At The Metagalactic Centre III

(ii) If an inanimate object occupies the metagalactic centre at the moment of the cosmic collision:

" '...then the two universes will reform exactly as they did after the explosion of the monobloc, and their histories will repeat themselves very closely.' " (Blish, Cities In Flight, London, 1981, p. 578)

So they will be destroyed but will immediately reform? This is one of the possibilities if the centre is empty for the collision. (See (i) in previous post.) Everyone will die in the destruction but they will die in any of these eventualities in any case.

(iii) If the centre is occupied by a human being, then two possibilities are suggested. First:

" '...we can put our imprint on the future of both universes...' " (p. 578)

Secondly, however, when this possibility is spelled out further, it changes from influencing two universes to creating one universe! Each survivor:

" '...has available...any of the infinitely many different sets of dimensions of Hilbert space. Each one of us that makes that crossing may in a few micro-seconds start a universe of his own, with a fate wholly unpredictable from history.'

" 'But...he will die in the process. The stuffs and energies of him become the monobloc of his universe.'" (p.  578)

To become a new universe is not to influence the future of two already existing universes. So I do find this discussion rather confusing.

In the previous volumes, he were told what the Mayor, the city manager and a few of their colleagues did while flying New York around the galaxy but were told little or nothing about the population of the city. In this volume, we learn nothing about the entire population of the planet, He. What do they think about the coming catastrophe and how do they feel about their planet flying through the darkness of intergalactic space instead of remaining in orbit around a star?

The text tells us that the planet flew:

"...toward that place where the Will had given birth to the Idea, and there had been light." (p. 577)

- but the rest of the text is non-theistic so this passage must be understood as describing the monobloc in terms of a, highly abstract, myth.

At The Metagalactic Centre II

In James Blish's The Triumph Of Time, why do the Hevians and their New Earthmen companions want to move the planet He to the metagalactic centre before the two universes collide?

I must ask some questions that are not raised in the text. First, is there an exact one to one correspondence between the two universes? Secondly, if yes, then does it follow that, when He occupies the centre of the matter universe, an anti-He will occupy the centre of the anti-matter universe? If that were the case, then the Hes would mutually annihilate simultaneously with the universes so that nothing would have been gained by travelling from the Greater Magellanic Cloud to the metagalactic centre.

Although this question is not posed in these terms, it does seem to be clear that no one to one correspondence is assumed:

" 'What we will be trading on is the chance - only a slight chance but it exists - that this neutral zone coincides with such a zone in the anti-matter universe, and that at the moment of annihilation the two neutral zones, the two dead centers, will become common and will outlast the destruction by a significant instant.' " (Cities In Flight, London, 1981, p. 577)

- although:

"This single many-barbed burr of a datum...was also sufficient in itself to endorse the existence of an entire second universe of anti-matter, congruent point for point with the universe of experience of normal matter..." (p. 513) (my emphasis)

The metagalactic centre is a "...neutral zone..." because it:

" '...is stress-free and in stasis because all the stresses cancel each other out, being equidistant. There, one might effect great changes with relatively small expenditures of power.' " (p. 577)

Because the metagalactic centre is as featureless as the rest of intergalactic space, complex instrumentation is necessary to detect it. Because the centre is stress free, instruments there will work at peak efficiency. Approaching the centre, needles recording external stresses fall while those recording outputs of equipment rise. On arrival, input meters operating at peak efficiency but detecting no incoming signals instead detect the signals generated by their own functioning. This is a sign that the centre has been reached.

If the two universes, even without a one to one correspondence, are counterparts differing only in electrical charge, then surely there is considerably more than "...a slight chance..." that there are corresponding neutral zones? But, in any case, what happens if there is a common neutral zone and if it is occupied at and immediately after the moment of cosmic collision?

In fact, three possibilities are considered:

(i) that the neutral zone is empty at the collision;
(ii) that it is occupied by an inanimate object;
(iii) that is occupied by a survivor with volition and maneuverability.

(i) Two answers are given here. One is that " '...history repeats itself. The universe is born again...' " and continues towards heat-death for matter and monobloc for anti-matter (p. 579). This does not sound like destruction to me? It is even suggested that the protagonists might live as before although in the anti-matter universe and without being able to tell the difference. I am not sure whether this means that they would repeat their previous lives exactly, thus with no memory of having lived before, or simply that they would live again but without being able to tell that they were now composed of anti-matter? In any case, this possibility is dismissed as unlikely. The more probable result is simply reduction of all matter to neutrons " '...and a re-birth of both universes from the primordial ylem.' " (p. 579)

" 'The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons from which all else emerged...Ylem in cosmogony is like "zero" in mathematics - something so old and so fundamental that it would never occur to you that somebody had to invent it.' " (p. 579)

I am not sure about that. I understand that the mathematical zero is a far more sophisticated concept that the straightforward "one, two, three..." of counting visible objects. The Romans had no symbol for zero. The Indians significantly contributed so-called Arabic numerals with the decimal point and the zero symbol. Surely the cosmological equivalent of zero would be not a flux of neutrons but empty space and/or mere nothing?

It is taking much longer to analyse this section of The Triumph Of Time than I had anticipated. The characters keep mentioning what seem to be mutually incompatible hypotheses from:

" 'Nothing less,' Retma said evenly, 'than the imminent coming to an end of time itself.' " (p. 505)

to:

" Retma shrugged. 'Then...history repeats itself. The universe is born again...' " (p. 579)

I have so far discussed only (i) and must leave (ii) and (iii) until a later post - but this does at least seem to enumerate all the possibilities. (To be continued.)

At The Metagalactic Centre I

I have not read precisely this account of the universe anywhere else. In James Blish's The Triumph Of Time/A Clash Of Cymbals:

planets (of course) orbit around stars;
stars form spiral arms around the centre of the galaxy;
galaxies form spiral arms around the centre of a metagalaxy;
metagalaxies form spiral arms around the metagalactic centre, from which the monobloc exploded.

Thus, according to this account, there is only one stage of organisation above galaxies: metagalaxies. In Tau Zero, also about intergalactic travel, Poul Anderson has "clans" of "families" of galaxies, although these terms are coined for convenience by the intergalactic travellers who are encountering and traversing these groupings for the first time. Anderson mentions neither spiral arms above the level of galaxy nor any centre from which the universe is expanding.

Although "galactic centre" means the centre of a galaxy, "metagalactic centre" means the centre not of a metagalaxy but of all metagalaxies.

To continue summarising Blish's account:

the system of metagalaxies is a single four dimensional continuum and has an anti-matter counterpart which is a second four dimensional continuum separated from the first by extra dimensions;
in fact, a total of sixteen dimensions is suggested.

Thus, the consistent theme here is "from big to bigger": from planetary systems to galaxies to metagalaxies to one continuum to a multi-dimensional system encompassing at least two comparable continua.

Why do the Hevians and their New Earthmen companions want to move the planet He to the metagalactic centre before the two universes collide? (To be continued.)

Microcosm And Macrocosm

In James Blish's The Triumph Of Time/A Clash Of Cymbals, the Hevians and New Earthmen must send a probe, called Object 4101-Alephnull, into the anti-matter universe in order to measure its energy level and thus to predict the date of the cosmic collision.

The probe, like the first sputnik, Object 1957-a, is named after the year in which it was launched. This date was revised from 4001 to 4101 in later editions of the novel but, through an oversight, the title of the relevant chapter was not revised accordingly. Thus, in Cities In Flight (London, 1981), Object 4101-Alephnull is launched in CHAPTER SIX: Object 4001-Alephnull.

A mere additional century was in no way sufficient to overcome the chronological discrepancy between Volume III, Earthman, Come Home, which implies thousands of years of interstellar flight, and Volume IV, The Triumph Of Time, in which Blish echoed Bishop Ussher's 4004 BC cosmic creation date with his 4004 AD cosmic collision date.

The probe, "...a stable, electrically neutral, massless plasmoid...," has to be constructed, by what would now be called nanotechnology, from zero-spin particles and massless, chargeless neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs that are held inside an invisible, rotation- and magnetic spin-controlling spindizzy field which, made visible by a jet of smoke, appears to observers as a six foot bubble containing concentrations of electron gas, stripped nuclei, thermal neutrons and free radicals, with, at its center, a minute crystal of anti-salt (pp. 554-555). Blish makes the point that the particles are unvisualizable because they do not correspond to any macroscopic experience.

Nevertheless, the characters in Blish's Story, "Nor Iron Bars," do see an electron, probably by de Broglie waves. Gordon Arpe's interstellar drive is meant to repel a spaceship from Earth faster than light by giving it negative mass. However, negative mass can exist only in the microcosm so the ship collapses down to inside a carbon atom of a nearby object. Arpe and a companion land on an electron whose position is uncertain so that its surface resembles a waist-deep swirling substance. Further, the ship with negative mass must be echoed by an electron elsewhere in the universe. Switching of the drive restores positive mass, thus returning the ship to the macrocosm in that other part of the universe. And that is how the Arpe drive works. Unfortunately, this idea was not explored any further. The next story in that series involves a different kind of interstellar drive. And Blish said in conversation that Arpe's experiences, bizarre though they were, did not correspond to the real microcosm.

