Don Lago        

This unusual essay explores the fact that a major theory of astronomy was inspired by a horror movie. I’ve published three books of creative nonfiction, including On the Viking Trail: Travels in Scandinavian America (University of Iowa Press) and Starchild: The Human Meanings of the Big Bang Cosmos (Plain View Press). My essays exploring nature and science have appeared for nearly 30 years in national magazines, including Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, Orion, Earth, Air and Space Smithsonian, Antioch Review, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Isotope, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many more, and they’ve won several awards and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Dead of Night

        
            To answer the unending mystery of human origins and human identity, humans have created thousands of creation myths.  In creating these myths, humans have drawn upon many sources: the night sky, the sun, the weather, the seasons, the life cycles of plants, the behavior of animals.  Humans have drawn upon our own experiences: our lifecycle, our heroic adventures, our tribal histories, our hopes and fears, our imagination, and our artworks.  Creation myths have been turned into petroglyphs, paintings, music, poetry, and plays, and sometimes such artworks have further influenced our image of our creation.  The cosmological images of Milton, Dante, Michelangelo, and Handel became lasting, powerful metaphors.  It shouldn't be surprising, then, that in a century when the world's most popular art form was the movies, movies would influence creation myths—even creation myths in the form of mathematically detailed scientific theories.  One of the most prominent astronomical theories of the twentieth century was inspired by a movie.
            In 1946 the idea of the expanding universe was barely twenty-five years old, and many astronomers still found it too incredible to believe.  Even a daring, imaginative theorist like Albert Einstein had resisted the idea of an expanding universe, which seemed less logical than an eternal, unchanging universe.  Even Edwin Hubble, who had developed the evidence for an expanding universe, had seemed timid about the idea.  In the years after Hubble announced his findings, other astronomers with stronger backgrounds in physics and mathematics gave the expanding universe a well-defined beginning: a super-dense, super-hot, element-cooking, explosion-like event—the Big Bang.  The phrase "Big Bang" was coined on a 1949 BBC radio broadcast by astronomer Fred Hoyle, who used the name mockingly, trying to make the idea sound silly.  Three years before—after seeing a movie—Hoyle and two colleagues had developed the main opposition theory to the Big Bang universe.
            Hoyle admitted that the galaxies were flying outward, but he was offended by the idea that the universe had an abrupt beginning, that the laws of physics had sprung into existence at an arbitrary moment, laws loaded with arbitrary yet perfect starting conditions.  You could avoid this problem by positing an eternal universe, but how could you reconcile an eternal universe with an expanding universe?  If the universe had been expanding forever, it should have emptied itself out, but this wasn't what we saw in the sky.
            Hoyle was pondering such questions one night in 1946 when he and fellow young British astronomers Thomas Gold and Frank Bondi went to the movie theater to see Dead of Night.  Even a year previously, Dead of Night could not have been made in Britain.  During the gloomy years of World War Two Britain had a production code that prohibited the making of gloomy movies; movies were supposed to be uplifting.  But after years of real-life destruction, depravation, and death, British movies had come to seem insultingly unreal and fluffy.  Now even the Ealing Studios, the master of genteel movies, was ready to rebound far in the opposite direction.  Ealing Studios assigned four of its leading directors and a dozen of its leading actors to make what became a classic horror movie. 
            Dead of Night begins with an architect arriving at a country house, in which a small group of people are gathered.  The architect has a powerful déjà vu feeling that he has lived this moment before.  He tells the group that he has met them all before, in a dream.  They dismiss this, but then they take turns relating their own twilight-zone experiences.  A race car driver recalls how a premonition saved him from boarding a bus that soon plunged off a bridge.  A teen girl recalls a children's party in an old mansion, in which she met a child who turned out to be a ghost.  A couple tells how they bought an antique mirror that had belonged to a wife-strangler/suicide, and soon the husband was trapped in the mirror's curse and tried to strangle his wife, until she broke the mirror.  The host tells how a golfer friend was haunted by his best friend's ghost.  A psychiatrist tells how he treated a famous ventriloquist who insisted that his dummy came alive and goaded him to murder.  This story triggers the architect to recall that in his dream he ends up strangling the psychiatrist—and suddenly the architect loses control and feels compelled to strangle the psychiatrist.  This scene dissolves into a nightmare made up of elements of all five stories, but then the phone rings and the architect wakes up in his own bed at home.  He declares that he's had his awful nightmare yet again.  What a relief it is for him to drive off to the countryside.  He arrives at a country house, which seems disturbingly familiar.  The movie ends with the exact same arrival scene with which it began, but now the screen says "The End."
