Physics edges; English cases and prepositions

 

The "Futurism" web site had a piece today showing general disagreement among prominent "scientists" about physics, actually the nature of the Big Bang and what dark energy and dark matter are. I'm hardly surprised. These are at the fringe. They managed to avoid the general agreement that all three are real.

Your reaction is fairly close to how many physicists themselves would frame it. At the frontier of a science, disagreement is not a sign of collapse; it is almost expected. What often gets flattened in popular reporting is the distinction between agreement on observations and agreement on interpretation.

With the Big Bang, there is actually very broad agreement on a core picture: the universe was once in an extremely hot, dense state and has expanded over cosmic time. That is supported by several independent lines of evidence—cosmic expansion, primordial element abundances, and especially the cosmic microwave background. Where disagreement appears is around the phrase “the Big Bang” itself. Did it begin from a singularity? Was there an inflationary phase? Did something precede it—a bounce, quantum state, multiverse, cyclic process? That is the frontier.

Dark matter and dark energy are similar but importantly different cases.

For dark matter, there is a strong consensus that something real is going on. Galaxies rotate too fast, galaxy clusters behave as if they contain much more mass than visible matter, and gravitational lensing maps unseen mass distributions. The disagreement is over what explains it. The mainstream view remains some as-yet-undetected form of matter (WIMPs, axions, etc.), but alternatives such as modified gravity theories remain alive because direct detection has repeatedly failed. So here there is agreement on the phenomenon, less agreement on ontology.

Dark energy is even murkier. There is broad agreement that the universe’s expansion appears to be accelerating. The evidence for that is taken seriously. But what dark energy is—a cosmological constant, vacuum energy, a dynamical field, a sign gravity behaves differently on vast scales, or something else—is profoundly unsettled. In a sense, “dark energy” is partly a label for ignorance: “whatever is causing this acceleration.”

Popular science articles often overplay scientific disagreement because “scientists baffled” gets clicks. But there is also a tendency in the public to imagine science as unanimous certainty until a revolution arrives. Real science is messier. A useful rule of thumb is: the closer one gets to conditions impossible to reproduce experimentally—the first tiny fraction of a second after cosmic origin, quantum gravity, the contents of most of the universe—the wider the plausible speculation becomes.

Your phrase “these are at the fringe” is apt in another sense: cosmology today is dealing with edge conditions where observation outruns explanation. We can infer a great deal from effects, but inference becomes increasingly model-dependent. It reminds me a bit of nineteenth-century astronomy inferring unseen planets from perturbations—sometimes brilliantly right (Neptune), sometimes misleading (the nonexistent Vulcan invoked to explain Mercury before relativity).

One place I might push back slightly is “they managed to avoid the general agreement that all three are real.” Journalists sometimes conflate “we disagree about what X is” with “we doubt X exists.” In mainstream physics, very few people doubt the observed expansion history or the evidence behind the dark matter problem. The disagreement is mostly over what reality underneath the measurements looks like. That is a subtler, and more interesting, sort of disagreement.

I was a bit surprised that a good fraction, although a minority, of their respondents (whoever they actually were [whomever?], said they thought the Big Bang was from a singularity and was the beginning of spacetime. The latter is reasonable but I thought the idea of singularities had been abandoned.

“Whoever” is correct there, incidentally. It is the subject of “were” (“whoever they actually were”), not the object. One of those places where educated people hypercorrect themselves into “whomever.”

On the physics: your impression is understandable, but the situation is subtler than “singularities abandoned.”

Physicists have largely abandoned the idea that a singularity is a physically understood thing—an actual point of infinite density we confidently describe. But many still regard the singularity in the equations as a signpost that current theory breaks down.

Under ordinary General Relativity, if you run the cosmic expansion backward, the mathematics tends toward a singularity: density, temperature, and spacetime curvature become unbounded. The famous singularity theorems of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose showed that, under fairly general assumptions, singularities are hard to avoid in relativity.

But here is the catch: almost nobody thinks plain general relativity can be trusted all the way down to arbitrarily tiny scales and extreme energies. Quantum effects should become dominant long before one literally reaches “infinity.” Since we do not yet possess a successful theory of quantum gravity, we cannot say with confidence what actually happened at—or before—the earliest instant.

That leaves several camps, none fully established:

1. The “singularity is real enough” camp: the universe truly had a beginning to spacetime, and the singularity represents a genuine boundary, even if our equations fail there.

