The Webb: more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy
The eagerly-awaited Webb photographs present a conundrum concerning a large and seemingly rather “settled” question in cosmology, the Big Bang. That article is by physicist Eric J. Lerner, who already was on record as a Big Bang doubter (does that make him a “Big Bang denier“?), but here’s what he has to say:
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.
What does it mean? I certainly don’t know, but it’s fascinating. I’m no physicist (duh!), but I’ve long followed cosmology to the extent of my ability to understand it, which is not a huge extent. But I’ve long wondered whether the Big Bang theory would someday be upended by something else, perhaps a return to ye olde Steady State, somewhat modified, or even something as-yet-undreamt-of by all of us Horatios.
NOTE: Here’s some more background, from about a month ago. And here’s an article discussing some of the historical disagreement with the Big Bang theory. I notice that a festival scheduled for a month from now in London, where Lerner will be speaking, is entitled “HowTheLightGetsIn.” Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem chorus,” anyone?:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
And sure enough, the HowTheLightGetsIn get-together is billed as a “THE WORLD’S LARGEST MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY FESTIVAL.” Then again, how many music and philosophy festivals are there?
Amongst the many reasons for the great interest in and enthusiasm for the images from the Webb (completely aside from the fascinating implications of this remarkable venture for science, cosmology, philosophy, and theology), perhaps the most fascinating is that the images are so ravishingly beautiful and sublime (in the eighteenth-century sense of the term). It is undeniable that most contemporary art revels in sheer ugliness, callophobia having long ago obliterated any aesthetic imperative exisiting within the culture to produce things of beauty; several of the late and much-lamented R Scruton’s best lectures (available on YouTube) concern this very topic.
In science, “There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic.
To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits.
To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.” Robert A. Heinlein
It will be interesting to see how many in the relevant fields of study will refuse to accept the new evidence. As more often than not, dogma dies a hard death.
You mean … The experts didn’t know it all? Let me recover from the shock.
“A UNIVERSE TAILORED JUST FOR YOU”
“The more that cosmologists and physicists have plumbed the depths of the laws governing our universe, the more they have been unsettled. They have found that the laws of nature seem to have been very finely tuned to make life possible. If just one of many constants and principles governing the cosmos were different by even the slightest amount, then life as we know it—in fact, life in the universe at all—could not exist!”
https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/magazines/2018/september-october/a-universe-tailored-just-for-you
Lerner’s an advocate for “Plasma Cosmology”, one of the non-standard comsmologies of which there are a few of I guess. Just because the Big Bang may not end up being correct doesn’t necessarily mean Plasma Cosmology is of course.
I do know that one of the issues with the Big Bang model is that it requires the Universe to be “isotropic” (meaning everything looks more or less the same in all directions), and there have been some large scale observations that seem to contradict that assumption.
…a Big Bang doubter (does that make him a “Big Bang denier“?)
–neo
Pretty much. It’s not a good career move in any event.
Halton Arp (1927-2013) is perhaps the most well-known “Big Bang” critic. He was one of the great observational astronomers of the 20th C. He got time using the big telescopes at Hale Observatories (including the 200″ at Mt. Palomar).
He compiled the “Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies” — galaxies which appeared anomalous to current theory and the Big Bang.
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With time, as evidence mounted supporting the Big Bang, Arp’s contention was seen as less and less credible. Eventually he was no longer allotted observing time on the world’s big telescopes, and he retired from the Hale staff to join the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics near Munich, Germany. It’s in Munich that he died, at age 86, on December 28th.
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/cosmologist-halton-arp-19272013/
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My bet is the Webb just added a bunch more “peculiar galaxies” to Arp’s compilation.
“A UNIVERSE TAILORED JUST FOR YOU”
Geoffrey Britain:
Yes, we live in a bespoke universe!
I wouldn’t want to live in one of those off-the-rack universes.
This is very exciting stuff. The best of times for physics is when the existing theory is shown to be wanting and we need something new.
The lack of evidence for dark matter, dark energy and inflation has not stopped the Standard Model being applied to the Big Bang but still lacking the QM/GR meld. But now with Webb, we may finally see the beginning of a new understanding. The second reference Neo put in on Anderson and Resonance theory is a good thing to read. As I have mentioned before I’m sort of placing my money on the Italian fluid spacetime idea which eliminates the need for dark anything and maybe (fingers crossed) will turn out to be more compatible with QM. It has some similarities to Anderson’s RT.
