This weekend, I had planned to read a new book, Rethinking Economics, about how “other ways of thinking about the economy” can be presented to university students who are forced to subsist on a diet of neo-classical economics (a misnomer if there ever was one—mainstream economics has far less in common with the classical school, or the triumvirate Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, than even Marxism). But after reading a few chapters of this book, I stopped and found that I was in the mood to read Stephen Hawking’s very readable A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.
The source of this mood was a scene in a movie, the Coen brothers’ Fargo, that I’d re-watched the night before with students. I have seen it maybe 100 times, and describe it as the work’s core or heart. The life of Fargo flows to and is pumped out of this sequence or system of images.
In this scene, a kidnapped woman and her two kidnappers are in a cabin in the middle of Nowhere, North Dakota. The first kidnapper is majorly man-spreading in a chair; the kidnapped woman, who has a bag over her head and is breathing like a frightened bird, is sitting in a wooden chair next to him and the kitchen stove. The second kidnapper, played by Steven “Funny Looking” Buscemi, is repeatedly hitting a TV that’s filled with static. He wants the set to clear up and catch a signal. But it just won’t. Whenever an image flickers on the screen, it’s almost immediately consumed by static. The first kidnapper stares into space. The kidnapped woman can only hear the banging of and cursing at the TV.
What is this scene about? Why is it Fargo‘s heart? Because, as NASA explains, the “cosmic microwave background blankets the universe and is responsible for a sizable amount of static on your television set.”
The TV is tuned to the birth of the universe. The characters are bathed in this birth, which is also called relic radiation. It was discovered in the 1960s with the help of pigeon poop—which is a story for another post. It is this piece of evidence that made the big bang hypothesis a theory. In 2013, scientists made a map of this background radiation and determined the age of the universe to be 13.8 billion years old (with an uncertainty of 59 million years).
Those who are familiar with the Coen brothers’ work will instantly see that this demented scene connects Fargo to another Coen brothers film, A Serious Man, which concerns a physics professor. In the former, the universe and its massive or eternal indifference is contrasted with the kidnapping (and thereby exposes its meaningless), and also with life, which is represented by the pregnant detective, Frances McDormand. The scene that follows the static/cosmic TV has the detective in bed watching a nature show on a functional TV—yes, a show about life, the only meaning that ever could and can be (0.48 to 1:14).
All of this was on my mind on Saturday morning while reading Stephen Hawking.
There was something in his book I wanted to find. It concerned a similarity between the birth of the universe and the singularity of a black hole. The closer we get to either, the more and more our understanding collapses. And so, as there is always a future the deeper we go into a black hole, there is always a past the closer we get to the Big Bang.
I eventually found the passage I was looking for. It’s in the sixth chapter on black holes. Hawking’s words:
There are some solutions of the equations of general relativity in which it is possible for our astronaut to see a naked singularity: he may be able to avoid hitting the singularity and instead fall through a “wormhole” and come out in another region of the universe. This would offer great possibilities for travel in space and time, but unfortunately it seems that these solutions may all be highly unstable; the least disturbance, such as the presence of an astronaut, may change them so that the astronaut could not see the singularity until he hit it and his time came to an end. In other words, the singularity would always lie in his future and never in his past. The strong version of the cosmic censorship hypothesis states that in a realistic solution, the singularities would always lie either entirely in the future (like the singularities of gravitational collapse) or entirely in the past (like the Big Bang).
Of course, this is a curious coincidence. And I considered (and one must always hear the etymological dub of that word when it is heard or written) this coincidence when I visited, around 2 p.m., my favorite bench in Rainier Playground (on my way there I ran into this paper’s former art director, Tracie Louck). A young man was shot and killed next to this bench last year. The meaningless murder has, as far I can tell, not been resolved, but the makeshift memorial (flowers, candles, toys, balloons, poems devoted to the young black victim) no longer covers half the bench. It’s now confined to an area between the bench and a public bin.
That Saturday I brought with me a mini-bottle of the bubbles (my tipple of choice for moments like this), and as I surreptitiously sipped the frothy fluid, I tried to think through all of this cosmic stuff. The relic radiation TV scene in Fargo, the infinity of the singularity, the structure of stars, the Chandrasekhar limit, the hints of the multiverse—is ours one universe in a froth of universes? If so, is that finally it? An effervescent eternity? A few days later, I learned on Twitter that a man is dead, a man is dead. The name of that man turned out to be the cosmologist who happened to be on my mind on that park bench, Stephen Hawking. May his ideas live for as long as this universe.
