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.
Sounds familiar ... About 100-150 years ago, we (physicists) had another problem with electromagnetism and blackbody radiation. And we had men like Max Planck to help sort it all out.
People whose education in the natural sciences ended in 8th grade don't know about that ... and they feel like this is something new. That's stupid. Scientists live for this stuff ... it's an opportunity to be on the bleeding edge of developing new and better theories of physics. Exciting times indeed!
Ahhhhh, the onion of real scientific truth unfolds some more, leaving more questions than anyone knew to even ask before, and shattering how complete older ideas were.
“Scientists” need to take a massive amount of humble pie, in every scientific discipline, and admit what is theorectical is not proof, just a theory, and should not be taken as proof, and then welcome all challanges.
They should have seriously started rethinking the Big Bang when they had to kludge ‘inflation’ into it. My first thought years ago when I heard of ‘inflation’ was to imagine it as a magician waving his hands in the air to distract the audience.
I think it’s past time to admit that the standard cosmological theory doesn’t actually work at any scale, and start over.
This and many articles out there prove they are looking to prove their point, not looking to see where the evidence takes them.
“Experiments have failed to prove evidence of cosmic inflation.” False. In other news, Edwin Hubble discovered at Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles in 1929 that everywhere you look everything is rapidly moving away from each other by using the red shift. And yes, the pictures from the new Hubble telescope are wonderful.
No, I posted what I think. It is not baseless, because in my short rant I used global warming as a typical example of those who want everyone else to believe what they believe so they can take complete control of our lives.
Science popularizers rarely explain science correctly. Even the ones I respect.
But you're going to believe what you want to believe, facts be damned.
I knew the big bang theory was bullshit the first time I heard that Galaxies are colliding out there in the cosmos. it may have takin millions of years but if there was a big bang then they all should be going the same way and all the same distance from the bang. Like an ever expanding bubble.
I disagree. I figure they've been propping up a dead line of thought, and sprinking fairy dust on it (inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and more), that I figure that apologies are warranted.
I have 2 Science degrees, 30+ post MS hours in AI, and a patent in Artificial Intelligence.
I think I made it past the 8th grade science the idiots here are blabbing about.
you would have to believe in God to buy that one man...
The fuss is about a certain, currently irreducible, fraction or cohort of people among us who are die-hard atheists.
The Big Bang theory, for them, has always been a great comfort, relieving them, however temporarily, of the responsibility of having to admit that they are wrong in thinking that there is not and has never been an all-powerful God the Father.
Take away the Big Bang theory and a whole lot of very, very smart but very, very intellectually darkened (and thus, spiritually vulnerable) people will have to contend, simultaneously, with an immense case of cognitive dissonance.
And that’s what we’re beginning to see, Charlie Brown.
Have they ever figured out where this supposed “big bang” began? Shouldn’t we know where the center of the universe is by simply working backwards from where the universe has expanded to by now?
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The problem is that as far away as we can see objects are receding at speeds approaching the speed of light.
1. We don’t know if there are more distant objects receding faster than the speed of light, and
2. Relativistically speaking, all observers in such a universe would observe exactly what we are observing ....all objects receding up to the speed of light. Therefore all points in the universe are the center of the universe.
...the universe as a singularity.
I think this concept can be attributed to John Wheeler at the University of Texas.
“There is no center of the universe.”
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As a matter of fact it’s all centrific.
From earth, everything is expanding away from us.
If we travel tons far star we would see everything expanding from that view.
Actually, you have it backwards in spite of what Hawkings has said about God the BBT posits a beginning just like Genesis is a beginning. It says nothing about who or why. Anyway, that’s not science’s job to answer those things. It replaced the Steady State Theory (SST) which doesn’t require a ‘creation’. Which makes it much more an ‘atheist’ theory. It’s infinite in both negative time and positive time. SST does posit a lot of little ‘creations’, matter popping out of ‘nothing’ - the quantum fluctuations to replace matter burned up by stars.
Anyway, theories are proposed, they work for a while maybe a long while then new data comes modifies the theory or eventually completely subsumes into a new theory. That’s science. If it’s carved in concrete can’t be changed that’s dogma. There’s a difference.
If they can prove that the Big Bang never happened, will they have to rename that TV show?
“The problem is that as far away as we can see objects are receding at speeds approaching the speed of light.”
We can see objects are receding at speeds exceeding the speed of light.
So does that tell the universe is at least 28 billion years old, give or take a year.
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