What a great time to be a 30 something physicist. I will probably be dead before all this gets sorted out. Looks like the Webb was worth every penny spent though. Now if we could just get the climate bunch back into science instead of politics…..
So, if the Big Bang is correct, what exactly exploded (evaporated)?
A black hole?
If so, where did the black hole come from?
Presumably a black hole is what’s left over after a large star loses it (fusion) energy and collapses upon itself. The gravitational forces of the imploded star can be so large that it literally sucks up anything within (near?) it’s event horizon.
So this must mean before the black hole came into existence, it was originally a star.
So where did the star come from?
What came first, the chicken or the egg??
Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” opined that a new scientific theory/explanation – one that supplants a long held belief – can only take hold after the “old guard” as died (died, as in the literal sense).
He was correct, because any (non-retired) scientist that does not accept the existing dogma is relegated to the pasture to join the retired thoroughbreds.
Today of course, this means the recalcitrant scientist will receive no funding for research, will have his/her papers rejected for publication, and will have no grad students to do the grunt work.
He / she is essentially finished (at least in academia; see Judith Curry).
And this is in physics – a hard science – unlike the phony baloney “science” of global warming/climate change, sociology, nutrition science and economics, just to name a few; all “sciences” in which controlled experiments cannot be conducted and in which “results” are derived by statistical analysis, which then oft times requires somebody to provide an explanation of the results, and which, miracle of miracles, conforms to the POLITICAL IDEOLOGY of the experimenter (e.g., Paul Krugman, global warming advocates, etc) .
As for the Big Bang Theory (BBT) I have zero clue if it is an accurate depiction of what really occurred or if it will go the way of Cold Fusion.
The trajectory / dogma for these latter four “sciences,” are determined by “cult figures,” the most prominent / famous amongst their clique or by those most effective in employing effective propaganda(see climate change. )
O
JohnTyler,
Your understanding of the BB is a bit flawed. It doesn’t postulate the universe came from an exploding black hole. Based on larger redshifts of galaxies (Hubble) correlating with increased distance and thus further back in time, the universe seems to be expanding. Add the observation of the 2.3 degree background radiation. Then run “the movie” backwards. What you get is the universe starting from an incredibly small, hot, dense object which then explodes outward and cools.
The model works very well with observations from the universe being about 400,000 years old and on to present. Prior to that age, not so much.
This bit of news is way overblown. The problem is that galaxies seem to have evolved faster than expected. Galaxy evolution is a complicated problem, and this is just some useful data that will drive future ideas. Indeed, even the large scale arrangement of the galaxies is a subject for speculation, they aren’t evenly spread around. The big bang, OTOH, is well supported by many observations, including the prevalence of the various elements. The mysteries associated with the big bang are inflation, for which the main evidence is the remarkable flatness of the observable universe, and the small acceleration of the expansion rate. There are other problems, but I doubt solving them will do away with the big bang, they will just refine it.
If you are really interested here is a lecture by Paul Steinhardt of Princeton about his Endless Universe Theory, an alternative to the standard Big Bang Theory. He doesn’t doubt the Big Bang theory itself, the data is too good, but he does doubt Cosmic Inflation, what came before the Big Bang. His idea is the endless universe where it expands and then contracts in an endless cycle.
One thing I found fascinating was that his colleagues were only recently able to make progress is due to the very complicated mathematics and computer programs developed to model the colliding black holes detected by the LIGO gravitational wave detector.
https://youtu.be/S7-HNi2ne44
Physicsguy, what is the “Italian fluid spacetime idea”? Can you link to a free popular exposition?
As for dark matter, color me skeptical. There has been at least 30 years of experiments looking for subatomic particles that are needed to make the idea work. None of them has been found.
As an experimenter, I think that the problem is that you can’t go way out there in the universe and “ kick the tires”. There now also seem to be more and more small galaxies discovered that don’t need dark matter to explain their structure. Interesting…
well they are capturing a image, near the point of origin correct, 13 billion years thereabouts, presumably the whole universe would be 2X in diameters, as we’re only as far as the radius, but what object could be dense enough to contain that much matter,
huxley,
Oh I agree. Is there anything more mediocre than an off-the-rack universe?
Radio astronomy observations of Pulsars indicate that the Hubble Red Shift is caused by “Tired Light” rather than the expansion of the universe.
