Why the Big Bang Theory Does Not Contradict the Dialectical Materialism... [Archive]

Kiev Communard

16th September 2010, 14:10

... while the Newtonian-style "steady-state" model of the Universe does.

(Excerpts from the book "Science, Marxism and the Big Bang: A Critical Review of 'Reason in Revolt'" by Peter Mason that constitutes the criticism of mechanistic thinking of Alan Woods and Ted Grant)

One of the major themes running throughout Reason in Revolt is the infinite. Woods repeats many times, claiming the support of dialectical materialism, that the universe is infinite in space and time: "Dialectical materialism conceives of the universe as infinite." (Reason in Revolt, p189)

"From the standpoint of dialectical materialism," Woods intones, it is "arrant nonsense" to talk about the beginning of time or the creation of matter:

Time, space and motion are the mode of existence of matter, which can neither be created nor destroyed. The universe has existed for all time (Reason in Revolt, pp198-9)

Is it true that dialectical materialism conceives of the universe as infinite in time and space? Is it a materialist claim? Is it a dialectical claim?

The view that the universe is infinite in time and space may strike many people as a perfectly natural one. This concept has developed over the last five hundred years and should be understood in its historical development. It is a view that arises from definite historical and social conditions.

The Big Bang theory may well seem contrary to common sense to many readers. If we start from the very beginning – with the ancient Greek philosophers from whom so much has been learnt, even by modern scientists – we will find the answer to why science has taken this plunge into what appears on the surface to be an assertion that something can come out of ‘nothing’: that the universe – all its matter and energy, time and space – can emerge from the Big Bang. We will also discover the real material basis on which science establishes the origins of our universe, and the ancient dialectical concepts which proved so perceptive.

But first, a few remarks on what is meant by ‘universe’ and ‘infinity’.

One universe or many?

Firstly, what does Woods mean by the ‘universe’? When we say "the world" we may mean one of two things. We may mean the entire universe, or we may be referring to the earth. But what precisely do we mean by the ‘entire universe’?

No one imagined galaxies beyond our own, let alone universes, until a remarkable eighteenth century German philosopher suggested that there were other "island universes".

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), son of a German craftsman, introduced dialectics into modern philosophy

This philosopher was Immanuel Kant, who was later to reintroduce the ancient Greek concept of dialectics into modern philosophy. In the late nineteenth century Engels enthusiastically praised Kant’s foresight and, in time, island universes were discovered by powerful telescopes, and termed ‘galaxies’. By the 1920s, the very great distances of some of these galaxies from our own galaxy had been measured.

After Einstein overturned Newtonian physics, and especially with the advent of the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe, it became possible to conceive of universes outside of our own, leading to various concepts of a multiverse or meta-universe – a set of universes which are speculated to arise in various ways. So now, when we say ‘the universe’ we may not mean everything that exists, but only ‘our universe’ as opposed to possible other universes. To most physicists the term ‘the universe’ tends to refer to our universe, the universe we can observe. The Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, who adopts the term "our universe" in this way, writes:

What’s conventionally called ‘the universe’ could be just one member of an ensemble. Countless others may exist in which the laws [of physics] are different…

This new concept is, potentially, as drastic an enlargement of our cosmic perspective as the shift from pre-Copernican ideas to the realisation that the Earth is orbiting a typical star on the edge of the Milky Way, itself just one galaxy among countless others...

The big bang that triggered our entire universe is, in this grander perspective, an infinitesimal part of an elaborate structure that extends far beyond the range of any telescope. (Rees, Before the Beginning, Our universe and others, p3-4)

Our universe appears to have had a hot, dense origin popularly known as the Big Bang. It does not exclude the possibility of other universes beyond our own. Scientists speculate about a substratum, as we term it here, from which universes might naturally arise. For instance, some envisage universes budding off from a quantum substratum like bubbles budding off from foam. But in modern science neither our universe, nor a multiverse consisting of many universes, is compatible with the old Newtonian universe defended by Woods.

For many scientists today, one significant element of our universe is the special physical attributes of atomic particles and forces of which it is comprised: "The entire physical world," says Rees, referring to our universe, "is essentially determined by a few basic ‘constants’: the masses of some so-called elementary particles, the strength of the forces – electric, nuclear and gravitational – that bind them together and govern their motions." (Rees, Before the Beginning, p236)

But if these forces were only marginally different the universe that we know would be a physical impossibility. Yet we do not know whether these forces are the only possible combination of constants – maybe there are many other possible variations, producing many other types of universe, beyond our own, which are hardly conceivable to us today.

In our universe the known physical laws appear to apply universally, and the space, time, matter and energy of our universe are bound together. Scientists often use the term space-time, meaning, in a special sense, that time and space together can be treated as a single phenomenon. This discovery was based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, which also showed that mass and energy are linked. For instance, when an atomic bomb explodes a small amount of enriched uranium is converted into a massive amount of energy, a dreadful demonstration of the truth of Einstein’s theory.

In Newton’s universe, space and time have an absolute existence of their own, independent of each other and of matter. Einstein showed that if the mass of our universe exceeded a certain amount, the gravity of the universe would cause space-time to bend until the universe became ‘closed’ like a sphere (which has three dimensions), but in the four dimensions of space-time (which is not easily conceived by us). By closed, we roughly mean that anyone travelling in the universe in what appears to be a straight line could eventually find themselves back at their starting point, as if we were ants scurrying around the inside wall of a gigantic football.

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Diagram: Space is bent around a massive object such as a star (shown by the dimple). To an observer from a distance, distances have been shortened, and time is also running a little slower.

Light (shown by the line) passing nearby is bent from the straight path indicated by the dashes.

