It is not true that developments in physics go ignored
by professional humanists or by the common man. The basic
facts get to us all and frame the way we think and even,
in this instance of the fictional Martin Fairweather, feel.
The picture physics paints of the material universe is arresting
enough to make the newspapers but far from flattering to
our individual identities. Astronomy is what we have now
instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts
are nil. — John Updike
[The opening of Updike’s short story “The Accelerating
Expansion of the Universe” is reprinted here with a comment
from the author, his kind permission, and that of Harper’s
Magazine, which published the entire story in its
October 2004 issue.]
Why should it bother Martin Fairweather? In his long, literate
lifetime he had read of many revisions of cosmic theory. Edwin
Hubble’s discovery of universal expansion had occurred
a few years before he was born; by the time of his young manhood,
the theory of the Big Bang, with its overtones of Christian
Creation by fiat—“Let there be light”—had
prevailed over the rather more Buddhist steady−state
theory claiming that space itself produced, out of nothingness,
one hydrogen atom at a time. In recent decades, in astronomy
as in finance, billions had replaced millions as the useful
unit: a billion galaxies, a billion stars in each. Ever stronger
telescopes, including one suspended in space and named after
Hubble, revealed a swarm of fuzzy ovals, each a Milky Way.
Such revelations, stupefying for those who tried truly to conceive
of the distances and time spans, the amounts of brute matter
and of vacancy seething with virtual particles, had held for
Fairweather the farfetched hope of a last turn: a culminating
piece in the great skyey puzzle would vindicate Mankind’s
sensation of central importance and disclose a titanic mercy
lurking behind the cosmic arrangements.
But the fact, discovered by two independent teams of researchers,
seemed to be that not only did deep space show no relenting
in the speed of the farthest galaxies but instead a detectable
acceleration, so that an eventual dispersion of everything
into absolute cold and darkness could be confidently predicted.
We are riding a pointless explosion to nowhere. Only an invisible,
malevolent anti−gravity, a so−called Dark Force,
explained it. Why should Fairweather take it personally? The
universe would by a generous margin outlive him—that
had always been true. But he had somehow relied on eternity,
on there being an eternity even if he wasn’t invited
to participate in it. The accelerating expansion of the universe
imposed an ignominious, cruelly diluted finitude on the enclosing
vastness. The eternal hypothetical structures—God, Paradise,
the moral law within—now had utterly no base to stand
on. All would melt away. He, no mystic, had always taken a
sneaky comfort in the idea of a universal pulse, an alternating
Big Bang and Big Crunch, each time recasting matter into an
unimaginably small furnace, a subatomic point of fresh beginning.
Now this comfort was taken from him, and he drifted into a
steady state—an estranging fever, scarcely detectable
by those around him—of depression.
John Updike is a novelist, poet, short−story
writer, and essayist. Villages, his most recent novel,
was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2004. Updike lives
near Boston. Although he once called “sex, art, and
religion” the three great secrets of life, readers
who notice how often scientific metaphors crop up in his
work know that physics belongs on the list too.
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