To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory. In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”
Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The papers don’t actually say. The truth that these papers don’t report is that the hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”
I’m no physicist, but the idea that all the matter in the known universe had once existed in the form of a particle the size of “nothing” always seemed patently ridiculous.
How many theories rest on assumptions that appear on-the-face-of-it, to be ridiculous…?
Point this out and the response will be, “Well we are here, so that must be how it happened”.
Quote – “…Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists…”
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There has never been a theory that has been questioned as much as the Big Bang. It is the most tested theory in the history of science, not in order to support it, but rather to destroy it. It passed every test.
Why did they want to disprove that theory? Because it says the universe had a beginning, which means it had a cause, a beginner, a creator. To acknowledge that there is a creator would be anathema to any atheist scientist, many of whom had ridiculed and detested the very idea.
Most of these people cannot bring themselves to admit a creator is a much more rational concept than spawning umpteen gazillion new universes every 10-43 seconds based on every possible quantum probability.
So yeah, when some data comes in that questions the fairy dust I’d say they might get a little anxious that all they’ve been doing their whole career has no more value than a kid drawing cartoons…..
Amen!!
Baloney.
Maybe, but it does show to the world. NO-one knows.
Ask me. I know.
The big bang was created by the big suck.
It sucked everything into an incredibly hot, dense state that finally had no other choice than to go BANG!
So who/what created the creator? Or was the creator created in a “big bang” also. God “dun it” is a facile explanation. The big bang is model constructed to explain our puny observations and is always subject to change based on new data. That is science. If some scientists treat the big bang hypothesis as gospel, that is their human failing. Just observe how many “scientists” accept catastrophic climate change as settled science.
If if the existence of anything requires some other thing:
What is matter made of? Molecules.
What are molecules made of? Atoms.
What are atoms made of? Protons, neutrons and electrons.
What are protons, neutrons and electrons made of? Uhhh ….. Quarks?
What are quarks made of? Uhhhh ….. strings?
What are they made of? ______________
What’s that made of? ______________
etc. etc.
At some point there will need to be something that does not rely on anything or anyone else for existence, it exists just “because”.
The most logical candidate for that position is “God”, the “I AM” of the universe.
The answer to the last question is “energy.”
Asking what energy is made of is like a child continually asking why.
Energy has certain dimensions, specifically mass*(length^2)/(time^2).
In fact, if you use natural units of c=G=h=1, then energy simply becomes inverse time.
That’s it, that’s all she wrote.
Quarks could be made of strings, but they cannot be made of yet smaller particles, and this is due to the known relationship between energy and distance, quarks, and electrons are so small that if they did have distinct constituent parts, the energy of the system would be much larger than the mass of the particle in question.
Where did the energy come from?
What is the uncaused cause?
A creator must by definition transcend his creation. The universe is known to have a beginning. A beginning cannot just happen out of nothing, it must have a cause. There is no natural agent that could have caused it, thus a creator is the most likely cause. So who created the creator? What makes you think the creator had a beginning? The universe cannot be infinite in either time or extent, but that does not apply, cannot apply to the creator that transcends it. Time as we know it began with the universe, so the creator must transcend time. Thus a creator need not have a beginning.
The big bang is not a model, it is a theory based on evidence. Like all theories, it is subject to change if new evidence requires it. It isn’t “settled science” but it is what all the evidence suggests up to now.
Eh, the item linked is about the new evidence that counters the expectations — in other words, failed predictions under the BB hypothesis. I’m not sure how you got off on this tangent. Did you even read it?
Kate:
1. BB is a scientific theory, it passed testing beyond being a hypothesis long ago, and your using of that term is intellectually dishonest.
2. Our models of the formation of the earliest galaxies, several hundred million years after the BB are what are in question, not the BB model itself.
I did read it.
I got off on this tangent because I object to this statement:
“…that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists…”
I object to that statement because the big bang has NEVER been defended as unquestionable truth, and the vast majority of cosmological theorists have tried to prove it wrong for more than a century. Most of them have been dragged kicking and screaming into admitting the big bang theory appears to be right. They came up with the idea of a multiverse in a rather pathetic attempt to get around it, because of the implicit requirement of a creator.
