Science Fiction
Modern science fiction, from Verne to the twenty-first century, opens up another chapter of imaginary astronomies, in which theories of astronomy and scientific cosmology are taken to the extreme. My old pupil Renato Giovannoli has written a fascinating book on science in science fiction,2 in which he examines not only all the (often highly convincing) pseudoscientific theories developed in stories about the future, but also shows how science in science fiction consists of a fairly uniform body of ideas and topoi that return from narrator to narrator, with subsequent improvements and developments. These include Verne’s cannons loaded with nitroglycerin and Wells’s antigravitational rooms; time travel and the various techniques for space navigation; traveling while in a state of hibernation; the spaceship as a small, ecologically self-sufficient world, with hydroponic gardening systems; and the infinite variations on the Langevin paradox, whereby the astronaut returns from a voyage in space at the speed of light, only to find himself ten years younger than his twin brother. Robert A. Heinlein, for example, in Time for the Stars, wrote a story involving twins who communicate telepathically during the journey, but Tullio Regge, in his Cronache dell’universo, noted that if telepathic messages arrive instantly, the answer from the brother in space ought to arrive before the question.
Another recurring theme is that of hyperspace, which Heinlein, in Starman Jones, describes using a scarf as a model: “Here’s Mars . . . Here’s Jupiter. To go from Mars to Jupiter you have to go from here to here . . . But suppose I fold [the scarf] so that Mars is on top of Jupiter? What’s to prevent us just stepping across?” So science fiction has been off in search of abnormal parts of the universe where space can fold back on itself. It has also used scientific hypotheses, such as Einstein-Rosen bridges, black holes, and space-time wormholes. Kurt Vonnegut, in The Sirens of Titan, theorized about “chrono-synclastic infundibula,” tunnels in hyperspace, while others have invented tachyons, particles that move faster than light.3
All the problems of time travel have been discussed—with and without the time traveler meeting his own double (including the famous grandfather paradox, whereby if we go back in time and kill our grandfather before he gets married, perhaps we would disappear at that moment)—using also the concepts developed by scientists, such as Hans Reichenbach in The Direction of Time, in relation to closed causal chains whereby, at least in the subatomic world, A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. Philip K. Dick, in Counter-Clock World, theorized about entropic inversion. The first part of Fredric Brown’s short story “The End” makes the supposition that time is a field and that the character Professor Jones has found a machine that reverses it. Jones presses the button, and the second part consists of the same words as the first, but in reverse order.
And finally, using the ancient theory of the infinity of worlds, writers have imagined parallel universes, so that Fredric Brown, in his novel What Mad Universe, reminds us that an infinite number of universes can exist at the same time: “There is, for example, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated, except that you—or the equivalent of you—are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones . . . There are an infinite number of permutations on that variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger, and one in which you have purple horns . . .” But on the logic of possible worlds, philosophers such as D. K. Lewis, in Counterfactuals (1973), has also stated, “I emphatically do not identify possible worlds in any way with respectable linguistic entities; I take them to be respectable entities in their own right. When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally . . . Our actual world is only one world among others . . . You believe in our actual world already. I ask you to believe in more things of that kind.”
How much separates science fiction from the science that preceded it or will come after it? Given that science fiction writers certainly read the work of scientists, how many scientists have nourished their imaginations reading science fiction? How many imaginary astronomies of science fiction are, or will remain, imaginary?
I have found a text by Thomas Aquinas (In primum sententiarum, distinction 8, article 1.2) in which he distinguishes two types of morphological relationship between cause and effect: cause can resemble effect, as a person resembles his portrait, or cause can be different from effect, as happens with fire that causes smoke; and in this second category of causes Aquinas includes the sun, which produces heat but is itself cold. We may laugh, since he reached this model from his theory of celestial spheres, but if one day cold fusion is taken seriously, might we have to reconsider this idea of Aquinas with more respect?
THE COLD SUN AND THE HOLLOW EARTH
Speaking of the cold sun, certain kinds of geo-astronomy have gone beyond the bounds of imagination into the realms of insanity, and yet seem to have influenced some very serious, though scarcely laudable, ideas and decisions.
In 1925, the theory of an Austrian pseudoscientist, Hanns Hörbiger, which was called the WEL, the Welteislehre or world ice theory, began to circulate within Nazi circles.4 This theory was to enjoy the support of men like Rosenberg and Himmler. But when Hitler rose to power Hörbiger was taken seriously even by some members of the scientific community, including people like Lenard, who had discovered x-rays with Röntgen.
According to Hörbiger, the cosmos was the theater of an eternal struggle between ice and fire, which produces not an evolution but an alternation of cycles, or epochs. An enormous hot body, millions of times larger than the sun, had once collided with an immense accumulation of cosmic ice. The mass of ice had penetrated into this incandescent body and, after having worked within it as a vapor for hundreds of millions of years, had made the whole thing explode. Various fragments were propelled into frozen space as well as into an intermediate zone, where they established the solar system. The moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are blocks of ice, and the Milky Way is a circle of ice—traditional astronomy purports that the Milky Way is made up of stars, but trick photography creates this illusion. Sunspots are produced by blocks of ice that break off from Jupiter.
The power of the original explosion is now diminishing and each planet does not revolve elliptically, as official science erroneously believes, but is (imperceptibly) spiraling toward the planet that most attracts it. At the end of the cycle in which we are living, the moon will move closer and closer to Earth, gradually raising the level of the oceans, submerging the tropics, and leaving only the highest mountains above water. The cosmic rays will become more powerful and will produce genetic mutations. In the end our own satellite will explode and be transformed into a ring of ice, water, and gas, which will then precipitate onto Earth. As the result of a complex series of events caused by the influence of Mars, Earth will also become a globe of ice and in the end will be reabsorbed by the sun. There will then be a new explosion and a new beginning. In the same way, the Earth in the past has already had, and then reabsorbed, three other satellites.
This cosmogony obviously presupposed a sort of eternal return, which harked back to ancient myths and epics. What Nazis today call “knowledge of tradition” was once again contrasted with the “false knowledge” of liberal and Jewish science. A glacial cosmogony, moreover, seemed very Nordic and Aryan. Pauwels and Bergier, in their Le matin des magiciens,5 attribute this great belief in the frozen origins of the cosmos to the faith, encouraged by Hitler, that their troops would cope very well in frozen Russia. But the authors also suggest that the need to test how cosmic ice would react had also delayed experiments on the V-1 flying bombs. Someone writing under the name of Elmar Brugg6 published a book in 1938 in which he paid tribute to Hörbiger as the twentieth-century Copernicus, claiming that the world ice theory explained the profound links between earthly events and cosmic forces and concluding that the silence on the part of democratic-Jewish science to Hörbiger’s ideas was a typical case of the conspiracy of mediocrity.
The fact that the Nazi party was surrounded by followers of magical, hermetic, and neo-Templaristic practices, such as the disciples of the Thule Gesellschaft founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, has already been amply studied.7
Another theory was taken seriously in Nazi circles: that the Earth is hollow and that we do not live outside, on the convex external crust, but inside, on the concave internal surface. This theory was first proposed in the early nineteenth century by a certain Captain John Cleves Symmes of Ohio, who wrote to various scientific societies, “To all the World: I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the