We will discuss how Einstein revolutionised our concepts of time and space in the course of this survey. But to anticipate these arguments slightly, let us take a moment to consider what this remarkable concept means. A star, like our sun, bends space and time – something that has been routinely confirmed by observation since 1919.

Light travelling to earth from a star will be bent if it passes close to an intermediate star or galaxy. Space and time are bent by the great mass of this intermediate star or galaxy, and light passing through this bent space and time behaves just as if it was going though a gigantic lens. Today, this is routinely observed and quantified. It can give rise to gravitational lensing, an extremely useful tool in astronomy, in which a galaxy or other object in front of a distant object acts like a giant magnifying glass.

In the same way, the mass of all the stars in the universe collectively, together with other matter, have the effect of bending the space and time of the entire universe – and if there is enough mass, it could be bent right round back on itself in various ways. Current observations, however, suggest that there is not enough mass for this to happen.

We should point out that Woods calls this result of Einstein’s general theory of relativity a "regression to the mediaeval world outlook of a finite universe", in a short passage particularly densely populated with false ideas. (Reason in Revolt, pp382-3) But we should also point out that earlier in Reason in Revolt, Woods has already unintentionally endorsed the idea of space-time bending, not once but twice: "This was proved in 1919, when it was shown that light bends under the force of gravity." (Reason in Revolt, p106) Later, Woods presents both his viewpoints on the same page, first appearing to deny or at least denigrate Einstein’s theory and then going on to say that:

… [Einstein] predicted that a gravitational field would bend light rays… In 1919… Einstein’s brilliant theory was demonstrated in practice. (Reason in Revolt, p154)

Woods seems to fail to grasp here that the 1919 experiment attempted to show that space and time are indeed distorted by the existence of a massive body and that the effect of gravity is a consequence of this distortion. Arthur Eddington’s famous 1919 observations, taken during an eclipse on the island of Principe off the West African coast, showed that light from a star that passed very close to the sun was indeed bent by the mass of the sun.

Eddington’s grand expedition was the first experimental test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. His measurements were soon improved upon, and much more accurate measurements have confirmed his result – the confirmation of Einstein’s prediction that space and time is warped. Newton’s theory of gravity can also be used to suggest that light bends by a certain amount. But Einstein’s theory predicts that the gravitational effect on light should cause it to bend by roughly twice as much as predicted by Newtonian science – and light does, indeed, bend by the amount predicted by the general theory of relativity as it follows the curvature of space-time.

When scientists today speculate about other ‘island universes’ they may envisage universes governed by different laws which lie beyond the space-time of our universe and which, therefore, could not be measured in distances and times from our universe. Such universes might not be gravitationally attracted to one another or to the matter in our universe and may have none of the basic ‘constants’ as Rees calls them, of our universe – or even, some suggest, the same space-time dimensions. Science stands on the very first stepping-stone of a path to the possible discovery of other universes, in the same way that Kant anticipated a vast enlargement of our horizons when he speculated about other ‘island universes’.

So the term ‘the universe’ today can either refer specifically to our universe or, more broadly, to our universe and anything that may lie beyond it. But Woods is defending the old Newtonian notion of an essentially unchanging universe comprised of infinite time and space with "galaxies and more galaxies stretching out to infinity".

Woods claims that, "At no time in the history of science has mysticism been so rampant as now." (Reason in Revolt, p384) He darkly asserts that "determined attempts" are being made to "drag science backwards" (Reason in Revolt, p381) and that the supposed subjectivism in Einstein’s relativity "beyond doubt, exercised the most harmful influence upon modern science". (Reason in Revolt, p167) "To blur the distinction between science and mysticism is to put the clock back 400 years," he warns. (Reason in Revolt, p199) Woods argues that the temple shrine in this citadel of mysticism is the Big Bang theory.

Has science been set back 400 years? These are absurd claims. Most scientists are not practising mystics but in many respects salaried workers, of whose work Woods approves and disapproves arbitrarily. "Fortunately," says Woods, "it is possible to work out quite accurately the amount of matter in the observable universe. It is about one atom for every ten cubic metre of space." (Reason in Revolt, p191)

How is it possible? Who did the science? Who should be credited? Why give merit to this cosmological observation and yet deride current cosmology as a whole? The reliability of such results are interdependent on the current state of cosmological theories in general – estimates of the number of atoms in the universe is not some isolated Herculean counting exercise carried out by an unknown, but an integral part of the current theories of the universe. Yet Woods rejects this general cosmological framework, which he says is "frequently bordering on mysticism". (Reason in Revolt, p183)

The Big Bang

What are Woods’ objections to the science of the Big Bang itself? The hot Big Bang model rests on four pillars of evidence. This is how the University of Cambridge’s cosmology website outlines them:

1. Expansion of the universe

2. Origin of the cosmic background radiation

3. Nucleosynthesis of the light elements

4. Formation of galaxies and large-scale structure

(http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/ user/gr/public/bb_pillars.html)

The Big Bang theory is the only theory which provides a consistent explanation for the observed universe: firstly, of course, its expansion, and secondly, the ancient cosmic background radiation, to which we will return.

Thirdly, it explains why there existed light elements, mainly hydrogen and helium, before there were any stars in our universe. Stars formed from these light elements. The processes which take place during the life and death of stars produces all the other elements which go to make up the chemistry of the universe (the elements of the periodic table, such as oxygen, carbon, silicon, iron, calcium, and so on). But they do not manufacture hydrogen, they only consume it, and the quantity of helium produced by a star is less than it consumes.

Fourthly, alongside a full account of the relative abundance of the light elements that make up the universe, the Big Bang theory is able to account in general terms for the formation of galaxies and other large-scale structures of the universe.

