Fall-out from the Big Bang

by Tom Gill

The articles in the Australian Marxist Review (No. 36, December 
1996) dealing with cosmology raise a number of philosophical questions 
which, I think, are worth following up.

Some of the criticism of Peter Symon's article on the Big Bang is, I think, 
justified, in so far as a scientific theory has to be judged in the light 
of the evidence on which it is based and on its predictions and further 
experiments which test them.

To condemn a theory solely on philosophical grounds — or worse, 
because it runs counter to what we would like to be the case, or what one 
would expect, is irreconcilable with a materialist outlook. (Peter Symon 
does not quite go to this length.)

However, one cannot claim that a theory should be beyond philosophical 
criticism. Once subjects like the origin of the whole universe are brought 
in, we cannot avoid some philosophy. Also, once we think of time as 
something more than the "t" in our equations, we find ourselves in the 
realm of philosophy.

In the same way, if a theory involves something which is unobservable or 
unknowable in principle or which appears to be absurd, we have to look at 
the theory from a philosophical viewpoint.

These latter two features seem to me to be inherent in some way in the Big 
Bang theory, as presented by Paul Davies, even though some features of the 
theory will certainly survive.

I will refer to two striking examples of the rejection of a theory on 
"philosophical" grounds.

The best known of these is the Lysenko affair in the Soviet Union. Here, 
the facts of modern genetics were rejected in favour of completely 
erroneous ideas by philosophers who should have demanded the rigorous 
testing of Lysenko's claims.

What seems almost unbelievable today is that the theory of the inheritance 
of acquired characteristics (known as Lamarckian evolution) was given 
official support. Soviet genetics was destroyed for nearly a generation!

It is possible that the support given to Lysenko by the Party and Soviet 
Government was influenced to some extent by the fact that Engels, in his 
(unfinished) article, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from 
Ape to Man, took Lamarckian evolution for granted. At the time when 
Engels wrote this article (1876), the Lamarckian theory was widely accepted 
by scientists, including Darwin.

Darwin's work established natural selection as the factor which acted on 
natural variation to change or produce species of plants and animals which 
took place over millions of years.

The re-discovery around 1900 of Mendel's laws of heredity (published ca 
1866) was eventually followed by a better understanding of heredity and 
today the theory that evolution is the result of random mutations subject 
to the action of natural selection is no longer seriously questioned.

My second example is also taken from the Soviet Union, but in this case it 
was not centred on one individual like Lysenko.

Einstein's [Special] Theory of Relativity (1905) was attacked by many 
Soviet philosophers and some scientists as being idealist. There is, of 
course, nothing in this theory which gives any support to an idealist 
philosophy and to claim this required the critic to be either ignorant of 
the theory or of philosophy.

But there is some excuse for those who were so misled. Unlike modern 
genetics, modern physics has been used to support idealist philosophy and 
religion to an extraordinary extent — as we have seen in the case of Paul 
Davies.

In addition to this, Einstein himself was, as he admits, greatly influenced 
in his youth by Ernst Mach. 1 Later in his life, Einstein came 
much closer to a materialist position.

However, Einstein was a good scientist and his scientific work stands on 
its own feet, irrespective of his philosophy. The Theory of Relativity, 
which Einstein published in 1905, is now supported by a large amount of 
experimental evidence and at present cannot be seriously questioned — any 
more than modern quantum theory can be doubted simply because it has been 
used to support idealism.

More than one lesson can be learnt from the Soviet experience I have 
mentioned. Probably the most important is that neglect or distortion of our 
basic materialist philosophy can have serious practical results and this 
applies to bourgeois society as well as to a socialist one.

We can think of Marxist theory as having two main parts, one its 
materialist philosophy, the other its scientific component.

It is not quite as simple as that, however. Materialism is the real basis 
of our philosophy, and on the other hand the materialist conception of 
history is a science as is Marxist political economy.

But our materialism is dialectical materialism, so we should include 
dialectics under the heading of philosophy. On the other hand, materialist 
dialectics applies to all forms of motion and change, i.e. science, from 
subatomic particles to the history of human society or the evolution of the 
universe.

In conclusion we can say that dialectical materialism belongs to both 
science and philosophy.

The question must inevitably be asked: what part did the neglect of 
ideology play in the defeat of the Soviet Union? The first indications that 
serious problems had arisen, at least for those outside the socialist 
countries, was the appearance of articles and statements which, at best, 
represented the long discredited ideology of social democracy, for example, 
the doctrine of the convergence of capitalism and socialism and the 
abandonment of class struggle. (See, for example, Australian Marxist 
Review, June 1989, pp 39-42)

The deterioration in the Soviet Union, however, was well-advanced by 1989. 
We cannot attribute the events in Eastern Europe entirely to neglect or 
abandonment of Marxism, although this must have helped. A very elementary 
knowledge of Marxism should tell us that capitalism and socialism cannot be 
mixed for long and that private ownership of the means of production is 
incompatible with socialism.

I would like to conclude with a quotation from a lecture, given by R Palme 
Dutt 2 at Moscow University in 1962 when he was awarded an 
honorary Doctorate of History.

"... the simplest rule-of-thumb test to judge the economy of a country is 
to enquire whether there is a Stock Exchange.

"... in socialist countries there is no need of a Stock Exchange; the 
economy is not based on stocks and shares representing private ownership of 
the means of production; income is based on work done, or, in the case of 
social production, on need, not on private ownership."

* * *

1  Ernst Mach was a philosopher and scientist whose name was the 
origin of the term Mach number (the ratio of a vehicle's speed to 
the speed of sound) because of his work in aerodynamics. He was one of a 
number of scientists criticised by Lenin in his book Materialism and 
Empirio-criticism. The essence of their philosophy was that scientific 
observations do not yield any knowledge about objective reality and that a 
scientific theory was not an attempt to describe or explain reality but 
merely a way to summarise the results of our experiments. Mach's ideas 
influenced many physicists apart from Einstein, the most prominent of whom 
was Neils Bohr who was the first to apply quantum theory to the atom. It is 
possible that Mach played a significant part in turning many scientists 
towards an idealist interpretation of quantum mechanics.

2  R Palme Dutt was the Editor of the English journal Labour 
Monthly for about 50 years. He was a brilliant Marxist theoretician and 
his monthly editorial notes provided a valuable commentary on current 
affairs and are still worth reading today. His best known and possibly his 
most important book was Fascism and Social Revolution (published in 
1934) in which he describes and analyses the rise of fascism in Europe. The 
lectures referred to were published under the title Problems of 
Contemporary History (Lawrence and Wishart, 1963) and the quotation is 
from page 76 of this book.