2. The “singularity is only math failure” camp: infinities signal that the theory has gone outside its domain, rather like dividing by zero. Something physical happened, but not an actual infinite point.

3. Bounce or pre-Big-Bang models: a prior contracting universe, quantum bounce, cyclic cosmology, or some deeper structure replaces the singularity.

4. Eternal inflation or multiverse ideas: our observable universe begins, but the larger reality may not.

You are quite right that “beginning of spacetime” and “singularity” are separable ideas. One can believe spacetime began without believing there was a literal mathematical singularity of infinite density. In fact, many physicists would say something like: “time probably has a beginning in some sense, but the singularity itself is an artifact of incomplete equations.”

The reason some respondents still say “singularity” is partly disciplinary taste and partly philosophy. Some cosmologists remain comfortable saying that the best current equations point to a genuine beginning. Others use “singularity” as shorthand for “a boundary where our physics stops,” not necessarily a physically existing infinitely dense point.

There is also a sociological wrinkle. Among physicists, “the Big Bang began from a singularity” can mean anything from “I literally think infinity existed” to “I am speaking loosely because the public recognizes the term.” Scientists are not always careful in surveys.

You may be remembering a shift that really did happen: from treating singularities as plausible physical realities to treating them as warnings that our theories are incomplete. That is a substantial change in attitude from earlier decades.

My recollection is that singularities were always treated like infinities, indications of something rotten in the State of Denmark. About "whoever," "were" is a linkng verb anyway.

Yes, that is a very fair characterization of how many physicists have regarded singularities—especially after the early triumphs of relativity settled down. Infinities in physics tend to make people suspicious. They often signal not a real feature of nature but a breakdown in the model. Classical electrodynamics gave absurd infinite self-energies for point charges; quantum field theory had to tame infinities through renormalization; the ultraviolet catastrophe was a warning shot that classical physics had reached its limit. A singularity saying “density = ∞” or “curvature = ∞” has long struck many physicists as exactly the sort of red blinking light that says, “the map ends here.”

That said, there have always been some who took theorems seriously in a stronger sense: if the mathematics robustly predicts geodesic incompleteness, perhaps nature really does have boundaries. Even then, the emphasis was usually less “there exists a literal point of infinite density” and more “spacetime cannot be extended beyond this.” The popular imagination turned “singularity” into a little infinitely dense bead of matter, which is much cruder than what relativists generally mean.

And you are quite right to push back on my grammar gloss. Because “were” is a linking verb, the case question is slightly disguised. Traditional grammar would still defend “whoever” because the pronoun functions as the subject complement in the clause “whoever they actually were,” and complements of to be have historically taken the nominative (“It is I,” not “It is me”). In modern English, of course, actual usage bulldozes this all over the place—almost nobody says “It is I” except in deliberately formal speech or comedy.

The interesting wrinkle is that with fused relative constructions (“whoever they were”), many grammarians say the internal syntax controls the case: inside the clause, “whoever” behaves as the complement of were, which in formal grammar points to nominative. So your instinct that the linking verb matters is very much on point.

You have reminded me of the sort of sentence that used to torment schoolmasters with red pencils. English case after linking verbs has always been oddly unstable. Even educated speakers often feel a little uneasy choosing between “whoever” and “whomever,” which is probably why “whomever” survives mostly as a prestige marker now.

More a pretentious "I am educated" marker.

Quite often, yes. “Whomever” has become one of those words people deploy defensively, like putting on a tie for a grammar occasion.

The amusing thing is that it is frequently used incorrectly by educated people who sense vaguely that “whom” sounds smarter and therefore safer. You will see sentences like, “Give it to whomever wants it,” where the pronoun is actually the subject of “wants,” so formal grammar would demand “whoever.” The result is a kind of grammatical overcompensation.

Linguists sometimes call this hypercorrection—using a prestige form where it does not belong because one is trying to sound correct or educated. English is full of it: “between you and I,” avoiding split infinitives in absurd places, or refusing to end sentences with prepositions even when the result sounds ridiculous (“the man with whom I spoke” in casual conversation).

There is also a social element that I suspect appeals to your underwriter’s instinct for signals and incentives: language often functions as status display as much as communication. Certain usages say, “I belong to the educated tribe.” Sometimes the marker persists long after its communicative value has vanished.

“Whom” itself is dying in ordinary speech because English largely abandoned case endings centuries ago. We no longer say thou/thee or distinguish ye/you in daily use. “Whom” survives mainly in formal prose, fixed phrases (“to whom it may concern”), and exactly the sort of prestige signaling you mention.

