A New York Yankee in Fred Hoyle’s Court

I suspect many people are unaware that there is a sequel, of sorts, to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Jules Verne's classic 1870 work of science fiction. Five years after that work was published, Verne wrote The Mysterious Island, an account of a group of Yankee soldiers who escape Confederate captivity during the American Civil War only to find themselves stranded on an uncharted island in the South Pacific.

The Mysterious Island appealed to the geeky science nerd in me, filled as it was with descriptions of ad hoc engineering, home-made explosives, volcanos, and other fantastic details calculated to capture the imagination of young readers like me.

Another book that features a capable engineer dropped, against his will, into a technological desert is Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which he wrote in 1889. Twain's work delves into matters of governance, of democracy versus monarchy, and of social and political conflict, but it also features lots of instances of bootstrap engineering as its protagonist, Hank Morgan, applies his 19th-century engineering knowledge to the problems of 6th-century Arthurian England.

I ate this stuff up. I fancied myself an inventor, a tinkerer, and I daydreamed about finding myself somehow transported to the past and having to use my superior technical and scientific knowledge to impress the natives and carve for myself a place in their primitive world.

But then the adult me got to wondering one day exactly what I knew that would be of use even a hundred years ago. What knowledge do I possess that I could take back to, say, 1924, and use to my advantage? I know a great many things, but how many of them could I communicate with sufficient detail and clarity as to be of value to anyone?

I know nothing detailed of chemistry, biology, or botany. Oh, I suppose I could describe the double helix of DNA, and perhaps deprive Watson and Crick of their future recognition, but what could I say about it, other than that it exists? I know too little of metallurgy and material science to make my fortune in the early 1900s. Predicting future events would be fun, but I don't even know the specific dates of very many things prior to WW II; I'd profit during the Crash, but that's about it.

The thing I know best, computing, was not even in its infancy. Twenty years later, in the depths of WW II, perhaps I could contribute to the codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park: in anticipation, I could write a bunch of cryptic texts that would be discovered just in time to speed the cracking of Enigma.

But today it occurred to me (yes, I guess I still daydream about it) that there's one domain in which I could offer revelation -- information that would have been timely a hundred years ago, that would be easily verified, and that the explication of which would mark me (however unjustly) as a visionary and a genius.

Astronomy. More specifically, cosmology.

In The Great Debate of 1920, the question under consideration was: Is our galaxy, the Milky Way, the entirety of the universe, with every visible astronomical object contained within it? For the affirmative was Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapely; opposed, astronomer Heber Curtis, then of the Lick Observatory.

Edwin Hubble settled the matter in 1924, establishing the approximate distance to the Andromeda galaxy with sufficient accuracy to prove that it could not be contained within the Milky Way. (Essential to his work was Henrietta Swan Leavitt's discoveries regarding Cepheid variable stars, the so-called "standard candles" of interstellar and intergalactic distances. Everyone knows the name Hubble; few remember Leavitt.)

I don't know when in 1924 Hubble published his results. It's August, which means there's a good chance I'd have been too late, were I to find myself in 1924 America. But you know that would be the question I'd ask of the first man I encountered on the street: "Tell me, quickly: what is the distance to Andromeda? Is it decided? I must know!"

I think I'd probably miss stealing the thunder from Edwin.

Three years later, in 1927, the Belgian priest and theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître proposed the idea that would later be called the big bang theory. (Lemaître didn't call it that: "big bang" was the name the great astronomer Fred Hoyle coined on a BBC radio broadcast while ridiculing Lemaître's idea as nonsensical.) Had I the means, I think I would try to catch up with Georges, either in Belgium or, much more conveniently, at MIT where he was presenting his doctoral thesis.

I could help him. A serious critique of his work was that it assumed an expanding universe, something we now believe to be the case thanks to (once again) Hubble's work in 1929. I could get him a small jump on Hubble's red-shift observations; maybe today we'd be arguing about the specific value of the Lemaître-Racette Constant as a result. (But probably not.)

The real coup, however, would be to preempt the brilliant contribution of Alan Guth, who in 1981 -- practically yesterday! -- in a stroke of sudden inspiration proposed his theory of inflation, the idea that the early universe expanded, from a size smaller than an atom, to something on the order of 100000000000000000000000000 times its size, all in much (much) less than a billionth of a billionth of a second.

Outrageous? Certainly, and I don't think Georges would take my word for it -- not right away, anyway. But it solved a bunch of problems that would become apparent later, things that couldn't otherwise be explained away and that were making people question the Big Bang theory. "Where are all the magnetic monopoles?" everyone was asking. "Why is the universe so flat?" "Why is the cosmic background so suspiciously uniform?" Things like that.

Guth elegantly answered their questions, questions of which Lemaître was no doubt aware and with which he must have struggled until the end of his life: Lemaître died 15 years before Guth had his revelation. I could have spared Georges his final doubts born of watching his life's work face ever greater, seemingly unanswerable challenge, if I'd simply offered him Guth's inflation.

Of course, in that case, Alan Guth would no longer be a name on the tip of everyone's tongue. I'd feel bad about that -- as perhaps would Alan, who alone of all those mentioned here is still with us.