The existence of non-zero vacuum energy implies a multiverse, for at least two reasons that I know of:
1. If part of this universe tunnels into a lower vacuum energy state (and thereby heats up to about a million degrees), that is essentially spawning another universe within this one. If this happens rarely enough, it’ll go on forever, as very few will actually touch each other and collapse our entire bubble into the lower energy state. (this is basically a slowed down version of “eternal inflation”)
2. If no part of this universe ever tunnels to a lower energy state, then you run into Boltzmann brain problems.
The time coordinates in other universes, or in the inflating medium in which they may be spawned is not the same time coordinate as the one we use, in this universe. A being that exists within multiple time (and space) coordinates could well be said to transcend the time and space coordinates of any of the individual little bubbles. Multiverse theories actually have more scope for a Creator than any other type of theory.
Why do they limit God’s creation to the observable universe? Because its all their little minds can conceive of, other than nebulous realms of Heaven and Hell, and they struggle to lock God’s work into one little book of Holy Words, be it the Koran or whatever. His works and laws are not so easily quantified, and to make the claim that they are, and dismiss people who actually try to quantify his laws by observing the laws that creation itself works by are, IMHO, the true blasphemers of God’s word.
Fear of mathematics unless it’s an absolutely useless equation that is incorrect in the first place.
But no one supposed to know as many different awards were given away for shamefully bogus education.
And so, who runs and pays for our educational system…our governments.
I would be classed as an engineer as I do a multitude of measurements and supplies management of materials needed for my projects.
Would it surprise you that our orbital gases are at different velocities and you map the distance of our planet?
It gives our planet it’s energy to rotate and holds down our planets gases as our planets counteracts with centrifugal force.
So many fascinating aspects are occurring including water changes direction at certain latitudes…no glaciers along that line…
The imbalance of weight is being a problem as our planet water loss to space.
As they look at the ultra small and impossibly large, they see and learn new rules.
Way back, there was the question of whether light was a wave or a particle. It seems to be both or neither and/or something else. The models of the Universe worked only if there was a huge amount of mass that no one could see, i.e. “dark matter”. Some idiots thought that “dark matter” was something real. Actually, it was a snide reference to how badly the models of the universe related to the reality.
At the fringes of very small and very large, our understandings fail. Particle and wave are classroom concepts. Reality doesn’t work that way. Don’t worry, when they figure it all out, you and I will probably be unable to understand it or the math involved.
Relax and enjoy the night sky and the person next to you. That is hard enough.
The astronomers are forgetting the basic instruction on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t Panic!”
HAHAHA. Great movie.
I never believed in the Big Bang (that it gave rise to the known universe) either but give credit to astronomers for not burying the evidence or covering it up like the climate scientists do. I like it when theoretical scientists panic (well not the ones working on fusion energy).
The expansion of the universe and the Big Bang are not the same thing. The former is an empirical observation. The later is a theoretical model of the universe when it was much smaller than it is today, as it must have been if it is expanding today.
The James Webb telescope images have not given evidence contradicting the expansion, but have given evidence that our model of what happened during the expansion is incorrect.
Just as Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is incorrect. Note that the first person to publish empirical observations that could not be explained by the LUG was . . . Isaac Newton. He never believed the model to be correct himself. He always knew it to be flawed in some aspect.
Cosmologists may have believed in the reality of the Big Bang model, but I’ve never met a physicist who wasn’t also observably a midwit who did. It is a model, a model based partly on empirical observation, but partly on certain assumptions which may or may not prove to be empirically correct. All we have known for a fact is that “the math works.”
Given that, I note that one way to express the primal singularity in plain English is: “Here is where the math fails.”
I don’t understand any of those theoretical equation except pi(3.14149) which is a complete circle.
Adding motion to the equation made it completely fall apart.
As motion in an open ended equation adds distortion to measurements.
The more I tried to use it, the worse the correction that would be needed.
So, any equation that includes pi is incorrect as it’s an open ended circle.