            Hoyle, Gold, and Bondi were struck by the metaphorical possibilities of Dead of Night.  The characters in the movie experienced their universe as a one-way progress, when actually they were part of a loop, a loop that could have been going on forever.  Hoyle, Gold, and Bondi wondered if the universe might work in the same way.  They came up with the idea that the expanding universe didn't require a beginning.  The creation of matter didn't require a Big Bang, but could happen in tiny doses, continuously, throughout space.  Then matter coalesced into galaxies and flew outward.  The continuous creation of matter was no more mysterious than the creation of matter in the Big Bang—actually less mysterious, for it avoided a beginning.
            For twenty years Hoyle's "Steady State" cosmology remained a viable alternative to Big Bang cosmology.  Advocates of Big Bang cosmology couldn't find any clinching proof for it, and in fact one of their most important predictions, that all the elements were forged in the Big Bang, ended up failing.  Trying to bolster his Steady State theory, Hoyle and other colleagues worked out proof that almost all the elements could be forged inside stars, a finding that remains a major pillar of astronomy.  Yet in 1965 astronomers discovered that all space was filled with a uniform microwave radiation, a precise fit for the Big Bang theory.  The Steady State theory soon faded away.
            Some historians of astronomy don't seem to like Hoyle's persistent claim that the Steady State cosmology was inspired by Dead of Night.  Scientific theories are supposed to derive from evidence and logic, not from pop culture, certainly not from horror movies.  Yet if Isaac Newton had lived in the age of movies, he could have wondered about an apple bonking Harpo Marx on the head.  Today movie lore is infiltrating into constellation lore: a star cluster long called the "Owl Cluster," with two bright stars for owl eyes, is now being called the "E. T. Cluster" by young astronomers.   Fred Hoyle was quite at home in the world of pop culture.  He also became famous as a science fiction novelist, and he helped the BBC turn his ideas into TV movies.  In 1960 Hoyle visited an acting school to try to find a young, unknown actress to star in the BBC production of his A for Andromeda, and he discovered Julie Christie, who only five years later won an Oscar for best actress.  Hoyle could appreciate not just a pretty face, but also the powerful ideas and metaphors in some movies.
            Dead of Night has some good company among films that became famous as metaphors, even scientific metaphors.  When Fermilab director Leon Lederman accepted the Nobel Prize for physics in 1988, the first sentence of his acceptance speech included the phrase "Rashomon-like."  His audience included a wide range of people—scientists, novelists, royalty, politicians, media—yet Lederman trusted most of them to recognize the meaning of a once-obscure 1950 Japanese film.  The term "Rashomon effect" was adopted by psychologists to designate the confused, contradictory testimony of different witnesses.  For physicists, long baffled by how to witness quantum realities, the film Rashomon was a perfect metaphor for the uncertainties that even scientists couldn’t resolve.
            While Rashomon remained a highbrow metaphor, the movie Groundhog Day quickly became a widespread and versatile metaphor.  Buddhists were especially enthusiastic about Groundhog Day as a metaphor of reincarnation, of life repeating itself over and over until you got it right.  For astronomers, Groundhog Day fit the possibility that the universe might repeat itself, expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting, over and over again.  Groundhog Day may have owed some of its inspiration to Dead of Night, as both movies pivot around a bell waking up a man and starting the same day and same disturbing experiences all over again, though in Dead of Night the bell is a phone and in Groundhog Day the bell is an alarm clock.  Yet Groundhog Day offers an exit and a happy ending; Dead of Night ends with Sisyphean starkness.  Did it bother Fred Hoyle that his Steady State universe was based on a nightmare existence?