That said, there are still places where it earns its keep by preventing ambiguity or awkwardness. But “whomever” especially has acquired a faint odor of showing off—rather like overusing Latin tags in conversation. I suspect your Harvard years exposed you to a fair amount of that.

Oh dear, "who" after a preposition would be jarring.

It can feel a bit jarring at first, especially if you were trained in the older “correctness ladder” where prepositions almost demanded “whom.” But in modern English, “who” after a preposition is actually the normal spoken form, and it’s increasingly standard in writing too.

The key point is that English quietly shifted away from case-marking in pronouns except in a few stubborn corners. So instead of “with whom I spoke,” most speakers now naturally say “who I spoke with.” The preposition just drifts to the end, and “who” carries no case burden anymore in that position.

What’s interesting is that both versions are still grammatically defensible depending on the register you’re aiming for. “With whom I spoke” sounds formal, almost judicial or bureaucratic. “Who I spoke with” sounds natural and neutral. Neither is wrong in any strict sense—just different dialects of style.

The real jarring effect today often comes from the reverse: people overcorrecting into “whom” in places where it doesn’t belong, or producing strained constructions like “to whom did you give it to,” which stacks the preposition awkwardly because English doesn’t really want that structure twice.

So what you’re reacting to is real—but it’s less about correctness and more about a shift in what English feels like. The language has moved, and some older forms now read as slightly ceremonial rather than structurally necessary.

Thinking about it, that is exactly what I tend to do: put the preposition at the end of the sentence and avoid the need for "whom" that way. I am not going to say, "For whom is this party?"

That instinct is basically how modern English solved the problem for itself.

English has been steadily drifting away from tightly “Latin-shaped” sentence structure for centuries, and one of the results is exactly what you’re doing: preposition stranding (“who is this party for?” instead of “for whom is this party?”). Once you allow the preposition to stay with the verb phrase at the end, “who” works perfectly naturally and no case decision is needed at all.

And you’re right about the awkwardness of the alternative in ordinary speech. “For whom is this party?” isn’t ungrammatical in a strict sense, but it sounds like you’re about to be interrogated by a very polite customs officer. It pushes English into a register it no longer lives in comfortably.

What’s interesting is that English actually prefers the stranded version in most contexts unless formality is explicitly being signaled. So your preference isn’t a workaround so much as alignment with the default modern system.

There’s a deeper linguistic point here too: English used to carry a fair bit of grammatical “gear” (case endings, rigid word order constraints inherited from Latin influence in formal writing traditions). Over time, it shed most of that gear and shifted the load onto word order and context. Preposition stranding is one of the places where you can see that evolution very clearly.

So your solution—“I’ll just put the preposition at the end and avoid whom entirely”—isn’t just convenient. It’s exactly what the language itself has been doing for a long time.

Well I goofed. What I wanted to say is that I am not going to say, "For who is this party."

Ah, yes—that one does sound wrong in modern English, and your instinct is good.

“For who is this party” feels off because “who” is doing double duty in a place where English still expects object form when it sits after a preposition. In that slot, traditional grammar would want “whom,” so the historically “correct” version would be “For whom is this party?”

But the more important point is that English usually avoids that whole construction entirely. Instead of either:

• “For whom is this party?” (formal, slightly stiff)

• “For who is this party?” (nonstandard in standard English)

most speakers naturally say:

• “Who is this party for?”

That last version is doing exactly what you’ve been leaning on: preposition at the end, no case decision needed, everything flows.

So you didn’t really “goof” in intuition—you just ran into one of those spots where English has quietly changed its preferred solution. The old rule (“whom after prepositions”) still exists as a formal option, but everyday usage has largely migrated to rephrasing the sentence instead of fighting over pronoun case.

It’s a nice example of how English tends to solve grammatical discomfort: not by enforcing stricter rules, but by reshaping the sentence so the problem disappears.

The rule largely seems to be, subjective before the verb, objective after.

That’s a very solid “working rule,” and for a lot of real English it gets you surprisingly far.

But it’s worth tightening it just a bit, because English is sneakier than it looks there.

What you’ve noticed is basically the subject/object pronoun split in default clause position:

• Subject position (before the verb): who, he, she, they
  “Who is coming?” / “He saw it.”

• Object position (after the verb or preposition): whom, him, her, them
  “I saw him.” / “to whom I spoke” (formal) / “I saw who you saw” (more on that in a second)

So far, your rule holds.

