The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?
iai.tv
iai.tv
Completely burying the full title "Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field" which is the best Panic! at the Disco pun I've seen in a long time.
I don't think it's disingenuous, just out of touch. The author is 75 years old; he probably didn't recognize a 2000s-2010s pop culture pun.
I get the impression he's regarded as something of a crank in astrophysics communities.
Shouldn’t the burden of proof be placed on the individual rather than the group?
Yes, but don't cover your ears and yell "burden of proooooof" so loudly that you can't hear them out.
There are plenty of examples where science got it wrong. Were it took years, even decades to get enough people to listen.*
That's not the way science is supposed to work. Politics? Yes. But not science.
I trust you can do the math from here.
* And when the tides turn, these not even an acknowledgement, let alone an apology. Scientists shouldn't not be turning in their graves for lacking an apology. That level of arrogance is also not healthy and proper Science.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460-600-vatican-...
Science doesn't advance by consensus. It advances by constructing models and comparing their predictions with observations. As Einstein famously remarked when someone mentioned to him that a hundred scientists had signed a letter saying they were doubtful of his theory of relativity: "If the theory were wrong, one would have been enough." We don't believe our best current theories because there is a consensus. We believe them because they have made accurate predictions that have been confirmed by experimental data to many decimal places.
No, not so much. That is scientific method.
Science is paradigmatic. The advancement of science only occurs when the current science paradigm is toppled. Currently, ΛCDM Theory is the paradigm. And it is not when it is discovered that CDM does not exist and the Universe is not expanding when the paradigm topples. Because that may have already happened... JWST may have completed this task.
A decent example of the resilience of paradigms is the luminiferous ether. Michelson published the results of his experiment in 1881. Maybe there were some that immediately realized the significance, but the paradigm remained through the ether crisis, and even after Einstein published Special Relativity in 1905, and deep, deep into the 20th Century and arguably shallowly into the first few years of 21st Century.
Science paradigms are sticky and resilient, even when they are completely wrong.
So it will take decades after the discovery that CDM doesn't exist before most scientists are finally on the same page and the paradigm is finally toppled. Only then, after being wrong for maybe as long as 200 years and most have moved on away from the previous paradigm that Science legitimately advances.
Are you being obtuse?
Your interlocutors have already stipulated that on occasion, the scientific establishment has been wrong, and the cranks have been right.
Their point is that this is almost never the case. There are and have been cranks who dispute the scientific consensus on almost every point since the scientific method was first developed.
Are you also suggesting we should believe the anti-vaxxers who still back Andrew Wakefield's paper?
Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say climate change isn't real?
Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say the earth is flat?
Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say that our current trees aren't "really" trees, and all the "real", giant, trees were killed long ago? [0]
All of these are cranks who disagree with the established scientific consensus—sometimes in bizarre but harmless ways, sometimes in extremely damaging and disturbing ones. If your point is genuinely "we should listen to cranks because they have a good track record", why not them, too? Why not all of them?
Or is there, in fact, something specific about this one that makes you think it's got something going for it besides "they might be actually super smart and seeing something the rest of us are missing"? If so, maybe lead with that, instead?
[0] https://www.inverse.com/article/21098-flat-earthers-trees
personally i dont think big bang theory deserves to be held up to same regard as classical and quantum mechanics, electro and thermodynamics, and relativity. and i dont think questioning it is anywhere close to flat earthism or creationism. still i happen to believe it is the currently best supported model, albeit one with plenty of questions to answer
So…
anyways, the threshold is likely when the hypothesis becomes convincing enough to a sufficient proportion or number of experts in the field
> We at LPPFusion have been applying that knowledge concretely to the development of a cheap, clean and unlimited source of energy that can entirely replace fossil fuels starting in this decade.
And I doubt that the website (iai.tv), that I have never head of, is a source that can be trusted.
I did not invest.
That's two things he's bent to support his position within the first two paragraphs of this piece. Right out of the gate he's shown that he can't be trusted with data.
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.
i wonder if the energy of empty space (yes, empty space has energy) plays a role in slowly dissipating the energy from light.
That was my point.
The universe is not 100% empty, so the index of refraction is not 1. This could be explained by lots of phenomena like dust particles or stray radiation, etc. Because of this effect, for practical purposes, light that we see as res “travels slower” because it has traveled through more media than blue light.
