover, the methods and assumptions of conventional cosmologyand fundamental physics reject scientific method, andthereby disarm science in the face of irrationality and occultism.Here, after all, is a world of electrons, photons, even entire universespopping into existence without cause, a world governedby neither causality nor logic. The criterion of truth is not fidelityto observation or experiment but the subjective beauty of equations,the symmetries plumbed from the mind of the scientists or"the mind of God"—ultimately the authority of established physicistsand of established ideas.It is no coincidence that the ideas of such science are nowused to lend credence to the "channeling" of departed spirits417