17th Century Woodcut by Carlo Antonio Manzini
The James Webb Space Telescope
(It's Currently About 1.5 Million Kilometers from Earth)
In “Probability and Proliferation,” the third of the four principal chapters of which his 2019 critical study Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe is comprised, Bjørn Ekeberg makes the speculative claim—not the sort of claim of which he is most fond!—that the great pantheistic-materialist philosopher and lens-crafter Spinoza would likely argue that the universe of modern science and cosmology is not a real being but a metaphysical one, a being of reason, though this is not to say that it is thus as a whole without legitimacy. Ekeberg does not know that contemporary cosmologists have provided us with a false cosmic world-picture because our neurology limits what we can know about the visible and invisible worlds around us. What he argues, in an extremely convincing manner, is that this cosmic world-picture is fundamentally dubious and assuredly an invention or a construction, though hardly one cobbled together out of nothing. The basic problem may appear to be one of epistemology. For Spinoza, “The price to pay for reason is constitutive uncertainty.” Both Spinoza, who operated in the context of 17th century Scholasticism, and Henri Bergson, a key French philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a popular lecturer and public figure who taught none other than ‘Pataphysics innovator Alfred Jarry, are, as Ekeberg emphasizes, thinkers who would tend to pursue “a perspective on the modern sciences in terms of their action in the world rather than their knowledge claims about it." Ekeberg has, near the beginning of the book, already assured us that Heidegger discerned in physics, in its move from Newton to the atomic age, a fundamental loss of its basis in empiricism and phenomenology, having come to suppose a suprasensory order, or rather physics and physicists have been compelled to insist that their toil and inquiry be conducted under the sun of a universe knowable in its “object-ness” and by virtue of “enframing” intervention. Mankind as the dispassionate and strategically displaced measure of all things…at an ungodly angle and in terrible light. Metaphysical Experiments is a book that addresses cosmology and disparate disciplines within physics in an academic social sciences/humanities mode. While the history of physics from Galileo to the James Webb Space Telescope is analyzed with rigour and in depth, the history of philosophy is equally pertinent here, and it is Ekeberg’s repeated contention that when philosophy and physics approach their limit situations in any number of ways, this is the point at which questions of metaphysics and constructivist intervention routinely assert themselves, whether we would prefer to acknowledge them or not. Always it is a matter of metaphysics for Ekeberg, seldom if ever ontology.
The Introduction begins with an epigraph from Émile Meyerson: “Metaphysics penetrates all science, for the very simple reason that it is contained in its point of departure.” Metaphysics makes especial sense in a context which builds to a critical assessment of contemporary cosmology and the groundlessness of its projections. “The question of the nature of the universe is metaphysical in the sense that it lies at the very limit of scientific inquiry, where what we really know is not so easily distinguished from what we think we know, believe we know, and would like to believe.” Metaphysical Experiments begins considering the aforementioned James Webb Space Telescope, a massively over-budget telescope which is not in any traditional sense an actual telescope. “What understanding of the universe determines [the telescope’s] design, its questions, its parameters?” The James Webb Space Telescope is more than a little like the famous Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in the sense that both work by translating data into “computerized renderings” on large digital monitors. What a particle accelerator tells you in data, the events it prioritizes, is based on the vast majority of information being filtered out because that’s what the tech has been told to do. This is experimentation as largely predetermined fishing expedition. “Here, as in all scientific ventures, theory and experiment mutually determine each another,” meaning that even if all the complicated tech performs satisfactorily there is still “the risk of paradigm failure,” although it must be said that it isn’t altogether likely such a thing would happen, the expensive tech not having been built and sent out to accomplish a crisis or chronoclasm in the field of study that generated it and which hopes to receive ongoing funding based upon experimental successes. The experimental scientist cannot outrun their own “tacit assumptions, unquestioned principles, hidden implications, overreaching simplifications, and other forms of delimitations.” Because physics has increasingly dealt with principles not available to direct empirical scrutiny or laboratory exploration, it has become “the only science in which theoretical laws are treated as more fundamental than phenomenological ones.”