            What if Fred Hoyle hadn't seen Dead of Night that night?  Would he and his friends have come up with the Steady State theory anyway?  Or what if Hoyle had seen some other movie?  There are other movies with metaphorical possibilities, even cosmological metaphors.  Perhaps if Hoyle's theory-churning brain had mixed with some other metaphor, he would have come up with some other astronomical theory.  The possibilities are intriguing. 
            Here's my list of metaphor-pregnant movies and the astronomical theories they could have inspired:
            The Wizard of Oz:  Humans can enter black holes and leave again.
            The tornado, obviously, is a schematic black hole, highly warped and energetic space-time invading the ordinary, flat space-time called Kansas.  Dorothy and Toto are sucked into the black hole and—defying the laws of physics—remain intact.  Dorothy and Toto discover that the laws of physics work differently inside a black hole, somewhere over the spectrum.  For one thing, the people are shorter.  In the center of the village is a map of a spiral galaxy, colored yellow for the light of ordinary stars, showing the way out of the galactic-center black hole.  But it's a long, difficult, strange journey.  The black hole, wearing a black tornado hat, tries to keep Dorothy trapped.  Dorothy enters a forest of apple trees and obtains lots of wormholes, perhaps the key to emerging from the black hole.  Dorothy melts the black hole's gravity and returns home.  There's no Laplace like home.
            Sunset Boulevard:  Inside a black hole, time stands still.
            Inside her dark, shadowy mansion, a collapsed giant star lives entirely in the past.  It is always 1922 there.  Her ever-youthful, mere-light face flickers on the wall there every night.  She believes she is still "the greatest star of them all," with a vast audience, when actually she is completely invisible.  When she is told "You used to be big," she replies: "I am big; it's the telescopes that got small."  Her attraction traps a hapless human, who finds he cannot escape: "No one ever leaves a star; that's what makes someone a star."  After she shoots him, she stands in a black dress in the black night and looks up at the stars and says: "The stars are ageless, aren't they."  The warped space-time she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.  "Mr. Einstein, I'm ready for my close-up."
            Casablanca:  As time goes by, thermodynamic order increases.
            While most of the laws of physics are independent of time, working equally well whether time is going forward or backwards, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a one-way process, requiring disorder to increase.  But clearly this isn't the way things work inside Rick's Café.  The galaxy-like roulette wheel defies randomness by delivering the same winning number repeatedly, shockingly, shockingly.   Out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into Rick's.  The fundamental things don't decay, not even Paris, as time goes by, on that you can rely.  The characters Rick and Renault begin as corrupt, cynical, and degenerate, and in spite of themselves they become much more pure.
            A Star is Born:  Their glamour is an illusion.
            When Sirius B got off the bus from the intergalactic sticks, her real name was Ester Blodgett.  Polaris was Lech Polaski.  Arcturus was Arthur Finkelstein.  Capella was trying to hide the fact that she had broken the perfect symmetry of Busby Berkeley's Big Bang.  They were all drawn to the bright lights, dreaming of stardom, only to find the streets full of failures: dwarfs, gasbags, burned-out cases.  The brightest stars sometimes burned out fastest.  Many would-be stars ended up waiting on astronomical tables.
            Gaslight: The stars exist only to obtain jewels.
            Humans like to think that the universe exists for the love of them, to create them, when in fact the stars only aimed to create jewels like white dwarfs, neutron stars, or the elements of diamonds and gold.  The stars did create bright jewels of blue planets, of bird's eyes, of Ingrid Bergman's eyes.  But Ingrid Bergman's eyes grew troubled when the gas ran out and the lights began to fade away.  Stars would incinerate a planet full of life if it stood in the way of making a jewel.  A star would drive its own creatures mad.
            Groundhog Day/Rashomon:  Cosmic expansion is but one of many cycles.
            When the energy of the Big Bang is spent, gravity stops the expansion of the galaxies and they collapse and collide and trigger another Big Bang, another outward flight of galaxies.  Cosmic expansion repeats itself exactly.  Well, maybe not exactly.  The samurai reported that in one cycle, Bill Murray was awakened not by the song "I Got You, Babe," but by the song "The Beat Goes On."  The woodcutter claimed that in the cycle he saw, it wasn't a groundhog, but a badger.  The priest was excommunicated for claiming that he saw Buddha crucified not with a crown of thorns, but a crown of clover.  No report was received from the bandit, who seems to have vanished entirely.  Nothing at all could be verified, since no information could be passed reliably between cosmic cycles.
