The farther we look, the more slowly the light from exploding stars (supernovae) fades. This tells us that the expansion of space affects even light, which arrives at Earth more spread out.

The farther we look, the more slowly the light from exploding stars (supernovae) fades. This tells us that the expansion of space affects even light, which arrives at Earth more spread out.

Various alternatives to the big bang model have been proposed, both inside and outside the scientific literature. We review some examples, and show how they deal (or not) with the evidence of astronomy.

The universe has a remarkably consistent elemental composition: about 75% hydrogen, 24% helium, and 1% heavier elements. Stars, for all their element-producing abilities, cannot have created these abundances. This points to another cosmic oven, in the universe’s hotter past.

The farther we look, the redder the light from galaxies appears. This fact points to a remarkable feature of our universe: it is not static. It is expanding.

Various alternatives to the big bang model have been proposed, both inside and outside the scientific literature. We review some examples, and show how they deal (or not) with the evidence of astronomy.

This book was inspired by the cold glare of a shark, which happened to meet my eyes in a train station bookstore. A full spread on the cover of a diving magazine displayed the prize-winning picture taken by the underwater photographer Doug Perrine. The image is of two copper sharks (Carcharhinus brachyurus) having their way with a hapless school of sardines. With sardines still stuck between their teeth, they are darting through the evasively maneuvering swarm, and the glance of one of the sharks during this feeding frenzy seems to fixate on the diver's camera. What Perrine managed to capture here so impressively is the famous sardine run – the annual migration of immense schools of sardines along the coast of South Africa. Their morphologies and dynamics number among the most fascinating phenomena of the animal kingdom that Alistair Fothergill and his team of BBC filmmakers had documented so vividly around the turn of the millennium.

Not long after this encounter, I coincidentally came across this image again: Perrine's photograph happened to adorn the cover of a small brochure that, in 2005, was used to advertise an upcoming consumer trend conference in Hamburg. Given the title ‘Schwarmintelligenz: Die Macht der smarten Mehrheit’ (‘Swarm Intelligence: The Power of the Smart Majority’), the symposium featured the keynote speaker Howard Rheingold, who had recently published his study of smart mobs, and thus shifted the focus away from sharks and schools of sardines toward the dynamics of highly concentrated network economies:

The trend conference in 2005 was thus right on trend. Swarm intelligence was on everyone's lips at the time and had just lately entered the discourses of the humanities and social sciences with the publication of Rheingold’s book.

In media-historical terms – as I discussed in my introduction – swarms have been fused into biological, computer-technical hybrids that can best be understood with the concept of zootechnologies. For, contrary to biotechnologies or biomedia, they are conceptualized less on the basis of bíos (the notion of ‘animated’ life) than on the basis of zoē, the unanimated life in the swarm – a sort of life that can be technically implemented. The knowledge gained from this hybridization has helped to establish a highly technical lifeworld that is increasingly confronted with models of complex contexts and systems. Whenever one is faced with disrupted or constantly changing conditions, or whenever solutions need to be found for unclearly defined sets of problems, methods can now be employed that are commonly known under the umbrella term ‘swarm intelligence.’ Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz thus make the following remarks toward the beginning of their standard work Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems:

Models as Media

As demonstrated in the previous chapters, Charles Breder was right when, in an early article, he referred to fish schools as ‘notoriously difficult laboratory materials’ – a characterization that applies just as well, if not more so, to studying them in the open sea. Alongside the efforts being made to gain empirical data about the control logic and organization of schools by means of various observational and analytic systems, a second (and complementary) strategy explored models and mathematical formulas in order to describe the dynamics and functions of biological collectives. Models, after all, provide the opportunity for drawing connections between different scales of observation and between different influential variables. They offer access to levels that the technical methods of visual or acoustic analysis cannot access, and they combine theoretical considerations and empirical data. However, two further sets of problems have to be considered in this context which exceed the difficulties that I mentioned in the previous chapter – namely the question of viewpoint, the feasibility of convincing experiments in research aquariums, and the revealing of visual ‘invisibilities’ by acoustic methods. One issue concerns the ways in which the relationality of schools could be converted into models and how to measure the epistemic value of such models in conjunction with other forms of knowledge production in the field of biology.

Fishy Business: Media Technologies of Observation and Experimentation

Schools of fish have not been studied as complex systems for very long. It was not until the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s that researchers first engaged with questions concerning the possible parameters and observational media that would be necessary to gain any knowledge about them. In his 1931 article on schooling behavior, Guy Malcolm Spooner remarked: “The phenomenon of schooling has received surprisingly little attention either from fishery investigators or from those studying animal behaviour.” The Russian biologist Dimitri Radakov similarly commented: “The phenomenon of schooling has undoubtedly been known since ancient times, at any rate since our ancestors began to catch fish. But it was not until comparatively recently that special investigations of fish were launched: at the end of the 1920s.”

At the beginning, investigations of the form and structure of fish schools were not as strongly motivated by the sense of fascination that can be found in literature or, as we have seen, in the work of early swarm researchers such as Edmund Selous.

Theory: Noise

Amalgamations of Perplexity

“In the beginning was the noise.” This is not the opening sentence of Michel Serres's The Parasite(that would have been too prosaic). It rather concludes a paragraph in which he emphasizes the productivity of interference – the bruit parasite, as the French goes. Thus, instead of beginning this chapter with one hackneyed pronouncement or another about the fascinating nature of flocking birds, schooling fish, their tendency to ‘hover’ and ‘dance,’ and the apparently mystical beauty of such activity, I have decided to take the diametrically opposite approach. This is because a phenomenological or anthropological ‘view’ obscures the fact that, in the swarm itself, perception is always disrupted. Swarms shimmer in a field of tension between interference and organization whose discursive and historical dynamics are resistant to any subject-oriented or analytical perspective. Or, in Serres’s words: