Our chief consultant writes:

Science is a part of our culture. It’s not just that the products of science are all around us, in our hands and in our lives; no less, the discoveries of scientists are covered in the mainstream news media (not always well) and the concepts widely known (not always accurately). It’s clear enough by comparing our world with that of other cultures, say in the particular case of astronomy. We have cosmology (the Big Bang and all that); the ancient Greeks, a series of stories about gods and Titans.

Studying humans, even as amateurs, one seeks out similarities across cultures, and so we see cosmology equated to cosmic mythology. This leads to assertions like, “Cosmology is only our way of explaining the universe to ourselves, exactly the same way other cultures use other explanations.” This is just true enough to be seriously misleading.

The problem lies in the idea that all “cosmologies,” including in that term various myths, are equally “valid” and in context equally “true.” The implication is that our current culture somehow determines cosmology, so that a change in the way we live will result in a change in our cosmology. This may be true for mythologies and Marxists; it is not true for science, and the distinction is important.

Let me give an example. In the middle decades of the twentieth century there were two major viable theories in the field of cosmology: the Big Bang and Continuous Creation. The background to each is the observation that, on any large scale, galaxies are all moving away from each other: “the universe is expanding.” The Big Bang postulated a beginning to the universe at some definite time, an extremely hot and dense moment after which the temperature and density dropped continually to their present values. Continuous Creation postulated that the universe overall stays the same forever, the average density staying the same through the creation of new matter. (This is not as magical an idea as it may seem. Even stranger ones are being pursued today.) Without going into further details, I want to point out the extreme difference between them: one has a beginning, and the universe looks very different at different times; in the other, the universe is eternal and eternally the same.

The choice between them (the Big Bang won, as you know) was made on the basis of observations. Eventually it became impossible to reconcile Continuous Creation with better and deeper pictures of the universe. It was not made by deciding which was more congenial to the surrounding culture, or even to the culture of scientists.

Now, the culture in which science is embedded does have some kind of effect on it. The level of technology and organization available will limit what observations can be carried out. No culture before the second half of the twentieth century, for example, could have chosen between the Big Bang and Continuous Creation scientifically. Also, the creation of a new theory is carried out by people within a culture, so one can speculate that some influence operates there. But that is so individual and singular an act that it’s hard to argue for any kind of direct connection. More importantly, the history of science is littered with bright ideas that turned out not to be true.  Simply creating a theory is only the first step.

The difference between mythology and cosmology, as between anything else and science, lies in the testing.  If a theory conflicts with observation, it must be set aside, whatever the culture might prefer.