            Fantasia:  The universe is a multiverse.
            Walt Disney himself gave Edwin Hubble a tour of the Disney Studios, which was in the middle of creating Fantasia.  A thousand animators sat at drawing tables with thousands of images of Mickey Mouse, each one slightly different, and images of broomsticks multiplying and multiplying.  In one story, set to "Night on Bald Mountain," the lights would be ominous; in another story, set to "Ave Maria," the lights would be sacred.  The story set to "The Rite of Spring" would begin with a spiral galaxy spinning in space, which gives rise to Earth and life, then gives death to dinosaurs—at least in one universe.
            Stagecoach:  The universe isn't really expanding; the galaxies are only going around and around in circles.
            Stagecoach pretended to be an epic journey across the Southwest, but director John Ford was only sending the stagecoach around Monument Valley in circles, giving viewers the impression that the entire American West consisted of red-rock spires.  Ford posed saguaro cactus in Monument Valley, where they don't really grow.  The announced route of the stagecoach was, in fact, gibberish.  The story switched scenes impossibly, especially in the Apache-attack finale, which switched from Monument Valley one moment to a California dry lake the next.  A Stagecoach cosmology solves many problems: there's no Big Bang, no expansion, no dark energy, no collapse, only galaxy-wheels going in circles, leaving ghost images of themselves.  All the world's a stage.
            Wuthering Heights:  You can force a happy ending onto the universe.
            Fred Hoyle was born in the moors of Yorkshire, famous as the setting of Wuthering Heights.  Hoyle grew up only five miles from the village of Haworth, home of the Brontes.  Fred could almost see Haworth from his house.  Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights as a tragic love story, and director William Wyler filmed it in that spirit in 1939.  But when producer Sam Goldwyn saw the initial version, he insisted the film had to have a happier ending: Saturday night Main Street moviegoers wanted popcorn entertainment, not tragedies.  So what if the main characters were already dead?  So what if the actors had gone off to other projects?  Goldwyn hired doubles to pose as the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy, walking hand-in-hand into the clouds, happy ever after.  Wyler was appalled.  But Goldwyn's version—Heath Cliff Notes—has cast a lasting influence on perceptions of the novel.  Like Goldwyn, Fed Hoyle forced a happy, if ghostly, ending onto the expanding universe.
            Fahrenheit 451:  The universe remembers everything.
            In 1965, the same year that the discovery of the cosmic background radiation ruined Fred Hoyle's Steady State cosmology, his other discovery, Julie Christie, starred in Fahrenheit 451, in which great stories survive even when all paper records of them are burned up.  Even the Big Bang couldn't burn up all the memories of itself.
            Pinocchio:  When you wish upon a star, string theory wins by a nose.
            The movie begins by showing superstrings not as a mathematical abstraction, but as a visible force that animates real-world actions.  Superstrings unify everything.  Even the stars are a mass of vibrating strings, catgut strings playing a harmonious music.  But all the laws and harmonies of physics don't free humans from having to pull their own strings, from free will, wishes, mistakes, troubles, and the need for a conscience.
            The Wizard of Oz:  The universe is but a dream.
            All the galaxies, all the motions of all the planets, all the forms and troubles and odysseys of life—it was all an illusion.
            2001: A Space Odyssey:  The universe is but a computer program.
            Open the pod bay doors, Halley's Comet.  Open the pod bay doors, Helium.  Open the Palomar bay doors, Hale.
            City Lights: A blind universe came to see.
            When the theater lights went up at the end of the world premiere of City Lights, Charlie Chaplin looked at the man sitting next to him, who was wiping tears from his eyes.  The man was Albert Einstein.  These were the eyes that had seen a strange new universe in the motions of light.  Einstein was in Los Angeles to consult with Edwin Hubble, to look through Hubble's telescope atop Mt. Wilson, to come to terms with Hubble's evidence for an expanding universe.  Through most of the movie, Einstein laughed like a little boy.  But at the film's end, when the blind flower girl has her sight restored through the compassion and sacrifices of the Little Tramp, Einstein's eyes theorized that a blind universe could not only see, but see with compassion and tenderness.
