Gould Is Great

I've been reading the late Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (1987). As much as it's about the recognition of "deep time" (e.g., the earth is 4 billion years old, but can you comprehend just how long that is?), it's about how we make sense of the world around us. His central theme is the distinction between "Time's Arrow," i.e. history, and "Time's Cycle," i.e., (for lack of a better word) universality. His larger (non-historical?) argument is that neither alone can best explain every aspect of the physical universe: we need both.

I've also begun Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's not bad — a fairly easy, usually enjoyable read, with a liberal dose of Brysonian humor (which I do enjoy). I think I would like it a bit more were it a Short Explanation of Nearly Everything, though. But it has been good for bringing to mind again some of the cosmological and physical questions about which I have occasionally wondered. Even better (or not, depending on what my future holds), it's raised some new ones, particularly in conjunction with the Gould book.

(N.B. I do not understand the difference between cosmologists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and so forth. So I use the words interchangeably, and I use them to mean roughly 'whichever are the most appropriate ones for the matter at hand.')

So. Physicists want a universal "theory of everything," a construct that will be the 'über-explanation of life, the universe, and everything.' To the extent that real-world variation blurs their data, they seem to find it annoying. They don't seem to be so interested in variation as in ideal relationship. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it seems. For instance, the distribution of matter in the universe seems such a great puzzle to cosmologists in a way that mildly astonishes me. Their working assumption seems to have been that the distribution of pre-E=mc² should have been uniform in the pre-Big-Bang singularity. As a theoretical simplification, I see nothing wrong with that. But they seem perplexed that the actual universe does not support that. Why is this? Does anything in the universe happen in precise accord with theoretical prediction? Besides, there's that photo of an A-bomb test shortly – very shortly – after detonation, showing a blast whose radius is still measureable in meters, looking almost like a bubble hovering over ground zero. It has this weird indentation on the camera-side "surface," almost as though the blast had encountered a sphere of something else and was flowing around it. (Sadly, I cannot find the image I have in mind, but this one is sort of like it.) Now, I know that a nuclear bomb is not the same as a big bang. But. Why should anyone expect that matter and energy should have been uniformly distributed at the Big Bang?

At all events, though, it wasn't, and that puzzles our universalizing physicists. And it makes me wonder, just how much of a role for history (in the sense of localized, possibly chaotic occurrences resulting from specific local conditions) could there be in cosmology? Maybe the cosmologists are way ahead of me on this, but if so, I haven't been seeing it in Scientific American.