” . . . pi(3.14149) . . .”
pi is not 3.14149, and therefore not a complete circle. pi is 3.14159265. . .
This introduces an analog of Xeno’s paradox of Achilles and the hare, just as Achilles can never catch the hare, no matter how fast he runs, the circle never closes. The Theory of limits, the foundation of the calculus, resolves the paradox and the circle closes, just as Achilles not only catches, but passes the hare.
This itself can be used to show why mathematical singularities should not be taken as a true statement of reality.
Its natural that Pi, e, and others are transcendental.
If you remove all transcendental from the real numbers, the set left is countable infinite, but the set of transcendental is uncountably infinite, ie it’s cardinality is the power set of the countably infinite set, an infinitely larger set. If you pick a random number along the real number line, the probability that it is transcendental is 1-x, where x is infinitesimally small.
In other words, the mathematical statement of the primal singularity is not a statement about the nature of reality, that it is “nothing,” it is a statement about the mathematical state of the model: That it tells us nothing.
In plain English: it is, by definition, not “real.”
Just because we see things expanding around us does not mean the universe is expanding. What if our field of view is 0.000000021% of the actual universe dimensions (which likely has no limit). As we look 13 Byrs into the past it looks as though our known universe is expanding. But anything could be happening including some big guy waving his arms.
The fact that our view of the universe is limited by our view of the universe is understood and taken into account by various models, most of which, by their nature, are speculative.
For instance, that our term “universe” is just as much a misnomer as our term “atom.”
I believe it was Rumsfeld who coined the phrase “unknown unknowns”. Your statement “the fact that our view of the universe is limited … is understood and taken into account” can’t be right. We don’t know what we don’t know.
Limits on a model only work when you know what exists beyond those limits. You can test your assumptions. When you don’t know, then your model is wrong. This is the classic case behind the climate models. The models assume that as CO2 concentration increases, Earth temperature rises – even though we know this to be untrue in the past. But not having any information on the future makes them valid because as you say these limits are “understood and taken into account”. No actually. The model is assumed to be correct and the observations are modified to fit the model.
” …observations are modified to fit the model.”
That is not the case with cosmology.
Also, just because we cannot see beyond the surface of last scattering is not evidence that all that lies beyond it is green cheese, or that our models somehow, magically lose all validity beyond that distance.
I actually quoted Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, and added that they may well be unknowable to us, but redacted it as breaking the flow of my post. You caught the implied presence nonetheless, so score a point there.
“Limits on a model only work when you know what exists beyond those limits.”
We knew from the outset that there was an unknown beyond Newton’s law of gravitation, but had no clue what it was, yet it worked perfectly well for Napoleon’s artillery. A model being incomplete does not imply that it is without practical utility.
(Know-it-alls say things like the mRNA will %100 keep you from getting the Wuhan SARS2.)
Wasn’t the earth center of the universe?
For human beings it still is. We ain’t going anywhere.
Torontonians believe Toronto is Center of the Universe. COTU syndrome is strong there.
Explains alot!
Space is fake.
A theory so implausible only a cosmologist would believe it.
White coats spewing out big words and large numbers impresses many, just like the guy in a big cavernous and echoing building, preaching high above on a stage behind a pulpit did for centuries and still does albeit to a lesser extent today.
-We still don’t know much about what lies in the deepest areas of our oceans but we claim we can predict the climate down to fractions in a distant future?
-We are apparently now discovering that some foods categorized as junk are actually better than some categorized as healthy food…at the same time we can’t explain why some people with “unhealthy” habits live much longer than some health freaks.
Bottom line is that in many respects mathematics does not apply thus the answers must be in the realm of a Creator (?)
Metalguru, “-We still don’t know much about what lies in the deepest areas of our oceans but we claim we can predict the climate down to fractions in a distant future?”
Those are wise words, thank you.