            It's a Wonderful Life:  Under the sign of Capracorn, the stars intervene to uphold human lives.
            Near the end of his life, Frank Capra said he always regretted not having become an astronomer.  When he was studying engineering at Caltech around 1920, Capra would gaze up at Mt. Wilson, where Edwin Hubble was discovering the multi-galaxy, expanding universe.  Capra's imagination was fired by one of his teachers, British poet Alfred Noyes, who wrote a 300-page epic poem about astronomy, Watchers of the Sky, which started with the dedication of the Mt. Wilson telescope Hubble would use: "Over us, like some great cathedral dome/ the observatory loomed against the sky…"  Noyes also inspired Capra to take an interest in poetry and writing.  One of Noyes's lines became a personal credo for Capra: "There are times in every man's life when he glimpses the eternal."  Capra used this line in two of his movies, Lost Horizon and State of the Union.  In 1930, when Albert Einstein came to Caltech and Mt. Wilson to consult with Edwin Hubble, Caltech hired Capra to make a film documentary of Einstein's visit.  Capra accompanied Einstein and Hubble to the Mt. Wilson Observatory, where Einstein dutifully posed looking through the telescope, though it was daytime and there was nothing to see.  That night, Einstein looked through the telescope for real, looked at galaxies, which Einstein soon conceded were flying into space.  At the beginning of It's a Wonderful Life, Capra shows two galaxies blinking as they speak to one another.  The galaxies are supposed to be angels.  They are worried about one human, George Bailey, who is ready to commit suicide.  They send an angel to Earth to show George Bailey an alternative universe in which he'd never been born, to show him that his life really did matter.  Life itself mattered more than social status and personal events.   Yet Capra knew that galaxies aren't angels.  These were Edwin Hubble's galaxies, rushing away from us.  One of Capra's images even seems to be a pair of colliding galaxies, not a good symbol of cosmic support.  Yet perhaps the galaxies supported our lives in other ways.  Perhaps it didn't take an angel to show us the difference between life and nonexistence, and if existence was good, so were the galaxies that supported it.  Perhaps it didn't take an angel to make Frank Capra regret missing his alternative life as an astronomer.
            Plan 9 From Outer Space:  God is a hack director.
            There are 999 stars for every one with solid planets.  There are 999 planets for every one with life.  There are 999 planets with life for every one with intelligence.  At least 99.99% of planets with life have predation, disease, natural disasters, hunger, starvation, chaos, fear, misery, and death.  If civilizations don't destroy themselves, exploring stars and black holes finish them off.  And the gravestones are made of cardboard, and wobble.
            The Passion of Joan of Arc:  The fire of the Big Bang was the pure spirit of God.
            Joan had heard voices before, but it was only when she was engulfed by flames, by light, by the medium of vision, that she saw an overwhelming vision of the source of all being, a vision of the Big Bang as ecstasy, of starlight as nurture, of nucleosynthesis as the carefully planned and structured order of creation.  Only then, as the flames filled her cells with their power, did she finally get a feeling for the intensity of being.
            The Seventh Seal/ The Exorcist:  The source of life and death is a mystery.
            It's the same story, really.  Something in the order of existence supports life, and something in the order of existence doesn't.  The cosmic sources of creation and destruction, order and chaos, life and death, have always deeply baffled humans, baffled them into creating thousands of creation myths to offer answers.  In both movies, Max von Sydow stands on the shadowy boundary between light and darkness, order and chaos, and searches in the vagueness for a shape, a face, a meaning.  Death steps forward to take him.  Is it better that death is the devil, a force of intentional malevolence, against which humans might have the power of exorcism?  Or is it better that death is simply a void, powerless, an unanswering mystery?
            2001: A Space Odyssey:  The universe is a black box.
            Webster's Dictionary on "black box":  "A complicated electronic device that functions and is packaged as a unit and whose internal mechanism is usually hidden from or mysterious to the user.  Broadly: anything that has mysterious or unknown internal functions."  2001's black box was a wrapped package of space.  The black box came from space to Earth.  The black box made humans what they became.  When humans sought answers to the mysteries of the universe by traveling to the moon, they found a black box.  When the sun lined up with the black box like it did at Stonehenge, the black box sent a signal to Jupiter.  Humans flew to Jupiter and entered into all the secrets of the universe.  But even then, the universe remained a mystery.

