Posted on 09/15/2022 12:56:44 PM PDT by OneVike
Physicist Eric J. Lerner comes to the point:
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.” [Update: Kirkpatrick has protested Lerner’s handling of this quotation. See Note below.]Eric J. Lerner, “The Big Bang didn’t happen” at IAI.TV (August 11, 2022)
Although we didn’t usually hear of it, there’s been dissatisfaction with the Standard Model, which begins with the Big Bang, ever since it was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre nearly a century ago. But no one expected the James Webb Space Telescope to contribute to the debate.
Now, Lerner is the author of a book called The Big Bang Never Happened (1992) but — while that makes him an interested party — it doesn’t make him wrong. He will be speaking at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London (September 17–18, 2022) sponsored by the Institute for Art and Ideas (IAI), as a participant in the “Cosmology and the Big Bust” debate.
The upcoming debate, which features philosopher of science Bjørn Ekeberg and Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, along with Lerner, is premised as follows:
The Big Bang theory crucially depends on the ‘inflation’ hypothesis that at the outset the universe expanded many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. But experiments have failed to prove evidence of cosmic inflation and since the theory’s inception it has been beset by deep puzzles. Now one of its founders, Paul Steinhardt has denounced the theory as mistaken and ‘scientifically meaningless’.
Do we have to give up the theory of cosmic inflation and seek a radical alternative? Might alternative theories like the Big Bounce, or abandoning the speed of light provide a solution? Or are such alternatives merely sticking plasters to avoid the more radical conclusion that it is time to give up on the Big Bang altogether?
Here’s a debate on this general topic from last year’s festival (but without JWST data). It features theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, along with Ekeberg and particle physicist Sam Henry.
So, yes, it’s been a serious topic of discussion for a while. Now, what to make of Eric Lerner’s approach? Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon offered Mind Matters News some thoughts and a potential solution:
The current thinking is that the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis era produced 75% Hydrogen and 25% Helium (by weight) and a smattering of Lithium, but not much else. Then after 300 thousand years, the universe cooled down enough to produce atoms, and gravitational attraction slowly, slowly built up stars. The early ones were big enough to explode, and the shock waves sent through the hydrogen gas caused pockets to form that began star-making in earnest. But it still took 500 million years to get enough stars for a galaxy. Now the earlier a galaxy forms, the further back in time and the further away it is from astronomers today, and the further away it is the faster it is moving away from us. This movement causes the light to be redshifted. So robust is this relationship, that astronomers replace “time” with “red-shift”. But the Hubble Space Telescope could only see visible light, and those early galaxies were so red-shifted they were only “visible” in the infra-red, which is where the James Webb telescope shines. So one of the goals of the James Webb telescope was to see the earliest galaxies, and indeed, they’re seeing a lot.
So what does this mean for the standard model?
Theorists have an answer. Lot’s of clumpy dark matter to get the Hydrogen gas to clump early. Which leads to the question, “why isn’t the dark matter clumpy now?”
I don’t have endurance to run down every rabbit trail cosmologists propose. Instead, I propose that the first stars were not made of Hydrogen, they were made of ice. The Big Bang synthesized abundant C and O which combined with H to form H20, CO2, CH4 etc. These gases freeze relatively early in the universe time frame, so clumping was not gravitational but physico-chemical, the same way snowflakes form. So we didn’t have to wait 500 million years for snowflakes to clump, it happen very quickly once the universe cooled below the freezing point. Hence James Webb sees lots of red-shifted galaxies from the early universe.
The paper on that (and maybe the prediction of what James Webb would find?) is in my open-access paper in Communications of the Blythe Institute in 2021.
That’s one possible solution. We know it’s science when it’s always posing challenges.
This sometimes comes up: Could the universe have always existed? The problem is, if the universe had existed for an infinite amount of time, everything that could possibly happen must already have happened an infinite number of times — including that we don’t exist and never did. But we know we do exist. As Robert J. Marks has pointed out, playing with infinity quickly results in absurdity. To do science, we must accept that some events are real and not mutually contradictory. So we can assume that the universe got started but we are a little less sure just now how that happened.
You crack me up. Not in a good way.
“My theory is a lot simpler and can never be disproven - God created the universe.”
Conjecture. To become a theory you first have to develop a testable hypothesis.
The required test must be observable capable of proving the hypothesis wrong.
That’s what they’re doing. Unfortunately right now that puts them in the “now what” phase. There’s not a lot of good evidence for something else, so they gotta go back and review and look for new hotness.
You just described the scientific process.
New data sometimes means modified old or new theories replace I should say subsume old theories, repeat!
Too many people want science to be dogma!
The big bang theory..
First there was nothing..
Then it exploded?
Agreed - but lots of folks will hold onto a theory tightly in spite of the new data.