When Hubble published his observations of red shifted light from distant objects there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zwicky, was that light lost energy as it traveled, termed “tired light”. At that time, ca. 1930, interstellar and intergalactic space were assumed to be perfect vacuums and thus there was no mechanism to redden the light. Now, 90 years later, we have actual observational evidence that Zwicky was right.
In the radio astronomy of Pulsars we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant but varies by wavelength. This time dispersion is proportional to the distance from us of the pulsar, indicating that the reduction in velocity is cumulative. The observed effect is isotropic. The interstellar medium is not a vacuum but rather affects light waves in a way best described as having an Index of Refraction greater than 1, unity. We find the same phenomenon in the observation of Fast Radio Bursts from other galaxies, thus indicating that the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum.
So all that stuff about photons meeting and making electrons or something might be recalled?
To iterate my stance on things: The problem with many cosmologists etc is that they believe their math defines the universe instead of describing it. Subtle but important difference.
GB @ 3:59 — on a universe tailored just for you:
From his cited link: “… physicists have discovered that the ratios of the particle masses that make up the atom cannot vary by even the tiniest amount. If they did, then the lives of stars would be too short or, in the worst case, even atoms themselves could not exist.”
So the universe is made for the universe, regardless of whether any life ever is generated within that universe. Assertions about the specialness of “life” seem to presuppose the existence of some “elan vitale” separate from the 4 currently recognized nature forces. But current scientific thinking suggests that life is “merely” the extension of inorganic chemistry to organic chemistry to biochemistry, which (a few random nuclear radiation events aside) is wholly within the electromagnetic force realm. With the astronomical numbers of trillions of stars/galaxies, it is probable there are millions to billions of “goldilocks” planets with conditions suitable for the generation of life, although not all such examples would evolve to a “wise man” species.
I believe the above is correct, unless physicsguy wants to offer a refinement.
“what is the “Italian fluid spacetime idea”?
It was a theory that came about after an evening of drinking a bottle of Amaretto.
The Big Bang bloomed out of the Steady State at a word.
Still, as Robert Frost knew:
“It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.”
@ physicsguy > “Now if we could just get the climate bunch back into science instead of politics…..”
Not gonna happen.
Too much money and power is invested in the climate change aka AGW hoax (or hysteria, if you believe there is a smidgeon of fact behind the fiction), way too much now to be abandoned.
And it’s going from bad to worse.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/18/the-green-threat-to-the-first-amendment/
The velocity of light is only constant in a vacuum. If the ’empty space’ between stars (and galaxies) isn’t empty enough to qualify as a vacuum, then obviously light will travel more slowly than c. It’s the sort of thing that would get noticeable if you are either A) looking for it and/or B) start looking at things over greater distances.
@Boobah,
“There are none so blind as those who will not see”.
See my comment above for the observational evidence that the space between the stars is not a perfect vacuum. The evidence is in plain sight and is studiously ignored by the “Cult of the Big Bang”.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil” ~ Timothy 6:10 KJV.
“For the love of theory is the root of all folly” ~ Me.
God made the universe. Spoken into existence by Jesus Christ. And he is coming back soon to straighten the world out and rule with a rod of iron.
seemingly rather “settled” question in cosmology, the Big Bang.
It has been continuously challenged and updated by cosmologists since proposed in 1927, and was first viewed as an attempt by a Catholic priest to import God into physics. The “Big Bang” was derisive nickname applied by an astronomer who didn’t accept it and wished to discredit it with the public. It was not generally accepted until the 1970s, and since then has been changed and revised many times in response to new observations especially after 1990. The idea that it is some kind of scientific dogma that is career death to challenge, as some commenters here seem to believe, is a horselaugh since it’s challenged and revised continually.
There’s a ton of evidence explained very well by Big Bang theories (there hasn’t been just one) and then a smaller set of evidence not explained very well, and so far no competing set of theories does that well. Anything new that is not the Big Bang is going to have to look a lot like it, in the same way that Einstein’s relativity makes the same predictions as Newton’s for the kinds of situations Newton was interested in. But Einstein’s theories predicted new and different things in other situations, and so likewise so would any valid alternative to Big Bang theories.
As for dark matter and dark matter energy, while they might not turn out to exist, using theories to predict new kinds of matter has had a long history in science and has been sometimes successful: neutrinos and positrons being the most prominent examples. And it also happens the other way, that the predicted types of matter are never found or made irrelevant by a different theory that doesn’t require them. Wait long enough and new observations eventually settle which it is….
The idea that it is some kind of scientific dogma that is career death to challenge, as some commenters here seem to believe, is a horselaugh since it’s challenged and revised continually.
Frederick:
Arp’s losing telescope time at Hale — and as a result his career as an observational astronomer — because of his opposition to the Big Bang isn’t a mistaken belief on my part. I supplied a cite from “Sky & Telescope,” a prominent astronomy publication, to that effect.
Likewise the “panic” neo references among cosmologists as a result of the Webb images.
It’s one thing for the Big Bang to be challenged and revised. It’s much more serious to doubt the Big Bang entirely as Arp did. He favored a return to some version of Hoyle’s Steady State Theory. This is the point I think you are missing.
Arp’s evidence, as I recall, involved a a fair number of low-red-shift galaxies which appeared linked to high-red-shift galaxies, which should be impossible according to the Big Bang, since the degree of red shift correlates with how far away an object is.
One of the things I love about this blog is how often I have the following experience. I read the post, read a few comments, think of something I believe should be said, and then someone beats me to it and does it better than I could have anyway. Frederick at 8:55 am does that here.
Roy, I’m not vey familiar with much of what you say here. Does the “tired light” idea imply that the universe is not expanding? Does it follow that it is static?
Late getting back to this, soccer season started this morning and I had a 10am game. Thankfully U12G which didn’t require a whole lot of running on my part given it was 93 degrees and 70% humidity…water break every 10 minutes.
Mike Plaiss: any replacement theory for the BB must account for the redshift of galaxies with distance. The easiest explanation is the expanding universe; it’s the BB’s very strong cornerstone. Add to that how the BB also neatly explains the cosmic microwave background. Not an easy model to overthrow.
The Italian idea I keep referencing is by Liberati and Maccione who posit spacetime as a superfluid. So there can be “flows” which would affect redshifts. Also, as a point, the speed of light can be derived as 1/(SQRTepilson0,*mu0), where epsilon0 and mu0 are the permittivity and permeability of free space. Those values change inside materials, and thus also the speed of light; ie SoL is slower in materials. The fact that they exist suggests a structure to spacetime beyond the GR mass-energy curvature. The L&M idea allows for varying e0 and mu0, just as they vary within regular fluids. I find it a fascinating idea that could be fruitful. But as Sagan said…extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Is Webb starting to show such?? Maybe, maybe not, but exciting to watch unfold.
physicsguy:
Would L&M reconcile Arp’s observations of low-red-shift and high-red-shift galaxies being close together?
Arp’s “peculiar galaxies” are written off as optical illusions. Something close up may appear near something far off when reduced to a 2-D image. However, in Arp’s photos these galaxies looked connected by tendrils. Persuasively so, to my amateur eye.
However, I have no dog in this fight. I am impressed at my layman level by the evidence for the Big Bang.
On the other hand it is clear to me science today is not the science I learned about when young. There are now dogmas which can damage a career or theory cutting against the grain of dogma as we have seen all too clearly with climate change and now with Covid and trans.
Lee Smolin shares the same concern in his book, “The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next” (2006).
BTW, I’ve never been impressed with Sagan’s maxim about “extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence.” Is there a meter, numerical method or scientific procedure for measuring “extraordinariness”?
Of course, there isn’t. That’s a human judgment and often by a human far from being disinterested.
Today’s climate change scientists have made it clear they won’t hear contrary evidence at all. Sagan himself is an excellent example too for his treatment of anything involved with UFOs.
About those climate science modelers:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gregory-wrightstone/2022/08/20/corruption-of-climate-science-supported-by-flawed-models-n1622586
GIGO, concensus garbage is still garbage.
@Mike Plaiss,
The Hubble Red Shift is not due to the Doppler effect (the premise for LeMaitre’s expanding universe) but rather a loss of velocity due to traversing a medium that is not a perfect vacuum. We see this all around us every day in the blue of the sky, the colors of the rainbow, a prism, a lens, a stick in water that appears bent. Light slows down and red slows more than blue. The physical science optics measures this effect as the Index of Refraction.