            The movie theater on the town square had been abandoned for nearly forty years.  Once, the Ritz Theater was the most exciting thing in Marshfield, Missouri.  Merely the names of the stars on the well-lighted marquee made people feel connected to a more glamorous world, to stories larger than their own lives.  After watching a movie, people filed out onto the town square, where in the sky glowed even larger stars, the constellations in which humans had tried to find the largest stories of all. 
            But now the Ritz Theater was being renovated, to be opened as a venue for music, dances, receptions, anything.  It would be called the Starlight Theater.  On Saturday nights people will file out onto the town square, where now they'll see, on the courthouse lawn, a 1/4th-scale, stainless-steel replica of the Hubble Space Telescope.  When Edwin Hubble was growing up in Marshfield in the 1890s, it was well before the Ritz.  The most glamorous light show in town was the parade of constellations, of universe-deep stories.
            Since my last visit to Marshfield, the last old general retail business on the town square, a pharmacy and Hallmark card store, had closed.  Now there was little to draw people to the town square, unless you needed a bail bond or a haircut.  The parking places were mostly vacant, like many of the buildings and lots.  But someone was trying to start up a new business in the old pharmacy/Hallmark space.  It was a combined coffee house, used book store, art gallery, and card store—at least until they sold off all the leftover Hallmark cards.  They didn't appear to be off to a promising start: it was a Saturday afternoon, but I was half of the customers in the shop.  I browsed through the books. 
            I found only one book on astronomy.  It was a 52-year-old paperback, its cover now curled, tattered, and yellowed.  It was a first paperback edition of Fred Hoyle's Frontiers of Astronomy, in which Hoyle argued for his Steady State theory, argued against Edwin Hubble's Big Bang universe.  The front cover promised: "A revolutionary new view of the universe."  The back cover promised a book as important as Darwin's Origin of Species.  I bought it for fifty cents and settled down to read, trying not to crack the brittle binding.
            It was established beyond question by E. P. Hubble that the galaxies are great independent star systems similar to our own and lying at enormous distances from us.  In a few years Hubble took man's conception of the Universe from a localized region of a few thousand parsecs in dimensions out to unprecedented distances…The galaxies stretch away from us farther and farther into space and by the time they are lost to view…some 100 million or more of them are accounted for.

            I had a sudden hankering for one of the shop's cinnamon rolls.  The cinnamon roll spiraled outward, like a galaxy.
            Hoyle then related the redshift evidence and other evidence for an expanding universe.  However, this didn't necessarily mean that the universe had a beginning, that all matter was created in one event:
            One has to be particularly cautious in accepting this sort of view because the human brain apparently posseses a kink in these matters that only too readily leads to serious mistakes.  Europeans of the eighteenth century used to believe that the universe came into being about 6,000 years ago!

            Hoyle argued that matter was still being created today, as it always had been.  New matter popped into existence at a rate of "about one atom every century in a volume equal to the Empire State Building."
            The coffee house closed at 5 pm, so I moved over to the only restaurant left on the square, a Chinese restaurant with a $5.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, accompanied by the greatest hits of the 1950s.  I took a seat at the front window, with a good view of the Hubble Space Telescope.  At sunset the telescope glowed with a dull rainbow.  The telescope was pointed toward the sunset, at least this time of year.  The telescope pointed just over the roof of the First Home Savings Bank, which at the peak of its roof held a clock, a clock that was broken, perhaps broken for years or decades.
            Hoyle explained his main objection to the Big Bang theory—a phrase he didn't appear to use in the book: "The weakness of the superdense theory…is that it puts most of the important observational features of the Universe into its starting conditions—the reason for the expansion of the Universe, for its large scale uniformity, for the condensation of the galaxies…"   
            Had someone in Edwin Hubble's hometown, perhaps even someone who had known Edwin as a boy, become curious about his famous work and bought Fred Hoyle's book to learn more about it?
