Adam Curtis a jeho blog nikdy nezklame... tentokrát (mimo jiné) o tom, jak britská horrorová antologie Přízraky noci (Dead of Night) spustila diskuzi, jejíž výsledkem byla tzv. Steady State theory, alternativa k terorii Velkého třesku.
One September night in 1945 three British mathematicians and astronomers went to see a new film at a cinema in Cambridge. It was called Dead of Night. It was a series of ghost stories told by a group of people gathered together in a farmhouse. The stories are linked by a device of a central character who is convinced that he has experienced the whole situation in the farmhouse before. In the end he murders another of the group - but then wakes up from this terrible dream.
That morning the telephone rings, he is invited down to the farmhouse, and the whole story, or dream, starts all over again.
The scientists loved the film, and they sat discussing its circular structure. One of them suggested that it could be the model for how the whole universe really worked. That, although the universe was expanding, it was also constantly renewing itself - to maintain itself in a steady state.
Out if this came what was called the "Steady State" theory of the universe. It was going to dominate scientific thinking for the next twenty years, and it would also make one of the three scientists very famous.
He was a very difficult and argumentative man called Fred Hoyle - and the story of what happened to him and his idea is odd and funny - and also shows how science can often add a spurious certainty to the stories that modern societies tell themselves.
I also want to tell the story of two of the men behind the film Dead of Night - because both of them were convinced that the certainties of the post-war years had trapped Britain in a narrow bubble that was preventing it from seeing the world as it really was.
And we may still be in that bubble.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/02/a_mile_or_two_off_yarmouth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_State_theory
http://www.csfd.cz/film/35396-prizraky-noci/