Tao Lin
Tao Lin | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 2, 1983 |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Journalism on alternative cosmologies; critique of the Big Bang model; advocacy of dissident science and self-healing |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Cosmology, science writing, natural health |
Tao Lin (Chinese: 林韜; born July 2, 1983) is a Taiwanese-American novelist, poet, essayist and artist who has taken a strong public interest in dissident science. Since 2018 his work has shifted from fiction toward nonfiction concerned with natural health, environmental toxins, and the sociology of scientific orthodoxy, and in 2022 he published a widely read journalistic survey of non-Big-Bang cosmologies. He is not a professional physicist; his contribution to the dissident community is as a writer who brings suppressed and marginalized scientific models to a large mainstream literary audience.
Biography
Lin was born on July 2, 1983 in Alexandria, Virginia, to a Taiwanese-American family, and grew up in suburban Orlando, Florida. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from New York University in 2005.
He began publishing poetry and fiction in 2006 and founded the independent press Muumuu House in 2008. His novels include Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007), Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009), Richard Yates (2010) and Taipei (2013), the last published by Vintage. His 2018 nonfiction book Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change documents his recovery from pharmaceutical drug dependence and his engagement with the ideas of Terence McKenna. His fourth novel, Leave Society (2021), follows a novelist researching pharmaceuticals, environmental toxins, vaccines, diet and alternative models of society.
Lin is also a visual artist, known for a long-running series of hand-drawn mandalas, which he has exhibited and sold online. He has lectured on his writing and art at Vassar College, the Kansas City Art Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other universities and museums.
Scientific contributions
Lin's principal contribution to natural philosophy is his January 2022 Document Journal essay "New Cosmologies: Could reconsidering the Big Bang theory save us?", written for a general literary readership rather than for a physics journal. In it he argues that the Big Bang model has survived only by accumulating ad hoc rescues — inflation, dark matter and dark energy — in the same way that geocentrism survived by accumulating epicycles before it finally collapsed. He suggests that the model's dominance owes as much to cultural and institutional factors as to evidence, and that the practical consequence has been the neglect of research programs that might have yielded genuinely new technology.
Against the standard model he sets out three dissident alternatives:
- Plasma cosmology, originating with the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén, which treats electromagnetic forces rather than gravity as the organizing influence on cosmic scales, and which anticipated the observed spongelike large-scale structure of filaments and voids before it was confirmed observationally.
- The Electric Universe model developed by Wallace Thornhill, which grew out of plasma cosmology and holds that gravity is an electrical effect, that the speed of light is not an absolute limit, and that space is filled with an unobserved aetheric medium through which light propagates as a wave.
- Infinite Universe Theory as formulated by Glenn Borchardt, which holds that the universe is infinite in space, in time and in scale, and that gravity is a pushing effect produced by aether pressure rather than an attraction or a curvature of geometry.
Lin's own sympathies in the piece lie with the electric and plasma models. He argues that if gravity is electrical in nature, then antigravity, faster-than-light travel and abundant clean energy become conceivable engineering goals, and he contrasts this open-ended prospect with what he calls the "fatalistic pessimism" of a universe that begins in an explosion and ends in heat death. The essay is notable within the dissident community for placing Alfvén, Thornhill and Borchardt side by side in a mainstream culture magazine.
Lin's critical interest is not confined to cosmology. In interviews around Leave Society he has described germ theory as misguided, arguing that bacteria and viruses appear in diseased bodies as part of a cleaning process rather than as the cause of the disease, and he has written and spoken extensively on environmental toxins, processed food, and self-healing. His larger thesis, drawn in part from Riane Eisler, is that the dominant scientific paradigm is one expression of a wider "dominator" culture, and that a shift toward a "partnership" model would change what science is able to see.
CNPS talks
He has appeared in the CNPS online seminar series:
- "A Scientific Conversation with Author & Artist Tao Lin" (5 March 2022) — a conversation with host David de Hilster about Lin's first scientific article and his interest in critical thinking and science.
Works
- "New Cosmologies: Could reconsidering the Big Bang theory save us?", Document Journal, 27 January 2022. Read online
- "Riane Eisler and Tao Lin on shifting our cultural paradigm", Document Journal, July 2022. Read online
- Leave Society (Vintage, 2021), novel.
- Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (Vintage, 2018), nonfiction.
- Taipei (Vintage, 2013), novel.
- Richard Yates (Melville House, 2010), novel.
- Shoplifting from American Apparel (Melville House, 2009), novella.
- Eeeee Eee Eeee (Melville House, 2007), novel.
- Bed (Melville House, 2007), short stories.