Where it starts to wobble is that English often restructures sentences so pronoun case stops being locally decisive. For example:

• “Who did you see?”
  “Who” is logically an object, but it sits at the front as a wh-moved element, not in true object position anymore. That’s why modern English prefers “who” there instead of “whom,” even though your rule would predict “whom.”

• “Who you saw” (embedded clause)
  Inside that clause, “who” is again behaving like an object, but English increasingly allows it anyway because case distinctions are weakening in everyday usage.

So a more accurate version of your rule in modern English would be something like:

“Who tends to appear in subject-like or fronted positions, and whom survives mostly in formal object positions—especially immediately after prepositions—but is often avoided by rephrasing.”

And your preposition intuition is actually the most stable part of the system: when English allows preposition stranding (“who did you talk to”), it effectively removes the need for “whom” in most conversational contexts entirely.

So yes—you’ve got the skeleton right. It’s just that English is in the middle of quietly dismantling some of the joints.

Well this points at the "It is I" absurdity, grammatically old-school correctness. After the verb, objective "me." Simple.

You’ve put your finger on one of the clearest fault lines between prescriptive grammar (Latin-flavored tradition) and modern English usage.

Historically, yes: “It is I” comes from the idea that to be is a linking verb and therefore should take a subject complement in the nominative case, as Latin would. That’s the logic behind it, and it’s internally consistent in that older system.

But English stopped behaving like Latin a long time ago.

In present-day English, especially spoken English, “it is me” is the natural outcome of how the language actually works. The pronoun after “is” behaves much more like an object position in perceived structure than a formal predicate nominative slot. So you get:

• Formal/register-preserving: “It is I.”

• Natural modern English: “It’s me.”

And crucially, nobody misunderstands either one. The difference is purely stylistic and sociolinguistic, not semantic.

What’s interesting is that English is inconsistent here rather than chaotic. We still preserve nominative case in true subject position (“I am here,” not “me am here”), but after linking verbs the old system has largely eroded in everyday speech. “It is I” survives mainly in elevated, self-conscious, or joking usage—very similar to “whom.”

So your conclusion—“after the verb, objective ‘me’”—matches how contemporary English actually behaves in most contexts. The only caveat is that English doesn’t apply that rule uniformly across all verbs; it’s more that case marking has largely retreated except in a few high-visibility positions (subjects and a few fixed forms).

If you zoom out, English is basically halfway through a centuries-long process of flattening its case system. What remains are a few fossils—“whom,” “I vs me,” “he vs him”—that still carry social signaling weight long after they stopped being structurally necessary.

We have possessive case for nouns but three cases for pronouns. As for English and Latin, I would say English has a huge Latinate vocabulary, from both Latin itself and French, but still a Germanic grammar.

That’s a very clean way to put it, and broadly correct.

English is basically a Germanic grammatical skeleton wrapped in a very large Latinate lexicon, with some Norman French plastering on top from the 1066–early-modern period pipeline. The result is exactly what you’re noticing: vocabulary that often feels Romance-derived in formal registers, but syntax and core structure that are still fundamentally Germanic.

On the case system point, yes—modern English has a very reduced case system overall:

For nouns, we really only have:

• common case: dog, the dog, dogs

• possessive case: dog’s, dogs’

For pronouns, we preserve a bit more morphology:

• subjective: I, he, she, we, they

• objective: me, him, her, us, them

• possessive: my/mine, his, her/hers, our/ours, their/theirs

So it’s not a full case system like Latin, but it’s also not entirely flat—more like a partially preserved fossil structure that survives only where frequency and clarity made it worth keeping.

Your broader observation about grammar is the key historical point: English syntax remained Germanic even as the vocabulary was massively Latinized. That’s why we say things like:

• “I give up” (Germanic phrasal verb structure)
  but also:

• “I surrender” (Latinate single verb expressing the same idea)

And we routinely prefer the Germanic structure in casual speech, while the Latinate equivalents tend to carry more formal or abstract tone. That split is one reason English can feel like it has “two registers built into it.”

One subtle refinement, just for precision: it’s not that English has three cases for pronouns in a fully robust sense like Latin (nominative/accusative/genitive with full paradigms), but rather that it has residual case distinctions preserved in a small, high-frequency pronoun set. That’s why it feels system-like but also inconsistent at the edges.

So your framing is essentially right: English grammar is Germanic in structure, but heavily “lexically Romanized,” and the case system is somewhere between erosion and fossilization depending on the word class.

I read once that English lost its cases, still seen in both German and Latin, because of the Norse. They used nouns similar enough to Old English nouns that communication was possible so long as one ignored the very different case suffixes.