The Big Bang therefore for the first time gives the universe a history in time. It further elegantly solved the centuries-old paradoxes that had puzzled scientists, such as that of the universe collapsing in on itself through gravitational attraction, and Olbers’ paradox, which we discussed in the chapter, Newton: belief and contradiction. It accurately predicts the abundance of elements: why there is so much hydrogen, created together with helium in the Big Bang, and the current proportion of the heavier atoms, created in the stars during the period since the Big Bang. (The calculation of the abundance of these elements has even more credibility because they were first made by a team led by Fred Hoyle, an opponent of the Big Bang theory.)

However, the piece of evidence that brought the Big Bang theory into mainstream cosmology was the accidental discovery of the last distant echoes of the Big Bang epoch: the cosmic background radiation.

The cosmic background radiation discovery

Woods objects that Big Bang theorists "move the goalposts" (Reason in Revolt, p222), continually shifting the theories associated with the Big Bang universe around to fit the latest sets of data. It is true that experimental data often provides unpleasant surprises for researchers, and that theories have to be re-examined in the light of new discoveries. But Woods argues that this continual readjustment of theory in the light of new facts shows that the Big Bang theory is not science, but mysticism. In this, Woods follows Eric J Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, who is well known for his attacks on the Big Bang ‘orthodoxy’. Lerner’s tribute to the remarkable scientist Hannes Alfven is reproduced by permission on the opening pages of Reason in Revolt (but omitted in the second edition), and he is quoted as an authority throughout, particularly in the chapter on the Big Bang.

Lerner believes that the scientific establishment bureaucratically defends orthodox theories to the exclusion of competing theories. This is an important point but Lerner views it in an entirely one-sided manner. It is ironic that the Big Bang theory is precisely one that was derided fifty years ago, but has become a mainstream theory, perhaps in particular as a result of the discovery of the cosmic background radiation.

Lerner and Woods make out that the bias in science towards the established orthodoxy is a shocking new phenomenon. But it has always been so. As the philosopher Thomas Kuhn remarked in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the establishment of paradigms (Aristotle’s universe, Newton’s universe, Einstein’s universe, the Big Bang universe) directs research to a particular ground, so to speak, establishing what then becomes normal science.

In the field of astronomy, Kuhn adds, the establishment of paradigms goes back thousands of years: "Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive to its basic commitments." But he points out: "Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that novelty shall not be suppressed for very long." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p5) The discovery of the cosmic background radiation was just such an "element of the arbitrary".

It is revealing to briefly study one instance of this supposed shifting of the goalposts that Woods pursues through the pages of Reason in Revolt. Before the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, theorists realised that if the Big Bang had taken place, there would be a faint afterglow of the original fireball, and were able to calculate the circumstances of the release of this cosmic background radiation. If found, they realised, it would be convincing evidence of the Big Bang theory. The actual discovery of the cosmic background radiation was one of those serendipitous scientific accidents which makes an excellent narrative, and is often found popular books on cosmology.

Woods describes how the temperature of the cosmic background radiation was differently estimated a number of times before it was discovered. The first attempt at an estimation of the temperature was by George Gamow and Ralph Alpher a quarter of a century before it was observed experimentally.

When the cosmic background radiation was discovered, purely by accident, by two young radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, in 1965, it was found to be at a much lower temperature than predicted. They measured a temperature of 3.5 degrees above absolute zero – absolute zero is minus 273 degrees centigrade – very cold indeed! Penzias and Wilson were perplexed by the radiation whose source was a mystery to them. Contemporary Big Bang theorists Robert Dicke and James Peebles, working at that very time not many miles away, had estimated the temperature to be in the region of 35 degrees above absolute zero.

Woods goes so far as to hint that Dicke subsequently made false claims about the accuracy of his original predictions. (Reason in Revolt, p 187) This lack of agreement of original theory and data in relation to temperature is Woods’ main argument to discredit the Big Bang origins of the cosmic background radiation. In reality, the early estimates were based on more approximate data, and as new data came in from bigger telescopes, more accurate estimates could be made. When Gamow and Alpher made their original prediction, they used the very approximate value for the rate of expansion of the universe calculated by Hubble in the 1930s.

It is true that there was still a discrepancy between the predicted temperature and the experimental result. But Woods fails to mention any of the other numerous factors of the radiation identified by the radio astronomers Penzias and Wilson, which coincided with the general theoretical conception of the cosmic background radiation model being developed by Big Bang theorists Dicke and Peebles at that time. In technical terms, Dicke and Peebles theorised that the radiation must be black-body radiation, it must be isotropic, unpolarised, have a certain range of temperatures, and a certain range of wavelengths. [See Note one] A further explanation of these concepts would take us a little beyond our remit. Suffice to say that the nature of this radiation was unique and quite specifically determined and identified. All of this meant that when the two teams of scientists, Penzias and Wilson, and Dicke and Peebles, finally learnt about each other’s work, they instantly recognised what they had found, despite the temperature discrepancy.

In 1965, the two teams published scientific papers describing their discovery in the same issue of Astrophysical Journal. The paper of Penzias and Wilson modestly concentrated on a detailed description of the radiation they had discovered, for which they won the Nobel prize. Dicke and Peebles, (who had intended to set up an experiment to detect this very radiation, until they were beaten to it by Penzias and Wilson) concentrated on just what this discovery meant. The papers are available on the internet (see endnote).

Let us take a brief look at the paper, Cosmic Black-Body Radiation, by Dicke, Peebles, Roll and Wilkinson. (Astrophysical Journal 142: pp414-419, July 1965)

One curiosity the paper reveals is that Dicke and Peebles were working on a cyclical Big Bang model, the type of model of the universe which, in the 2002 preface to Reason in Revolt, Woods falsely says is consistent with dialectical materialism, because it assumes the universe is infinite in time (which we touched on in the chapter, Engels on materialism, the infinite and cosmology). This was a common Big Bang model until the time of the discovery of the cosmic background radiation.

Dicke and Peebles worked out the early temperature of the hot dense origins of the universe using the current temperature of the cosmic background radiation newly discovered and determined by Penzias and Wilson. They wrote that during the "highly contracted phase of the universe" a temperature in excess of ten billion degrees "is strongly implied by a present temperature of 3.5° Kelvin for black-body radiation". (Astrophysical Journal 142, p416)

This is the temperature that Penzias and Wilson measured. From Penzias and Wilson’s measurement Dicke and Peebles found that there was support for the calculations of the relative abundance of the light elements (mainly hydrogen and helium) made by Hoyle and others, emanating from a hot dense origin of the universe – another of the four pillars of the Big Bang theory, alongside the cosmic background radiation itself. This is compelling evidence for the Big Bang.

A third deduction in their paper relates to the number of atoms per "cubic metre of space" calculation for which Woods gives a figure without recognising its derivation. The authors of the paper somewhat ruefully recognised that, based on the experimental evidence discovered by Penzias and Wilson, the average number of atoms in each cubic metre of space (the density of the universe) was far too low for their own model, the cyclical Big Bang model, to be possible.

The universe appears to be 'open', fated to continue expanding indefinitely, they reluctantly concluded. Their cyclical model, they wrote, required the lower limit of the temperature of the cosmic background radiation to be no lower than thirty degrees above absolute zero, with an upper limit of forty degrees, except under some rather speculative circumstances. At a frigid 3.5 degrees, they wrote, this spelt trouble for their 'closed' universe concept which cycles through big bangs and big crunches.

All these considerations show that Woods’ objections to the discrepancies of the temperature of the cosmic background radiation do not in any way invalidate the general nature of the discovery, as he implies. However, the apparent low density (the ‘missing matter’ problem) of the universe is still a question for major study in cosmology.

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Table 5: the situation today

There is no headlong rush to mysticism in these four pillars of the Big Bang theory, which adhere entirely to the material evidence, as opposed to the occult of Newton’s universal gravitation. In fact, it is Woods who abandons a materialist approach in order to explain the origins of this supposed mysticism. He argues that subjective idealism, Einstein’s supposed "philosophical mistake", has had the most "harmful influence upon modern science". (Reason in Revolt, p167) And he cites the autobiography of the virulently anti-Marxist philosopher Karl Popper to back him up. According to Popper, Einstein confided his "mistake" to him, Woods informs us. Woods takes this as good coin:

All the nonsense about "the observer" as a determining factor was not an essential part of the theory, but merely the reflection of a philosophical mistake, as Einstein frankly confirmed. (Reason in Revolt, p167)

What Woods terms "nonsense" is in fact a straw man resurrected by him based on past philosophical misinterpretations of Einstein. It is astonishing to see Woods quoting Popper uncritically. Popper’s works and followers are saturated with an active hostility to dialectics and Marxism. Popper’s works are harmful to science and the philosophy of science. (This is discussed in more detail in the next chapter.)

It is not a materialist approach to attribute to a "philosophical mistake" the emergence of a supposed "mysticism" more rampant than at any other time in the history of science. This appears to be more of an idealist approach: to seek to explain developments in human society primarily through the development or influence of philosophical ideas, mistaken or otherwise, rather than to look for their material basis.

Creation of matter

Woods often argues against the coming into being of our universe in the following way:

From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, it is arrant nonsense to talk about the ‘beginning of time’ or the ‘creation of matter’. Time, space, and motion are the mode of existence of matter, which can neither be created nor destroyed. (Reason in Revolt, p198-9)

Woods bases his argument essentially on the law of the conservation of mass and energy, which basically says that the total amount of mass and energy of a system must be conserved. He says, "there is one law which knows no exception in nature – the law of the conservation of energy". (Reason in Revolt, p108)

Let us disregard for a moment that some scientists suspect there are small breaches in this law at the quantum level over very short periods of time. The law of conservation of mass and energy appears to apply generally within the confines of our universe, the physics of our four dimensional space-time. But suppose that there is a substratum which underpins space-time, perhaps a world from which our four dimensional space-time is an emergent property, the tip of an iceberg, a qualitative change in special circumstances. Suppose that in other circumstances quite a different configuration of physics emerges from this primeval flux? This is, of course, speculative.

But let’s look at the matter historically. Hermann Helmholtz is often considered to be the first to formulate a law of conservation of force in 1847, although others, including Descartes, had proposed similar theories. He later said: "If we are fully acquainted with a natural law, we must also demand that it should operate without exception." Engels, who quotes Helmholtz here (Dialectics of Nature, pp108-9), ridicules the fact that Helmholtz goes on to admit that we "objectivise laws which in the first place embrace only a limited series of natural processes, the conditions for which are still rather complicated". In other words, Engels explains, Helmholtz admits that while scientists may demand that a law is applicable without exception in nature they are often far from understanding it, let alone proving its eternal validity. Historically, it can be seen that our understanding of physical laws is contingent on our understanding of physical processes, and that laws come into being and pass away in revolutions in physics which render the old laws inapplicable. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the laws of conservation of energy, or more strictly of mass-energy, replaced the law of conservation of ‘vis viva’ or ‘living force’ proposed by Leibniz around the period 1676-89.

It may be objected that the conservation of mass and energy is common sense – things do not pop up out of nowhere. This appears to be the way questions are often treated in Reason in Revolt: statements are made that, it is assumed, simply require no justification, no evidence, as if one should rely on common sense. But we are not talking about our everyday experience, but the extreme limits of nature and our scientific knowledge.

The second problem with Woods’ approach is much simpler: it simply does not follow from the law of conservation of mass and energy that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only that the total mass and energy of a system must be conserved.

