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.
Here is an idea, why not follow the evidence where it takes you, instead of trying to prove an idiotic idea is right?
You know, it's like stop trying to convince yourself that man is responsible for changing the weather.
You seem pissed off.
First you were hating on some old lady from England and now this.
Are you on some medication or recently stopped some medication?
Do you have family or friends that could maybe look in on you?
Are there some county facilities that you could maybe check into?
These guys are getting closer to what I’ve long thot. The whole place is too big for one “bang.” And the directions of the blast don’t match. I think it’s all more like a pot of popcorn with bunches of galactic stuff blowing, congealing, then blowing again. And Einstein said light could bend in an arc meaning we could be looking at ourselves from a long time ago. Gives meaning to “have we met before.?”
To me, this seems to indicate that the universe is infinite in size.
???? Ice = H2O
Big Bang theory has been “dead” for many years. We created “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” to prop it up like a Weekend at Bernie’s.
Now we keep NOT finding additional matter/energy in our universe that is absolutely required for the math of a big bang to work...The hope after building each new generation of telescopes (optical or radio) is that NOW we will find it....
What we saw with the JWSP is...........same old same old, just at a higher resolution. Nowhere near the new vistas of matter we needed to justify continued belief in the BB.
Moral: when you create a theory that DOES NOT fit the existing observational facts (i.e. amount of matter in the universe) hoping new things will turn up - when they don’t your theory deflates like a souffle taken out of the oven too early :)
My theory is a lot simpler and can never be disproven - God created the universe.
They'd be better off searching for God instead.
Perhaps you’re correct but where did it all start, the older I get the more spiritual I become, how did it all begin, it can’t and will never be answered unless or until you believe in a supreme being aka god, the question of how the universe began will never be answered unless you have faith in a supreme being
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?
I dunno what the fuss is all about.
A theory was posited (big bang) new data comes along indicating that we need a new theory to explain the new data.
What’s wrong with that?
I don’t think anyone needs to apologize for a theory that is now being cast in doubt.
bkmk
‘In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” Terry Pratchett
Wow, you seem to have more to problem with me than I have with the World.
I expect the World to be screwed up, so I like pointing out the ways it is
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.
Alan Harvey Guth is not impressed enough to remain awake.
“Here is an idea, why not follow the evidence where it takes you, instead of trying to prove an idiotic idea is right?”
You no nothing about scientific research.
Well, no... not really. I'm not posting hate threads about you, am I?
I expect the World to be screwed up, so I like pointing out the ways it is
Yes, repeating the obvious is normal for the senile and demented.
Doesn't there come a point at which you cease being shocked
and angry over the same things?
How many times did you need to learn that fire
is hot before you stopped being angry about it?
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