A Standard Model or Grand Unified Theory of Physics (or GUT) is gonna need to get real fancy if it doesn’t want to topple fast like a straw man. The emergence of these kinds of problems are what ruined Albert Einstein’s peace of mind in later years. Indeed, “the quest is on, and has been going on for decades, engaging thousands of physicists in work on theories that can unite the Standard Model with gravity and merge the quantum physics of atomic structures with the order of stars and galaxies.” Although mostly what the distinct fields of physics find are discontinuities and irregularities, the forking disciplines themselves are still operating under the presumption that there is something like a road to total cosmological unification, a Theory of Everything itself analogous to René Descartes’s dream of a mathesis universalis. We have something like a stark formulation of opposing models: Galileo, kinematics, identity, autology of excluded middle vs. Descartes, dynamics, principle of reason (force), and autology of included middle. Descartes’ metaphysics requires God for instrumental (autological) purposes in a way that Galileo and Newton, beginning with the supposition of an abstract void, do not. From the Galilean-Newtonian void we see the development of future physicists, like Joseph-Louis Lagrange and his various descendants, “not only theoretical physicists but economists and other modelers,” pursuing “a deceptive definition of mechanics as a thoroughly independent and neutral model, useful for generalization across problems and disciplines.” When you keep fudging the numbers eventually you can no longer make them out. Here much begins to accelerate, perhaps especially tensions and/or exclusions between the aleatory/stochastic element of statistical probability and the more purely epistemological domain, generally a matter of coherent, determinable causal delineation, and always reminding yourself that you know impossibly little. Aleatory probability subtracts the autological, the principle of reason, and mobilized generative forces, fielding a kind of randomness of situated identities and making calculations about them for shits and giggles. It happens in multiple domains and persists to this day. Think of currency and commodities speculation, social media and algorithms. In the 19th century, the fundamental substance of atmospheric ether was invented in order to perform a binding autological function for people, map, and territory, making mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics actually work and bringing Descartes's God in through the back door without so much as a how-dee-doo.
Increasingly what the benevolent systems administrator in the sky sees when he looks down upon us from his puffy aquamarine cloud are networks, webs, and what Ekeberg calls “hypologic,” whereby the intercession of a governing axiomatic introduces a new arbitrary regulatory authority, not unlike how the month of January begins our year because a powerful Roman enamoured of Janus once insisted this be the case. Who’d have called the longevity on that baby?! The hypological posits “something as under itself, in the manner of a framework, established through the retroactive unfolding of a transformation that makes its terms self-evident.” The hypological framing begins to truly operate when the governing axiomatic is repressed or naturalized/neutralized such that we participate in an unconscious framework which we never for a moment imagine to be an invented metaphysical conditionality and specialized relativity in is own right. For our metaphysical world-picture to survive—and to continue to win funding!—we have had to approach total ignorance of the nature of our own work. Einstein’s insistence that the speed of light is constant is not empirically verifiable, but rather hypologically axiomatic. And then a new hypological intercessor comes upon the scene, the singularity and black holes which swallow whole the unreconciled mathematical flotsam, though actual black holes cannot be empirically verified in any way we know.
If Spinoza and Bergson would place scientists within the world rather than outside of it where they can preside juridicially over truth claims with gavel and gown, this already suggests politics. But it goes further than that. The rise of a new cosmology in the 20th century is concurrent with a physics that has been appropriated by the war industry and which has essentially abandoned any explicit connection to metaphysical considerations, seeking instead to negate evidence of the conditional nature of the epistemic world frame. [Academia is like the Central Intelligence Agency.] It’s a context in which Hannah Arendt is presented by Ekeberg as figuring centrally. How does the whole banal evildoer picture show play? The big bang as theory follows quickly on the heels of the atomic bomb, a boon to burgeoning nuclear science sector. Let us just look at Albert Einstein making claims about the universe: “from the standpoint of the theory of relativity…,” or “it is more satisfying to…,” or “possible only if….” This looks an awful lot like a mind formidable in its reasoning capabilities chomping at the bit of constitutive uncertainty! You can call it the scientific method or ontology instead of metaphysics, but you are nevertheless merely playing a game you made up and that you keep making up as you go.
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubric, 1968)
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