I believe that God created everything. The “how” is what science is trying to figure out, and ultimately leads to answers on how we can do things and create things ourselves.
A quote from Sir Isaac Newton:
From this fountain (the free will of God) it is those laws, which we call the laws of nature, have flowed, in which there appear many traces of the most wise contrivance, but not the least shadow of necessity. These therefore we must not seek from uncertain conjectures, but learn them from observations and experimental. He who is presumptuous enough to think that he can find the true principles of physics and the laws of natural things by the force alone of his own mind, and the internal light of his reason, must either suppose the world exists by necessity, and by the same necessity follows the law proposed; or if the order of Nature was established by the will of God, the [man] himself, a miserable reptile, can tell what was fittest to be done.
” Shouldn’t we know where the center of the universe is by simply working backwards from where the universe has expanded to by now?”
There is no center of the universe.
“My theory is a lot simpler and can never be disproven - God created the universe.”
The Big Bang Theory is essentially that. It is a theory accepted by scientists that the universe was created from nothing by something.
Science can’t say what that something was, but God is the only explanation that fits.
“I expect the World to be screwed up, so I like pointing out the ways it is”
No. You posted a baseless rant because you are confused about how the world works.
I don’t think anyone needs to apologize for a theory that is now being cast in doubt.
//
Neither do I.
On the other hand , the entire public education system has been teaching it, AND evolution , as fact for decades now, I think it’s only right they all eat crow by the butt load.
( and change the name of that tv program to “ the big bang error” )
( and nothing would make me happier than to see Young Sheldon have his little butt bared and spanked every time he gets snotty with an adult /-)
.
What is wrong is DECADES of stating, as if fact, that the Big Bang was true.
One should always state when a theory is a theory, and WHY it’s a theory. They never did, they covered up the reasons.
This is a problem with people (who are biased) vs the scientific method.
If you want to, you can see it everywhere - for example take a read on the history of Louis Pasteur, and how the founders of the theory of spontaneous generation derided and defamed him...In fact, I read his address to the Academy of Sciences - what he identified as problems with science are still at work today. (in fact, he addresses how science seems to prefer to go from one mis-truth to another rather than embracing an inconvenient (or unpopular) truth. We still observe this in strong force today. Witness the “Global Warming” now “Climate Change” Science for pay movement.
I actually posed this question to the cosmologist and author Sean Carroll who has written numerous peer reviewed scientific papers related to the early state of the Universe.
He was quite clear that none of the JWST images disprove or contradict the red shift evidence for the expansion of the Universe after 10E-30 seconds known as the “Big Bang”. This defines the start of Einstein’s General Relativity laws where all the photon energy that has ever been set the coefficients of the Hubble constant and the rate of expansion.
This article mistakenly conflates Alan Guth’s controversial hypothesis for the quantum inflationary period driven by the breaking of the inflaton symmetry prior to 10E-30 seconds with the actual beginning of the Standard Model (U0, SU(2), SU(3)) expansion.
As Dr. Carroll pointed out, all that the JWST images show is that the models of how the early Universe clumped may not be complete and need to be adjusted to reflect our new information.
The expansion of the Universe is well established with decades of peer reviewed scientific data. People who try to convince you otherwise are misleading you.
Indeed man will never know how everything in space works or the power that exist to make things happen.
Roll the dice
Mrs. Clinton just tweeted: “What difference at this point does it make?”
“Science can’t say what that something was, but God is the only explanation that fits.”
“God did it” is not an explanation. Nor does it invite scientific enquiry.
You’ll have proof one way or the other when you die and there’s an afterlife or nothing.
My thoughts exactly -- all that "dark matter" & "dark energy" which nobody could even define, much less find, and now this!
Clearly, science doesn't know what happened and it's time to quit inventing fairy tales (i.e., "big bang") to explain what they just don't understand.
False premise.
We've built a telescope that will help (is helping) people a whole lot smarter than you address questions they've been unable to answer with previous data.
Here is an idea, why not follow the evidence where it takes you,
If you think that's not what they do (are doing) you're even dumber than you look.
Seriously.
Grow up.
I totally agree. That said, because theories are only theories, science needs to remain skeptical and humble - characteristics that have unfortunately been in short supply.
“One should always state when a theory is a theory, and WHY it’s a theory. They never did, they covered up the reasons.
This is a problem with people (who are biased) vs the scientific method.”
*The scientist did and are doing. The problem is we have biased people that rant on subjects they don’t understand.
“What is wrong is DECADES of stating, as if fact, that the Big Bang was true.
One should always state when a theory is a theory, and WHY it’s a theory. They never did, they covered up the reasons.
This is a problem with people (who are biased) vs the scientific method.”
*Science can’t control the minds of non-scientist that try to simplify concepts they cannot understand.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.