In other words, the law of conservation of mass and energy does not contradict the dialectic of coming into being and passing away, whether at the subatomic, quantum level, or at the cosmic level, so long as energy and mass are conserved overall. It is speculated that our universe is comprised of opposites so that, for instance, all the mass and energy of the universe is exactly equal to its opposite, gravity, so that they cancel out. In this way, it is speculated, the law of conservation of mass and energy was not broken when all the matter and energy of our universe emerged in the Big Bang, along with its negation, gravity.

Woods ascribes to matter and energy indestructible and uncreated properties, which he wrongly believes follows from the law of the conservation of energy. Interestingly, Engels says this on the question of the law of conservation of energy:

Whereas only ten years ago the great basic law of motion, then recently discovered, was as yet conceived merely as a law of the conservation of energy, as the mere expression of the indestructibility and uncreatability of motion, that is, merely in its quantitative aspect, this narrow negative conception is being more and more supplanted by the positive idea of the transformation of energy, in which for the first time the qualitative content of the process comes into its own, and the last vestige of an extramundane creator [e.g. Newton’s god] is obliterated. (1885 Preface, Anti-Dühring, p18)

In our view, Engels would have embraced the ideas of Einstein, of the transformation of mass into energy and vice versa. Engels placed geat emphasis on the discoveries of the transformation of different forms of energy – heat, light, mechanical motion. He was thrilled at the discovery of the conservation of energy only because of its recognition of these transformations. The conservation, the indestructibility and uncreatability of motion, Engels sees as a narrow negative conception, "the last vestige of an extramundane creator", which is being "supplanted" by concepts of the transformation of energy.

Nineteenth century mechanical conceptions were found to be inadequate by the beginning of the twentieth century. Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful of modern scientific theories, shows that if a particle with positive energy comes into being out of nothing (perhaps from some as yet unidentified substratum), a particle with negative energy also comes into being. Matter and energy are thus conserved while at the same time the narrow negative conception of the conservation of mass and energy is lost. No wonder, then, that physicists were not completely unprepared for a rather larger version of this quantum creation and destruction of matter in the Big Bang, only given that there was sufficient evidence, a smoking gun, which was provided by the cosmic background radiation.

Woods, on the other hand, precisely stresses the narrow, negative conception of merely the conservation of energy and mass, in order to justify his undialectical concept of an infinite universe, which is beyond material proof.

Woods suggests that dialectical materialism has a special privileged way of determining scientific questions in advance of any evidence. In truth, Woods is merely regurgitating the efforts of nineteenth century physics that were summed up in the first law of thermodynamics – the conservation of energy – and giving it his endorsement.

As briefly mentioned earlier, Woods follows Eric Lerner’s general approach to the Big Bang. Lerner, adopting a popular style, argues that the Big Bang theory is full of holes. This is misleading. When pressed, Lerner makes clear he rejects the Big Bang theory because one or more of its predictions have from time to time failed – such as the original calculations of the temperature of the cosmic background radiation mentioned above.

Science according to Karl Popper

Lerner takes the position that: "When a theory makes clear predictions which are contradicted by observation it is falsified and has to be rejected." (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=89106&page=2) What Lerner expresses here is the well-known philosophy of the anti-Marxist, anti-dialectician Karl Popper. In broad terms, Popper said that if a single observation falsifies a scientific theory, the theory is wrong, and must be abandoned. He argued that if a science relies on theories that do not admit of falsification, or if a science simply modifies its claims to circumvent falsification, it can no longer be thought of as a science, but at best is no more than a "metaphysical research programme", and at worst is no different to mysticism, like astrology.

In its original and popular form, Popper’s mode of falsification may be conceived in terms of a single experimental result, which is capable of producing data that can falsify the scientific theory under investigation. This idea has entered into our common sense notions of science, but is an inadequate and misleading depiction of the methodology of science.

While there are many celebrated examples of falsification – such as the Michelson and Morley null result which failed to prove the existence of the aether discussed above – closer historical examination of such examples shows that this oversimplifies the situation. In the case of the Michelson and Morley experiment, there were serious conceptual problems with the very idea of the aether. There were related problems of how James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism was linked to the physics of light. There was a period of crisis in physics. There were a whole series of experiments, each of increasing accuracy and ingenuity, before and after the celebrated Michelson and Morley experiment, and yet scientists were at a loss as to what exactly was wrong. It was the combined weight of these failures, together with the emergence of Einstein’s theory of relativity, that finally overthrew the old Newtonian physics and the aether theory together.

Popper came to recognise that his original conception was inadequate, and modified his theory in various ways to circumvent criticism. Lerner uses the "naïve falsification" popularly associated with Popper’s theory to dismiss the current Big Bang theory, while some have used Popper’s theory to suggest that cosmology itself is not a science, arguing that it cannot, by its very nature, be falsified in the way Popper conceived.

But this only demonstrates that Popper’s theory of falsification was too narrow. In every field, including physics and especially cosmology, science advances on a broad front and requires evaluation, comparison and judgement of a wide range of evidence (often apparently conflicting) over time. For this reason, it is inappropriate to cast science into the mould of simple true/false laboratory tests. This is most clear in the sciences that are far removed from the experimental laboratory, such as the sciences which study evolution, archaeology, palaeontology, and so forth, but it applies in cosmology too.

Popper falsely argues that Marxism is not based on a scientific method since, he asserts, it has shown itself to be not falsifiable. Events, Popper argues, have provided evidence of the falseness of Marxism as a theory, and yet it has refused to die. Marxists argue that Popper and his followers display a profound lack of understanding of Marxist theory, if not a determined opposition to it. Popper concluded, at one point, that according to his criterion Darwinian evolution is not science, essentially because Darwinian evolution, a little like Marxism, does not generally avail itself of simple laboratory tests.