The speed of light is very difficult to measure and impossible for distant objects, except for an occlusion event. The first semi-accurate estimate of c was made by timing the moons of Jupiter as they passed behind the planet. Pulsars simulate an occlusion event. The pulse is, for all practical purposes, a square wave. It contains multitudes – wavelengths from the very long to the very short. In the observations of Pulsars by radio astronomy we see shorter wavelengths arriving before longer wavelengths. The speed varies by wavelength. The path is not a perfect vacuum. The time difference, the Dispersion Measure, increases linearly with the distance to the Pulsar. This is precisely what happens in an earthly laboratory with denser materials. The effect is isotropic – it is the same in all directions meaning it is not path dependent. We observe the same effect with Fast Radio Bursts in nearby galaxies, meaning that the intergalctic medium is also not a perfect vacuum.
These measurements are at very long wavelengths – in the microwave region. The effect is so slight that photons in the visible light spectrum are not noticeably affected for objects closer than a billion light years or so. So yes, this implies a static universe.
@physicsguy,
There is nothing in particular about the CMB to associate it with the Big Bang. It is a black body radiation with no spectral lines to gauge its distance. Roger Penrose has noted that the CMB is at or near maximum entropy which implies that is as old as the universe itself. My guess is that it is the temperature of the interstellar medium. That might account for the universe being twice as bright as it should be.
@Everybody,
Now for the $64 question. How come everything in the universe spins? From the tiniest particle to the largest galaxies. There is nothing in Newtonian Mechanics or General Relativity that causes objects to rotate. The only force that does that is electromagnetism. This is not a matter of optical illusions or other uncertainties. Everything spins. If your theory can’t account for the spin it’s a non-starter.
Thanks for the response Roy. So if the theory you’re discussing implies a static universe, what does that then imply about General Relativity? Does the cosmological constant go back in?
The Hubble Red Shift is not due to the Doppler effect (the premise for LeMaitre’s expanding universe) but rather a loss of velocity due to traversing a medium that is not a perfect vacuum.
Roy Lofquist:
I take it this is *your* theory. Standard theory is otherwise:
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On modern reckoning, the explosion — now called the Big Bang — took place some 1.4 x 10^10 years ago. Hubble’s conclusions were based on the fact the light from rapidly receding objects is redshifted (so the spectral lines are displaced to the ‘red end of the spectrum’, i.e. to longer wavelengths) owing to the Doppler Effect.
–Roger Penrose, “The Road to Reality” p.704
@Mike Plaiss,
It ain’t a theory, Mike. It’s an extrapolation of observations to known laboratory phenomena. As for General Relativity, I don’t think there are any implications. GR, and gravity in general, are local phenomena – solar system size or slightly larger. Solar system meaning the Oort cloud and beyond, not just Pluto’s orbit. The only noticeable effect of GR is the precession of Mercury’s orbit by 38 arc seconds per century. That’s the equivalent of a gnat’s eyebrow in a bowl of Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder.
Roy Lofquist:
Assuming you are talking to me and not Mike Plaiss…
Sure, light is affected by the medium in which it travels and space is not a perfect vacuum.
Nonetheless, the Hubble Redshift as understood by Hubble himself on down to the rather brilliant Roger Penrose is due to the Doppler Effect, as in my previous quote.
@huxley,
If you say so.
Well, I did a medium, not deep, dive into the Webb Telescope and the Big Bang. Here’s my current understanding. The Webb Telescope is looking as far back into cosmic history as it can and finding too many small, bright, smooth galaxies than the Big Bang models predicted:
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Within days after Webb began observations, it spotted a candidate galaxy that appears to have been shining brightly when the universe was just 230 million years old, 1.7% of its current age, which would make it the most distant ever seen. Surveys since then have shown that object is just one of a stunning profusion of early galaxies, each small by today’s standards, but more luminous than astronomers had expected.
https://www.science.org/content/article/webb-telescope-reveals-unpredicted-bounty-bright-galaxies-early-universe
______________________
So there is reason for mainstream cosmologists to panic.
Here’s more from Eric Lerner, who is a strong opponent of the Big Bang, and whom neo referenced:
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Too old and too many galaxies mean the same thing. The JWST uses many different filters to take its images in the infrared part of the spectrum. Thus, it can see the colors of the distant galaxies. This in turn allows astronomers to estimate the age of the stars in these galaxies because young, hot stars are blue in color and older, cooler stars, like our sun, are yellow or red in color. According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur.
Just as there must be no galaxies older than the Big Bang, if the Big Bang hypothesis were valid, so theorists expected that as the JWST looked out further in space and back in time, there would be fewer and fewer galaxies and eventually none—a Dark Age in the cosmos. But a paper to be published in Nature demonstrates that galaxies as massive as the Milky Way are common even a few hundred million years after the hypothesized Bang. The authors state that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time, so again– no Big Bang.
https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215?_auid=2020
If there is no Big Bang, or at least none as current theory demands, this is on par with the Copernican revolution which overthrew the model of the Universe with Earth at its center.