Meanwhile, The Triumph Of Time takes us back from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, this novel addresses the question: if stars are grouped into galaxies, then what are galaxies grouped into? - although the answer given here is slightly different. The "inner metagalaxy," comprising about fifty galaxies, including the Milky Way and the Andromeda, revolves "...in spiral arms around a common center of density..." (p. 576) Such metagalaxies form spiral arms around the metagalactic center from which the Saturn-sized monobloc had exploded.

Flying their planet to the metagalactic center, the Hevians and their companions occasionally glimpse a distant galaxy but do not see any of the "...tenuous bridges of stars which connected the galaxies..." (p. 577). Poul Anderson in World Without Stars describes isolated red dwarfs in intergalactic space though not any "...bridges of stars..." Blish hoped to find a way to work the bridges into a story although there was the problem that traveling between galaxies by these bridges would not be any quicker than traveling direct. 

Religion In Cities In Flight

Pre-Okie period: the Believers, sort of Evangelical Jehovah's Witnesses;
Okie period: an inchoate paganism of "the gods of all stars";
Post-Okie period: the Warriors of God, led by Jorn the Apostle.

The tone of James Blish's Cities In Flight series is entirely secular. Readers and sympathetic characters alike regard the Believers and the Warriors as Fundamentalist fanatics. The end of the universe is a scientific problem and is addressed as adequately as it can be by scientists, philosophers and administrators, not by priests or prophets.

The pragmatist Mayor Amalfi realises that:

"...it would be fatal to expect [Jorn] to panic if he got a Dirac-'cast claiming to be from Satan -" (James Blish, A Clash Of Cymbals, London, 1959, p. 119)

It is difficult while reading that to remember that Blish's other main end of the world scenario, Black Easter/The Day After Judgement, is not science fiction (sf) but fantasy and does involve a personal appearance and speech by Satan himself, the Satan that was seen by Dante. That fantasy is part of a Trilogy that addresses the question of whether the desire for secular knowledge is evil from a spiritual/supernaturalist point of view. In fact, when we read Blish's secularist sf, theological issues recede.

I question two premises of The Triumph Of Time. Has there been enough time for planetary populations of farmers to grow up in the Greater Magellanic Cloud? And would they so quickly lose a scientific perspective that a Fundamentalism could become a military force?

The Augustinian Age

"...in a universe of normal entropy, the monobloc is intolerable and must explode; in a universe of negative entropy, the heat-death is intolerable and must condense." (James Blish, The Triumph Of Time, London, 1981, pp. 510-511)

So, if entropy periodically reverses, can each universe cyclically become the other?

"And out of one universe might come the other..." (p. 510)

However, Blish immediately seems to contradict this:

"What the visible, tangible universe had been like before the monobloc was, however, agreed to be forever unknowable." (p. 511)

He quotes St Augustine's joke. What was God doing before he created the universe? He was creating a Hell for people blasphemous enough to ask such questions! The joke has a point. If our universe is the first, then, by definition, there cannot be any record of anything previous to it. Again, if our universe is not the first but if the process of cosmic destruction and re-creation involved the reduction of mass and energy to their most basic components, then there cannot be any organised state of mass or energy that would constitute a record of previous cosmic states. So, although there are no questions that should not be asked, maybe there really are some that cannot be answered?

But we can still speculate that, before the monobloc, there was a negative entropy universe winding down.

I have not reread this far yet but, at some point, Blish's characters posit that each of them might be able to survive the cosmic collision in an isolated, sensorially deprived, bodiless form. This strikes me as both impossible and undesirable. Then they seem to forgot this idea and plan for something else. Some of the discussion is not meant to be understood by the lay reader. It simply shows us that those of the characters who are scientists are grappling with their task. But there are other times, like this, when the discussion seems to me to be internally inconsistent.

Another example: the Hevians first think that continuous creation seems to prove divine creation although Fred Hoyle, who originally postulated it, did not think that. However, the Hevians have a history of religious speculation so it is comprehensible that they would see it that way.

The Structures Of Flandry And Okies

Original Series
Flandry: seven stories, collected in two volumes.
Okies: four stories, collected in one volume; Okie civilisation ends in the third so the fourth is an aftermath.

Works Written Later But Set Earlier
Flandry: three "Young Flandry" novels.
Okies: one prequel and one juvenile novel.

Works Set Later
Flandry: two later Flandry novels; one novel about his daughter; four works set after the Empire = one novel + one collection(?)
Okies: one novel about the end of the universe.

Related Works
Flandry: the earlier Technic History.
Okies: other series with related ideas.

Qualitatively though not quantitatively comparable.