Why are they panicking?
they get to do actual science, of observation and revision to the theory, which should excite them
Astronomer here. The issue with this is that the scientists working on the standard model of cosmology, known as the Lambda-Cold-Dark-Matter (LCDM) theory, don’t want to do real, Popperian, science. They’ve been patching up the theory to meet observational challenges for decades already. They’ve been looking for the CDM for 50 years, and they still have not even found a likely candidate. If ancient Greek astronomy was criticized for adding epicycles to their epicycles to get the motion of the moon right, then these people are so deep into their epicycles that they can’t even tell that they contradict each other.
Which is all a shame, because there’s another cosmological paradigm, MOND, for which early structure formation is a prediction. For a somewhat technical view of the current fuss, see https://tritonstation.com/2022/08/05/a-few-early-results-from-jwst/ and the posts before and after. If you want to really dig into MOND, see David Merritt’s recent book on the subject.
The truth seems likely to be a combination of both theories. There are observations that cannot be explained by MOND, and observations that cannot be explained by CDM.
Ha I was just rereading Reinventing Gravity by John Moffat …. a physics prof I had at U of Toronto a million years ago 😉
Anyway last night I plowed through the sections on Milgrom’s MOND and Bekenstein’s relativistic version of MOND. Made my head hurt.
I think all the folks here that don’t have at least several university level physics courses are wasting their time thinking too much about the early universe, the expanding universe etc etc
Or as HiHo sez “if you can’t do tensor math / if you don’t know the math” you are wasting your time.
Also don’t take the “big bang” science too seriously … as Stephen Hawking said “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine” …. Hawking was paraphrasing Haldane’s quote.
I won’t go near all the god / invisible friend comments!!!!
“I’m no physicist, but…”
yep.
If ya can’t do tensor math, then your opinion about cosmology is as valid as a Toronto Karen’s opinion about diesel engine design.
Don’t get me started on “Dark Matter” which is the dog ate my homework of modern cosmology.
BS. We see it by its interactions, much in the same way that you see an apple by its interactions.
All these armchair “scientists” who can’t do the math and rely on crap from The New Scientist or worse to form their “informed” opinions.
Gravitational lensing by mass that does not have an electromagnetic interaction is an observational fact. Rotational anomalies in most galaxies is another.
How do you know that a distant galaxy has no electromagnetic interaction?
Galaxies do have electromagnetic interaction, that’s how we see them. The apparent mass haloes of dark matter that cause the rotational anomalies (if the theory is correct) do not, nor do fields of the stuff between us and distant galaxies, it only has gravitational interaction, so all we can see of it is how light gets diverted as it passes through its gravitational field.
Some MOND models can model most but not all rotational anomalies without dark mater, but so far, the only model we have that explains some of the lensing we see is dark matter.
The astronomers are engaging in scientific debate and study.
New information, when reliable is welcome.
Keep looking.
Yup.
There seems to be many who think that if new observations pose more questions than they answer, then all previous models should be thrown out, and everybody should just give up, because “God”, which as actually an insult to God, because the laws of physics are truly God’s laws, and we were created in his image, and are thus capable of understanding His laws.
More baloney.
Stunning ripost.
Yoo iz so smrt.
You ever use GPS? Then you implicitly use general relativity.
You use computers, phones, etc? Then you implicitly use quantum mechanics.
Do you think PET scans work or H-bombs work? Then you implicitly admit that the Standard Model also works.
When you can actually point to a part of the math that is undeniably wrong, and come up with math that not only fits all past observations, but also describes new observations, and makes testable predictions, then you’re doing science.
When you’re saying “I don’t believe in CDM or the Big Bang”, without even knowing the math, then you’re talking out of your ahole.
I suggest that you look up “Standard Model Lagrangian”, and understand that, for starters.
One big oversight when telling people who do not believe in the Big Bang that “they are talking out of their aholes” is the assumption that the people who do the math are not. An example math mistake was the world’s smartest man (Lord Kelvin) who “calculated” the Earth to be 20-100 million years old based on heat flow analysis. He was right for 30 years until his theory was proven wrong. Math correct, wrong theory. Was he more right than people who disbelieved his theory but couldn’t do the math, or just as wrong?
The people who disproved him had better math. No math, no science.
