Science fiction has called to me since I was nine years old. It’s my absolute favorite reading. You know how there are certain books that you always return to for comfort? That’s science fiction for me.
It’s the thought of what might be out there that draws me. Not so much the science, though I love the feeling of stretching my mind to try to understand the science, but mostly it’s the abstract mind-bending trying to comprehend what might be out there.
There’s an amazing guest essay in the New York Times online right now – it was printed on September 2, 2023 – by the astrophysicist Adam Frank and the theoretical physicist Marcello Gleiser, titled “The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.” It was prompted by the discoveries that have been made since the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope, specifically the discovery of “the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.” The model we have held for some time posits that after The Big Bang, galaxies formed slowly over time. Instead, as the new telescope allows us to look even farther back in time, we are finding galaxies we were sure couldn’t have been there yet, “akin to parents and children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.”
Frank and Gleiser speculate that we may have to jettison the cosmology model we have been so sure of, which means there may be a huge change coming in “how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.” The essay ends with this:
“The philosopher Robert Crease has written that philosophy is what’s required when doing more science may not answer a scientific question. It’s not clear yet if that’s what’s needed to overcome the crisis in cosmology. But if more tweaks and adjustments don’t do the trick, we may need not just a new story of the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it.”
Besides the mind-bending, what I love the most about this essay is how they see cosmology, and the tools of mathematics and physics, as how we tell stories about what we are trying to understand. We humans – including the philosophers and astrophysicists – are storytellers. That’s how we puzzle out the mysteries that surround us every day.
Raven, Tell A Story 