It wipes the slate clean of all the “revisions” to the Big Bang, which Frederick earlier boasted of.
Particularly Guth’s “Inflation Theory” — which to get around some Big Bang problems proposed that very shortly after the Bang and for a very short time the space of Universe suddenly “inflated” at a huge rate never seen again.
Inflation smoothed out various bumps in the cosmological carpet, but it always struck me as a giant hack, like Ptolemaic epicycles preserved Earth as the center of the Universe.
Of course, it’s too early to celebrate the demise of Inflation and the Big Bang. I’m just a kibitzer. But it is fascinating.
Stay tuned.
@Huxley,
Lerner is, at the very least, enigmatic. I have been trying to get in contact with him for about 30 years with nary a response from him or his organization.
Guth’s inflationary theory arrived with a tremendous splash at a time when the acceptance of the Big Bang was still in doubt. In its original form he proposed that the singularity suddenly expanded to a size roughly equal to the orbit of Venus in 200-300 years. The current “wisdom” is that it expanded to 90% of the current size of the universe, roughly 42 billion light years, in 1/10^39 second. He was only off by about 60 orders of magnitude but hey, it was close enough for Government work.
The history of the Big Bang is a study in advanced ad hocery. They have “discovered” more unknown and undetectable particles, objects, and forces than there are garden gnomes, fairies, and little green dragons in Irish mythology.
Roy Lofquist:
I’m not sold on Lerner either. His plasma cosmology which replaces the Big Bang universe is widely criticized. Also, Lerner is a science writer, not a scientist.
However, Lerner’s summary of the problems Webb is creating for the Big Bang comports with what I’ve read elsewhere, e.g. the quote from “Science” I provided, and explains the “panic” well.
The hard nugget of information he mentions that *will* be published in “Nature” is impressive. Again:
___________________________________
The authors state that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time, so again– no Big Bang.
___________________________________
However, I want to read that article myself.
There are no doubt many ways to fix the Big Bang or reinterpret the Webb images, so the story is far from over.
My general impression is scientists tend to excessive optimism that “This time we’ve just about got it handled.” Plus these days there is more groupthink than ever, which is self-reinforcing. For instance, climate change.
So I tend to cheer on developments which rock that scientific assurance.
I tried to grok the basis for the big bang thesis, like in that earlier piece, but they didn’t look in the other direction, did they, or at another plane, assuming we are looking at the origin point, some 15 billion lightyears, have we tracked the motion of the outer most galaxies from the origin point, near us,
miguel cervantes:
Your comments are usually on the terse side. I’m often unclear what you are saying. Perhaps you might expand a bit more.
As I understand the Big Bang, there is no origin point nor another direction in which to look. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) compromises the oldest remnants of the Big Bang we can detect and we detect it in all directions.
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The cosmic microwave background radiation and the cosmological redshift-distance relation are together regarded as the best available evidence for the Big Bang theory. Measurements of the CMB have made the inflationary Big Bang theory the Standard Cosmological Model.[52] The discovery of the CMB in the mid-1960s curtailed interest in alternatives such as the steady state theory.[
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
there has to be an origin point, one assumes over x billions of years, there galaxies would be receding,
miguel cervantes:
No. There is no origin point. It’s tricky stuff.
The Big Bang isn’t like a bomb went off in outer space and we’re all bits of shrapnel scattering in different directions.
There was no space into which the Big Bang exploded. The Big Bang was the initial expansion of space itself and that space is still expanding.
Essentially we are inside the Big Bang. There is no direction where we can look and the Big Bang isn’t. It’s rather boggling.
@ huxley > “It’s rather boggling.”
And the atheists complain about the Garden of Eden and Christ’s Virgin Birth.
SMH
Huxley. If interstellar space is not a perfect vacuum, then it has matter in it. And if it’s correct that this matter is intercepting light–making it “tired”–then interstellar space would be emitting the resulting energy it stole from the light. It would not be at absolute zero.
I haven’t been able to find anything on that.
If the universe were infinitely old, then the interstellar vacuum would be infinitely hot, would it not?
Which, backing into it, would suggest a starting point, not an infinity.
We are still receiving radiation from the event 15 billion years ago right.