Not just better math. They realized that radioactive decay heating the earth’s interior was much more significant than Kelvin’s calculation based on simple thermal cooling from a hot formative state. Kelvin also ascribed solar radiation to gravitational collapse, nuclear fusion not being discovered yet.
Agreed, they had more and better data, knowledge of tidal gravitational friction, plate tectonics, radioactive heating as you mentioned, etc.
That being said, Kelvin still did science, and people who doubted it based on ideas other than the available data were not. Those who thought the Earth was only 6000 years old (and some still do) were even more wrong, those that thought it was older made some lucky guesses, the closer they got to around 4.5 billion years old, the luckier their guess. Lucky guesses !=science.
I just want to know one thing. Can we go to Mars and live there?
Maybe, in a thousand years or so.
Some good practice would be some entirely self-sufficient colonies in terms of energy and food in the Sahara and Antarctica, that last for at least a few hundred years with zero resupply.
A thousand years seems pessimistic. What do you think of Robert Zubrin’s “The Case For Mars”? While he may be a tad optimistic, I don’t see any reason to think that we couldn’t put a viable colony on Mars within 50 years, max. Probably a lot less, if we wanted to.
I think we could get a permanently manned base that needs regular re-supply going on those sort of timescales, but a fully self-sufficient colony of over 300 people, showing population growth year after year, decade after decade, raising families, etc? I stand by my 1000 year estimate.
In the Big Bang, there was no centre and no pre-existing void, so it didn’t happen at any ‘location’. Space itself popped into existence and began expanding everywhere at once.
Huh? No point of origin in the theory? Multiple points of origin? Why? How? We are smart, and getting smarter … primarily because we can observe more … through ever more detailed empirical observation (kfg) both up close and out far … but we still haven’t come close to discovering the singularity that describes our universe. The closest thing we have to singularity is God. Call it a flimsy theory … but at least it empirically describes our world with surprising accuracy
Lastly, the author of that article is a proponent of the completely debunked pseudo-science of “the electric universe”, and as such his opinion on things is about as valid as a flat-earther’s opinion on intercontinental flights and spaceflight in general, but the rubes still like to give him money. He’s like one of those Green activist environmental pseudo-scientists.
On the rare occasion when I get my telescope out and catch Saturn or Jupiter, to see them against the black void, it is hard to fathom that they orbit the sun as we do. They’re just hanging there while making telescope adjustments as the earth rotates. Mesmerizing.
As for the origin of the universe, it is beyond my comprehension that out of all the galaxies, planets and such that we are here (what are the odds?). Maybe that explains the reasoning for God.
The fact is, our current theory of gravity works perfectly, with no measurable errors at all, from scales of about 1mm to around 10 000 light years, and with some MOND models, +CDM, from 1mm to the edge of the electromagnetically observable universe, aka the surface of last scattering.
The Standard Model based on quantum field theory works almost perfectly with one or two measurable errors from scales of about 10^-15 meters to the edge of the electromagnetically observable universe universe.
People who cannot do better themselves, but who say our theories are “wrong” are like people who want to abandon fossil fuels, but have no viable replacement for them.
Full disclosure. One of the measurable errors of the Standard Model just happens to be the single biggest error ever, in the history of physics. The Standard Model predicts a vacuum energy of around 120 orders of magnitude bigger then the observed vacuum energy. Its basically the ultraviolet catastrophe writ large, in quantum terms. That’s what Supersymmetric theories were supposed to fix, but almost all of them have been ruled out, and to rule them out completely, we need a bigger accelerator.
The quote at the bottom was NOT questioning the big bang, here is another quote from him on that very question:
“Absolutely not! Galaxy evolution is actually a problem completely separate from the Big Bang. You can have a Big Bang and yet create no galaxies. One does not imply the other. I was referring to our current understanding of galaxy evolution.”
The author of the link distorted everything to make it seem like that. No surprise that he’s anti big bang theory.
The guy’s whole shtick is “the electric universe” pseudo-science BS. Look him up.
Ohhhh boy.
For anyone question the big bang – or the expanding universe – please explain the CMB.