How Dark Physics Fails

by Asa Boxer

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Last week I observed that old archetypes find new expression by mining science for new figurative language. Not only do these archetypes. . . these old psychological drivers (stories and characters) figure in sci-fi stories, but they also find authoritative, scientific expression. Millenarianism now wears the scientific cloak of climate change. Revelation now poses as TheScience™. Idolatry now wears the habits of putting the scientific model before the phenomena, and of making phenomena fit the models. And that’s just a few examples. Consequently, the notion that science escapes the figures and tropes of poetics and fiction to present us with the one true Truth is a myth. It follows that truth is a slippery thing, and the philosophical concern is that we’re sliding into relativism, the idea that any personal claim is true. Of course this is not the case. Some explanations work and others don’t. Reality isn’t simply a figment of one’s imagination. I addressed this issue at the end of last week’s Barstool Bit and promised to pursue the matter further this week.

So what makes a literary conceit work? Broadly speaking, correspondence. What do I mean by correspondence? Literary scholar Jeffery Donaldson explains the concept in his article for analogy magazine, “A Bridge is a Lie: How Science Does Metaphor”: “In the correspondence model, a proposition is true if it ‘corresponds’ with something outside it.” In other words a conceit works when it strikes one as plausibly connected to the world and one’s experience. For instance, when poet Robbie Burns writes, “My love is like a red red rose,” readers connect to the image because they have experience of the beauty and the prickliness of love. The image corresponds to the experience.

It’s worth noting that this correspondence isn’t simply intellectual: there’s a participatory and enthusiastic element to figurative correspondence. If I suggest, for instance, that in picking up a button from a lawn, I am undressing it. . . one is struck by how the grass suddenly springs forth like hair. Notice the inner element invoked here, the stimulation of the imagination, the assertion of an inner power to make things new, to defamiliarise the mundane and see things as though for the first time.

In other words, an inner work takes place, an awakening of consciousness. One is put in touch with the psychic power to revitalise the banal and habit-worn ways of life. When enough corresponds in a surprising enough manner for a mind to feel tickled and for the heart life to be stirred, we have ourselves a conceit that works. In this present case, the reality invoked is the human ability to perceive familiar things from a new perspective; the figurative language puts us in touch with an inner transformative ability. Enjoying cognitive flexibility of this kind is essential for finding creative solutions and for discovering entirely new approaches to practical problems and scientific questions.

Equally important to wrap our heads around is the phenomenon of bad poetry, or bad conceits. When do they fail? Top of my mind is so-called “dark matter” and “dark energy”—apparently invisible stuff that just has to be since there isn’t enough visible stuff for our model to work. The most obvious issue here is inconsistency. You base a whole perspective of the universe and how humans ought to relate to it on empiricism—that is, hard, visible, measurable phenomena—and then you set aside your cornerstone when your model fails to account for the phenomena. It’s a desperate act (a self-negating one) to rescue a broken model.

In terms of science, when things don’t add up, it’s not the phenomena that require correction, nor is it the job of science to make stuff up so the math works. The conclusions must show correspondence with the observed phenomena. The dark stuff hypothesis compensates for this asymmetry—the fact that the model fails to correspond to observations—by proposing that most stuff exists beyond observation.

This sort of trouble is not only rooted in problems with correspondence, but also with what is often referred to as coherence. As Donaldson puts it: “In the coherence model the proposition or model is true if it ‘holds together’. Think of a wheel that we say ‘spins true’.” When physicists propose that most of the matter and energy in the universe is invisible, they violate the coherence of their discipline. In effect what they’re saying is, Our science is True and trustworthy because based on the observable universe; observation shows most of the universe is not observable. This inconsistency (or lack of cohesion) is fatal to the paradigm.

Worth mentioning here (for those unfamiliar with the physics) that dark stuff was introduced owing to the problem of galaxies lacking enough matter and energy to cohere. In other words, they should fall apart because there’s not enough matter and energy in them to explain how they hold together. We’re talking about literal incoherence here. Referring back to Donaldson’s metaphor, the present model of the wheel (of the galaxy) does not spin true.

When science starts making stuff up like this, we ought to be shocked. A pedestrian equivalent would be short changing someone in a financial transaction and claiming that you paid most of the money in dark dollars.

As the analogical mind applies itself to this problem of what is real and what works and why, what becomes apparent is that we must look for areas of analogy and agreement. Phenomena like archetypes fit the bill because they appear again and again despite changing perspectives, disciplines, and paradigms. In other words, there are things that remain when we pull away our instruments, methods, and paradigms; things that are confirmed as real when we apply other instruments, methods and paradigms.

When multiple branches of physics and philosophy for instance wind up concluding from entirely different frameworks that the human being is a microcosm of the cosmic macrocosm, or that there’s a holographic quality to the universe, we can allow ourselves to suspect that perhaps we’re onto something truly empirical. The question then remains whether the reality in question is an inner one or an outer one. . . or of course whether it’s both, in which case, no doubt we’re dealing with a level of correspondence and cohesion that would qualify as about as real as we’re ever going to get.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.