Yet the truth is that no science reduces itself to the simple criterion Popper proposes, as the example of the temperature of the cosmic background radiation in the previous chapter, The Big Bang and mysticism in science, shows.

Vulgar materialism and positivism

Popper’s theory of falsification fails its own test – it cannot be falsified. The theory is problematic since the falsifying observations themselves may turn out to be false. But these are merely technical objections. The truth is that complex phenomena such as scientific theories evolve in time, and any modern science is a complex result of historical development. By contrast, it is in the nature of what is termed positivist philosophy to attempt to reduce all things to simple facts, the atomic components, as it were, that make up the whole, rather than approaching things in a holistic manner. Although he refused the title, Popper was correctly seen as the representative of modern positivism in Britain. In their day Hegel and Marx were both hostile to all varieties of atomistic positivism, from the ancient Greek atomists to the positivists of their day.

Dialectics has always opposed this simplistic approach. The evaluation of scientific theories requires a comparative analysis of a wide range of observation and theories – all facets of the phenomenon. By comparison, Popper’s approach is reductionist: it tends to take the falsifying evidence in isolation (as Woods does in the cosmic background radiation temperature discrepancy) rather than examining the whole in its historical development. Some of the most prominent scientists have attested to the inadequacies of Popper’s approach, such as Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, and Roger Penrose in The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a thousand-page book aimed at giving a comprehensive guide to the laws of physics, published in 2004. Penrose says Popper’s method is "too stringent a criterion, and definitely too idealistic a view of science in this modern world of ‘Big science’." (The Road to Reality, p1,020)

Unfortunately, however, many scientists still pay lip service to Popper’s basic contention, even if in their daily practice they do not apply his method. Some, like the physicist Lee Smolin, appear to have an inconsistent or pragmatic outlook. Smolin demands that a theory is not only falsifiable, but also "confirmable" – something Popper denies is possible. Further, when Smolin discusses What is Science? he embraces the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, a fierce critic of Popper. (Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, pxiii and p290)

Of course, any materialist, considering the Big Bang theory, would rightly object to the notion that something can come from nothing. But as we have said before, science assumes a substratum. Science continually uncovers as yet unknown physical processes. If something appears to spring from nothing, it indicates that there are limits to our scientific understanding, an understanding that does not encompass all aspects of reality. Marxists cannot take the crude approach exemplified by Reason in Revolt.

In fact, sometimes Woods takes a very crude approach to science: "In the last analysis, all human existence and activity is based on the laws of the motion of atoms." (Reason in Revolt, p60) This is not true in any sense, let alone in the last analysis. In the very simplest sense it omits gravity, photons of light and so forth. But it is an indication of the eclectic method of Woods that he then immediately proceeds to assert the opposite: "Nobody in their right mind would seek to explain the complex movements in human society in terms of atomic forces." (Reason in Revolt, p60) What does he mean then by "in the last analysis"? Cells, animals, species, consciousness, social organisation – most complex things cannot be reduced to the laws of the motion of atoms, "in the last analysis".

Later, Woods applauds the ancient Greek atomists "who visualised the universe as being composed of only two things – the ‘atoms’ and the ‘void’. In essence, this view of the universe is correct." (Reason in Revolt, p145) It is not true in essence or in any other sense. It is the crudest, most ancient expression of the philosophy of positivism of which Popper is a descendent – the modern school properly began with Auguste Comte in the early nineteenth century, and with which outlook Reason in Revolt is flawed. This time Woods does not stop to contradict himself, but leaves this crude reductionist position to stand. Marx and Engels rejected the philosophy of Comte and those who took up a similar position later in the century.

Dialectics and science

In any case, from a dialectical point of view, everything that changes has within it an interpenetration of opposites, as Engels puts it in Dialectics of Nature. This dialectic applies in the field of science, and certainly brings us nearer to a Marxist understanding of the nature of scientific theories. Some opposing, contradictory data is likely to be unaccounted for by any scientific model in any field, especially the more ambitious models.

In the "great dialectic between theory and data", as the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould called it, good scientific modelling attempts to find common ground in a riot of data. The Big Bang theory famously confronts a number of contradictions, the most important of which is how it came into being out of nothing. We have attempted to show that modern science is no stranger to the dialectic of coming into being, even if it does not consciously recognise this dialectic. But none of these contradictions yet seriously challenge the validity of the four pillars of experimental data that confirm the Big Bang theory. Instead, the contradictions lead to further developments and new conceptualisations of the universe and its contents, further experiments and discoveries.

As well as contradictions confronting scientific models themselves, there are also opposing political and social pressures on scientists to interpret their data in various ways. Take global warming. Enormous political pressures were placed by various elements of the ruling elite, particularly within George W Bush’s regime in the USA, on those scientists who defended the theory of global warming against the theory’s opponents, which included some of the large, powerful sections of the capitalist class that Bush represents, like major oil companies. This may now be beginning to change.

Yet the vast majority of genuine researchers in the field of global warming were prepared to oppose these political pressures. Why is this? There are divisions within the ruling class on the question of the environment, since some corporations fear a backlash arising from the failures of big business-led governments to counter global warming, among other concerns. This same pressure is no doubt felt within the scientific community, as well as being fed by it. Woods treats the scientific establishment as if it is monolithic, but it too suffers from the interpenetration of opposites. Scientific teams of researchers, at any rate, are in many cases skilled workers themselves, even if the grants, bursaries and investment in science are coming more and more under the thumb of the capitalist class at the present time.

In fact, contradictions in and between scientific theories and their data abound within science, as any practising scientist knows. We have shown how Newton was aware of contradictions in his own model of the universe, such as the problem of the collapse of the universe under its own gravity. There will always be data that is untamed, alternative interpretations, contradictory material. Some contradictions indicate the path down which a more advanced theory may one day be found, leading at a certain point to a revolutionary overturn of the old paradigm and the establishment of a new paradigm, which then largely dictates the outlook and direction of scientific research and its theoretical development over a whole period of time, as the philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962.