            Hoyle declared that in its arbitrary starting conditions the Big Bang theory:
            …is quite characteristic of the outlook of primitive peoples, who in attempting to explain the local behavior of the physical world are obligated in their ignorance of the laws of physics to have recourse to arbitrary starting conditions.  These are given credence by postulating the existence of gods, gods of the sea who determine the arbitrary starting conditions that control the motion of the sea, gods of the mountains, gods of the forests, of the air, of the seasons of the year, of the Sun, of the Moon, and so forth.  There is a strong hint that what modern man has tried to do with the universe is no better than what primitive man did with problems whose nature we now find simple…

            Edwin Hubble: Cave Man.
            I went back to the buffet for a second helping, and I discovered that the tray from which I had taken the final scoop of sweet-and-sour chicken was now brimming full again.  The buffet, at least, was a Steady State buffet.  But downtown Marshfield clearly wasn't a Steady State downtown, or it would be generating new stores to replace all the ones that had flown outward.  Edwin Hubble's hometown was a Big Bang cosmology, dominated by the gravity of the new Super Wal-Mart on the far edge of town.
            For ten years after it was published, Hoyle's Frontiers of Astronomy remained a cutting-edge book, but after the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, Hoyle was soon put on the shelf.  Even Julie Christie went on to better things than did Hoyle.  Movie theaters were a better place for pretty faces than they were for hatching cosmologies.
            After dinner, after Hoyle, after dark, I stepped out onto the town square, into the real starlight theater.  The Hubble Space Telescope watched the most distant galaxies on the front waves of the Big Bang.
            The old Carnegie library, now the county history museum, was dark.  Marshfield had the smallest Carnegie library ever built, a result of the friendship between Andrew Carnegie and the librarian.  On the opposite end of the spectrum of his generosity, Andrew Carnegie gave the funds to build Mt. Wilson Observatory, where Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe.  When I had visited the county museum this afternoon, I had studied a county map and identified the boundaries of the old Hubble orchards a few miles south of town.  The Hubbles had owned 640 acres, all of Section 22.  Conveniently, Highway A ran straight on both the north and south sides of the former Hubble land, but at the section lines where the highway crossed the Hubble boundaries, the highway bent into a diagonal.  This made it easy to recognize when you had crossed onto Hubble land, even in the dead of night.
            Of course I had to see the night sky from the place where Edwin Hubble had first seen it.  I drove down Highway A and diagonaled onto Hubble land.  I slowed down and watched for Old Orchard Road, a name that recalled its Hubble days, though the Hubbles were long gone, and so were their orchards, as far as I could see when I'd explored by daylight.  This afternoon I'd driven the boundaries of the Hubble land, and followed a few group driveways to where they dead-ended.  The Hubble land was now mostly hayfields and cattle fields, but there remained large areas of woods, which probably had been here when Edwin was setting up his telescope here.
            Old Orchard Road was a quiet, dark, gravel road.  I pulled to a stop and got out.  If I'd gone a bit further, I'd have come to a mailbox that bore the name "Kepler."  I looked at the stars, through a patchwork of clouds.  Even in clouds, humans insisted on seeing meaningful shapes and stories.  I saw constellations, the shapes and stories of ancient gods, heroes, and monsters.  I saw other shapes and stories that had come and gone, the shapes and stories of scientific theories.  I saw the Steady State universe, blasted apart by the Big Bang.
            I gazed into the Big Bang night, into the rush of galaxies.  From the pure energy of the Big Bang had sprung layer upon layer of shapes and stories, characters acting in ever new ways: particles, forces, atoms, gas clouds, stars, galaxies, black holes, planets, tectonic plates, volcanoes, oceans, oceans full of organic molecules, oceans full of life.  From the dead Earth and the dead night had sprung trilobites, fish, flowers, lizards, birds, bees, rabbits, lions and tigers and bears and—oh my—a creature who could see the whole rushing cosmos and feel the mystery of it and of themselves, creatures who would see themselves among the swarming lights and wonder if they were but shadows in a cave, or a dream, or a nightmare, or a glow in God's mind, or immortal spirits, or a star-projected flicker of order—shapes yearning for order, yearning for meaningful stories, flickering lights yearning to be real, solid, and steady.                 

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