The Zwicky Tragedy

In 1929, Fritz Zwicky published his famous paper “On the redshift of spectral lines” right after the discovery of Hubble’s famous cosmological redshift law. Zwicky showed that the Hubble law is based on ordinary gravitational interaction between the passing light rays on the one hand and the randomly moving galaxies and their clusters that are being negotiated on the other.

For reasons hard to reconstruct, the scientific community prefers, as an explanation of Hubble’s grandiose discovery, an ad hoc assumption: “cosmic expansion.” This unnecessary hypothesis fitted the theological views of an influential priest, Abbé Georges Lemaître, who was a trained astronomer in his second vocation. The immediate general acceptance of Lemaître’s view left Zwicky no chance to be heard with his own more parsimonious and hence more correct explanation of the Hubble law. He would get rehabilitated only 8 decades later by the new science of deterministic Cryodynamics, the canonical sister discipline to Yakov Sinai’s deterministic Thermodynamics of 1960. Both chaos-based fundamental theories do without any statistical approximation. So, Boltzmann’s universe is getting retrieved in effect.

But why the word “tragedy”? The time delay by almost a century does not quite suffice for that. Zwicky had a combative temperament to him which attracted enemies like a flame draws insects. This personal trait ultimately explains why his retrieved eternal cosmos went unappreciated. The tragic component in this has to do with the fact that the falsely adopted Big Bang theory carries an unprecedented danger with it: The whole planet is betting its own survival on Zwicky having been wrong, even though he was right as we saw.

The currently running largest peace-time experiment of history - the LHC experiment at CERN near Geneva - relies with its safety concerns on the belief in the Big Bang and hence in Zwicky having been wrong. The officially attempted-to-produce microscopic black holes at CERN will not “Hawking evaporate” in contrast to the currently globally accepted view, and hence will not be innocuous. In the wake of Zwicky retrieved a first successfully produced microscopic black hole is bound to start growing exponentially inside the earth so as to eat the latter inside out after a delay of but years – as the ultimate tragedy.

I thank John Kozak for a discussion. For J.O.R.