That idea has a grain of truth, but it’s a bit cleaner in popular telling than it is in the historical linguistics.

Old English already had a fairly full case system—nominative, accusative, genitive, dative—much closer to German or Latin than to modern English. The major erosion of that system didn’t happen because Norse speakers told English speakers to “just ignore the endings,” but because sustained contact between Old English and Old Norse created a long period of mass bilingualism and partial mutual intelligibility, which tends to simplify morphology.

Old English and Old Norse were both Germanic languages, and they were similar enough in vocabulary and basic structure that speakers could often make themselves understood. But their inflectional endings differed enough that, in mixed communities—especially in the Danelaw in northern and eastern England—those endings became a kind of “optional overhead” in communication.

In that environment, several reinforcing pressures pushed simplification:

First, communication across dialects and languages favors redundancy reduction. If word order and context can carry meaning reliably, the system with heavy case endings becomes less necessary.

Second, learner acquisition matters. Adult second-language learners (whether Norse learning Old English or vice versa) tend to regularize and strip inflectional complexity. That’s one of the strongest forces in language change.

Third, dialect mixing inside England itself mattered a lot. Even without Norse influence, Old English was not uniform; contact among dialects already encourages leveling of inflections.

The Norse influence shows up most clearly not so much in “causing case loss directly,” but in accelerating a broader simplification process and leaving traces like pronouns (they, them, their are Norse forms replacing Old English ones). The collapse of the case system was gradual and uneven, continuing through Middle English long after the Viking Age.

So the more accurate picture is:

• Old English had cases (like German/Latin).

• Contact with Old Norse created intense dialect mixing and mutual intelligibility pressures.

• That contact contributed to rapid morphological simplification.

• But the full loss of case endings unfolded over centuries through multiple reinforcing processes, not a single Norse-driven mechanism.

The “just ignore the endings and get by” intuition isn’t wrong as a description of communication in mixed communities—it’s just not the sole or direct cause of the grammatical outcome.

Of course, way too simple an idea.

Exactly—these “single cause” stories are almost always a bit too neat for what language actually does.

Language change, especially something as big as the erosion of case endings, is usually more like a slow convergence of pressures rather than a single historical shove. Norse contact is definitely part of the story, but so are internal dialect mixing, phonetic erosion (unstressed endings collapsing over time), and the general tendency of frequently used systems to simplify when meaning can be carried elsewhere.

What makes the Norse contact idea so tempting is that it feels like a clean mechanism: two similar languages collide, endings get “ignored,” and voilà—modern English. But the real process is messier and less intentional, more like drift than design.

A useful way to think of it is: English didn’t “lose” its cases so much as it gradually stopped needing them as much once word order, prepositions, and context took over more of the grammatical workload. Norse contact probably nudged that along, but it wasn’t the sole architect of the outcome.

And in a way, your skepticism here is exactly the right instinct—historical linguistics rarely rewards single-variable explanations.

Is that partly why English learners have to memorize long lists of prepositional phrases?

Yes—very much so, though not only for that reason.

English prepositions are doing a lot of the work that Latin, German, or Old English used to handle with case endings. When a language loses morphological case, it doesn’t lose the distinctions—it just moves them somewhere else. In English, that “somewhere else” is largely:

• prepositions (in, on, at, to, by, with, for…)

• fixed word order

• and a big chunk of idiomatic pairing (“depend on,” “interested in,” “good at,” etc.)

So instead of a noun changing form to show relationships, English often uses a verb + preposition bundle or a preposition + fixed meaning pattern. And those patterns are not fully compositional in the way learners expect.

That’s why learners end up memorizing lists like:

• depend on

• rely on

• interested in

• afraid of

• good at

Because the preposition isn’t always “logical” in a transparent, geometric sense—it’s partly historical residue. Different older constructions (Old English, French influence, phrasal verbs developing over time) settled into conventional pairings.

There’s also a second layer: English prepositions are doing multiple jobs at once that other languages often separate cleanly. For example, “in” can be spatial (in the room), temporal (in 2026), or abstract (in trouble). That polysemy makes rules harder and memorization more necessary.

So your intuition connects correctly to the deeper structural shift:
loss of case endings → more reliance on prepositions → more idiomatic, less rule-transparent combinations → more memorization for learners.

It’s not that English is uniquely chaotic; it’s just that a lot of what used to be encoded in morphology got redistributed into small words that carry a disproportionate amount of grammatical meaning.