Thus the Newtonian paradigm of space and time was overthrown two centuries later by Einstein’s space-time paradigm and the Big Bang theory, resolving contradictions that had existed since Newton’s day. We cannot discuss the merits of Kuhn’s work here, but Kuhn is certainly right when he points out that a paradigm "need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted". (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p18)

Woods rather disdainfully writes that Kuhn’s philosophy of science "can be accepted as true" (Reason in Revolt, p380), although, in typical eclectic fashion, in the preceding paragraphs he embraces some of the very ideas Kuhn was successfully refuting. Woods can hardly argue that Kuhn’s approach, which has elements of a dialectical outlook, informs Woods’ own approach to science in Reason in Revolt, since the opposite is true. There is no question that the accumulation of material evidence is critical to the advancement of science. But Woods’ approach is too simplistic.

Contradictions found in scientific theories, such as the Big Bang theory, might indicate the dying embers of an old, negated paradigm, or aspects of it preserved but represented in unrevised methods and outmoded supporting theories, outdated instruments operating at the far limits of their range, or techniques that are still far from adequate.

Hegel explains that in the course of human development the negation of old ideas (or paradigms) does not simply mean that human history is a meaningless process of endless errors. Something is always preserved in the course of the negation. Now this something might be a positive or a negative hangover (or a mixture of both), but it indicates, as Kuhn hastened to emphasise after the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that there is a continuing development of a greater understanding of the cosmos, in contrast to those philosophers who deny any progress at all. There seems to be insufficient recognition of the nature of this dialectical process of new ideas coming into being in Reason in Revolt.

In the collection of essays, It Ain’t Necessarily So, the evolutionary biologist and social commentator, Richard Lewontin, puts it like this, beginning with an oblique reference to the same revolution that inspired Hegel:

As in politics, so in science, a genuine revolution is not an event but a process. A manifesto may be published, a reigning head may drop into a basket, but the accumulated contradictions of the past do not disappear in an instant. Nor do the supporters of the ancien régime. The new view of nature does indeed resolve many of the old problems, but it creates new ones of its own, new contradictions that are different from, but not necessarily any less deep than, the old. And waiting, just across the border, are intellectual somocistas, saying, "I told you so. What did you expect?" trying to convince us that the old way of looking at nature was correct after all. Of course, the old view of nature can never return, but rather new revolutions displace old ones. (Darwin’s Revolution, New York Review of Books, 16 June 1983. The Somocistas were reactionary landlord supporters of the US backed Nicaraguan dictator Somoza prior to the 1979 revolution.)

Only a complete theory would consistently explain everything – and no theory is ever complete because observations constantly reveal new phenomena that require new, higher levels of theoretical understanding. Woods, however, rejects the entire body of the modern science of cosmology, calling it creationism: "The Big Bang theory is really a creation myth," complete with "its inseparable companion, the day of Final Judgement (the ‘Big Crunch’)." (Reason in Revolt, p183) This accusation of a creation myth, made by Hoyle (who died in 2001), and other opponents of the Big Bang theory – at least until the discovery of the cosmic background radiation forty years ago – is regarded by scientists as simply casting aspersions. On its own it is not a scientific refutation. If Woods wishes to criticise the Big Bang, he must do so by thoroughly examining – in an informed and balanced way – the experimental evidence.

Idealist approach

In the chapter, The Theory of Knowledge, Woods elucidates the main reason why he feels there is mysticism in science: "… there has been no adequate philosophy which could help to point science in the right direction. The philosophy of science is in a mess." (Reason in Revolt, p381)

This is Woods’ justification for writing a book on a subject that he knows very little about: he is the philosopher bringing dialectics to the misguided or ignorant scientist. Reason in Revolt attempts to use philosophical reason to revolt against modern science, calling on the assistance of dialectics. As we have seen, Woods’ acquaintance with philosophy also appears to be sketchy.

Woods reiterates that "Einstein was partly responsible" for the supposed tendency to mysticism in science. (Reason in Revolt p381) Once again we must insist that this is not a materialist approach. It is not helped by a complaint of "prejudice against dialectics". (Reason in Revolt, p385) However true that may be, and however much it may hinder the rapid development of science, it is still no material barrier which could send science backwards, let alone so far back that at "no time in the history of science has mysticism been so rampant as now". (Reason in Revolt, p384)

As long ago as 1885, Engels concluded that "natural science has now advanced so far that it can no longer escape dialectical generalisation". Twentieth century scientific theory, in particular quantum mechanics, in many ways soon proved this to be the case. Engels merely notes that the scientist can arrive at these generalisations "more easily if one approaches the dialectical character of these facts equipped with an understanding of the laws of dialectical thought." (1885 preface to Anti-Dühring, pp19-20)

On the whole, however, Woods puts the causes of the supposed descent into mysticism of science down to philosophical mistakes. This is a very one-sided approach that has fallen into idealism. Hegel, the consummate idealist, would – indeed did – take the same position. Science, he said, was a "kind of witches’ circle in which… phenomena and phantoms run riot in indiscriminate company and enjoy equal rank with one another." (Science of Logic, p461) Hegel was an idealist philosopher. Marx and Engels broke from that view.

So should Marxists defend the Big Bang theory? Such a question would indicate a wrong approach to Marxist dialectics. We have tried to show that Marxism does not supply an a priori means of determining correct scientific theories – it cannot dictate by means of materialist dialectics which scientific theory is verifiable and which is not.

In general terms only a genuinely socialist society could re-establish workers’ confidence in the results of modern science, once science is no longer subject to the malign influence of big business agendas. In 1926, Trotsky wrote:

Although class interests have introduced and are still introducing false tendencies even into natural science, nevertheless this falsification process is restricted by the limits beyond which it begins directly to prevent the progress of technology. (Problems of Everyday Life, p287)

This is still true today. But scientific thought will only demonstrate truly "vast possibilities" once it is

… so to speak, nationalised, emancipated from the internecine wars of private property, no longer required to lend itself to bribery of individual proprietors, but intended to serve the economic development of the nation as a whole. (Problems of Everyday Life, p274)

Only then could we perhaps envisage the development of the social and political toolkit of Marxism into one which embraces and encourages independent scientific development (without any a priori judgements). Then, instead of perhaps in their ones and twos today, scientists as a body will be able to consciously apply dialectical considerations as an aid to their work.

But Trotsky issued the following warning:

Whenever any Marxist attempted to transmute the theory of Marx into a universal master key and ignore all other spheres of learning, Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] would rebuke him with the expressive phrase "Komchvanstvo" ("communist swagger"). (Problems of Everyday Life, p274)

Dialectics and the universe

Science has demonstrated the dialectics of the universe. Some ten to twenty billion years ago, so far as is most broadly accepted by science today, there was a sudden catastrophic dialectical transformation, and the universe we know came into existence – from what cause we do not know. Time and space are bound up with matter and energy, and are not exempt from the dialectics of nature. Time has not been ticking eternally, exempt from the transformations of quantity into quality first discovered by the ancient philosophers of Ionia, and which in modern times helped form the Marxist understanding of processes here on earth.

Woods supposes that time is exempt from this dialectical transformation. In arguing for an infinite universe, Woods steps from the path of materialism and science, and onto a path towards what Hegel termed ‘metaphysics’. By metaphysics here we mean both a non-dialectical approach and an attempt to base a philosophy on a realm beyond the world of experience. The science of the Big Bang presents both a more material and a more dialectical view of the universe than that of Reason in Revolt. Woods dismisses the scientific evidence of the Big Bang without a proper consideration of that evidence. Is this dialectical materialism? Surely it is the opposite.

Some of the modern theories of the cosmos contain a rediscovery (not for the first time) by science of the dialectics of nature. The theory of cosmological phase changes or transitions helped scientists make definite predictions that have been experimentally proved, as Greene explains. He says "cosmological phase transitions have proven so potent" that many scientists feel that the concept of phase transitions will contribute to a unified theory of the cosmos. (The Fabric of the Cosmos, p268) They are used in theories of how the early universe developed. Phase transitions are an example of the dialectic of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa.

One thing is certain: an infinite universe can never be tested for or detected by a telescope, or any other instrument. The origin of the concept of an infinite universe is not to be found in nature but in the mind. It is an idea, and to argue that our universe is infinite in time and space in the twenty-first century is a move backwards to the epoch of the origins of Newtonian physics, and towards a philosophy of idealism.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this review, we suggested that Woods has a less than rounded-out grasp of science. He does not understand how water boils. He does not recognise Newton’s first law of motion, attributing it to Einstein’s relativity, and then attempts to discredit it. Had he chosen any other of Newton’s laws to discredit, he might have been correct, if only by chance, but he fell upon the one Newtonian law which remains fundamental to physics. Woods attempts to defend the Newtonian universe, yet no more recognises the fact than he does Newton’s laws.

But it was not Woods’ scientific pretensions that led us to review Reason in Revolt. Woods claimed, in his obituary to Ted Grant, that Reason in Revolt defends the fundamentals of Marxism. We strongly object. Woods supposes that dialectical materialism takes as axiomatic the Newtonian universe. He misrepresents 2,500 years of science and philosophy to support this mistake. He fails to grasp the dialectic between theory and experiment, and has little understanding of scientific method.

He calls on Hegel for support. Whereas Marx and Engels took Hegel’s dialectical idealism and stood it on its feet, creating what became known as dialectical materialism, Woods spins it around to get metaphysical idealism. He reverses Hegel’s rejection of the spurious infinite universe, embracing this undialectical ideal in the name of Marxism. Marx and Engels abandoned Hegel’s system and kept his dialectical method. Woods defends Newtonian absolute space and time, which Hegel incorporates into his Absolute Idea, and abandons Hegel’s dialectical method which contradicts it.

Woods misrepresents both Hegel and Engels. Engels explicitly praised Kant’s insight into the coming into being of our universe, yet Woods makes no mention of it. He attempts to turn Engels’ understanding of science into a timeless dogma, and ignores Engels’ dialectical method, which points clearly to the conclusion that our universe must have come into being and will pass away.

We have attempted to present an alternative to the reader, by discussing the historical development of ideas about the universe, which led eventually to the astounding and counter-intuitive theories of today: Einstein’s relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Big Bang. Marxism does not have the tools to evaluate these sciences independently of a full comprehension of the scientific evidence, incomplete as it always will be, purely on the strength of its philosophical method. Yet Woods supposes that dialectical materialism has some a priori ability to judge the correctness of a science, expressing an affinity for Popper, who thought that his method of falsification could do the same.

We have pointed to a more dialectical understanding of the nature of science, and briefly outlined the undoubtedly dialectical elements in modern scientific theories about the universe. Science will continue to develop and change, as will our understanding of the universe. In the last century, however, we have witnessed several remarkable revolutions in science, overturning centuries-old paradigms. Some may find them shocking and disturbing – just as shocking no doubt, as the ancient Ionians found the philosophy of Anaximander, who two-and-a-half millennia ago said the world had come into existence in a ball of fire and would eventually pass away. But these revolutions, which have opened such vast, unexplored horizons – even of universes beyond our universe – must not tempt us into false notions of the infinite.