"interstellar clouds of electrons retard the velocity of radio waves in direct proportion to their wavelength" in an article from a 1968 edition of Scientific American written by Anthony Hewish...the same guy who discovered pulsars
"The component frequencies of each burst are delayed by different amounts of time depending on the wavelength. This delay is described by a value referred to as a dispersion measure (DM). This results in a received signal that sweeps rapidly down in frequency, as longer wavelengths are delayed more."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_(optics)#Pulsar_emi...]
"dispersion measure (DM) is the column density of free electrons (total electron content) — i.e. the number density of electrons (electrons/cm3) integrated along the path traveled by the photon from the pulsar to the Earth"
Is a hypothesis that, as a sole or primary explanation of observed redshifts of galaxies, has been thoroughly debunked in the scientific literature.
> the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum
This is true, but it cannot explain the observed data by itself, because the observed data is not "redshifts" by themselves. The observed data is a combination of redshifts, apparent luminosity, and angular size for thousands of observed galaxies. These data have observable relationships that can only be explained by cosmological expansion. If the redshifts were caused solely by dispersion in the intergalactic medium, their relationships with apparent luminosity and angular size would be very, very different. That is a quick summary of the thorough debunking of "tired light" that can be found in the scientific literature over a period of some decades.
If universe is expanding is it getting thinner? That is same amount of matter is spreading over larger space. Thus wouldn't the refraction index be higher on average when observing the path from really old objects?
The dark matter crowd was able to convince quite a few people without hurdling such a high bar, not to mention stuff like string-theory..
Dark matter is the result of observations...of something
I don't know where you're getting this from. Dark matter models make lots of testable predictions, and they currently match the overall data set (which includes many different observations, not just the galaxy rotation curves that are most often mentioned) better than any other models.
> not to mention stuff like string-theory
Here I agree: string theory has not made a single testable prediction.
At this point I see string theory as more of a mathematical framework than physics
No, it didn't. Particular supersymmetric extensions to the Standard Model made testable predictions of what particles the LHC should detect at different energy levels, none of which have panned out.
String theorists like to take credit for those predictions (or at least they did until the predictions became notorious for their wrongness) because they claim that string theory is what justifies those particular supersymmetric extensions to the Standard Model. That doesn't mean we should let them get away with it.
Nothing I saw demonstrated in any way that the Big Bang didn’t happen.
No, it isn't. Theories don't get "falsified" except in rare cases and in the idealized fanciful histories of some philosophers of science. The idea that you can run one critical experiment that, if the results come out a certain way, will falsify a theory, is a myth.
Scientific models like our current hot Big Bang model make thousands of predictions about observed data. No model ever matches all the data with 100% accuracy. But if there is no other competing model that matches the data better, we do the best with what we have. Saying the Big Bang model is "falsified" if the error in some prediction vs. data is over some threshold is useless if we don't have a better model to replace it with.
Examples: (these aren't old philosophers, crackpots, or fringe theories)
* https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/cosmic-exp...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2020/03/22/astro...
* https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03678-x
* https://news.fnal.gov/2015/12/holometer-rules-out-first-theo...
The first, in fact, is not even finalized yet, because there are still unresolved issues about the actual value of the Hubble constant: different sets of observations point at different values and the discrepancy is not fully understood. (Google "Hubble Tension" for much more.) But this whole general line of research is not about "ruling out" a theory, and it's certainly not about putting some better theory in its place; it's about refining our existing theoretical model by adding more and more reasonably confirmed detail about the actual distribution of matter and energy in the universe and its actual expansion history.
The second is a particular kind of hypothetical particle that has never been observed, still never having been observed. That doesn't "rule out" the existence of that kind of particle with 100% certainty. It just means we still haven't observed it. (Even the article you reference notes that there are still axion models that have not been ruled out.) And it doesn't change our best current model of the universe at all.
The third "rules out" a class of models that nobody has ever used. Similarly, the fourth "rules out" a model that was not even built to be used, but was expected to be ruled out, at least at the level of accuracy of these particular measurements. (That accuracy, as I understand it, is still well short of the Planck scale, which is where most physicists expect any "quantization" of spacetime itself to show up.) These results are useful in that they narrow the space of possible models that scientists might consider trying to use in the future; but they bear no resemblance whatever to what Eric Lerner claims (incorrectly, in my view) is shown by the James Webb telescope observations, which he claims "rule out" the entire Big Bang model.
>None of these examples are of theories like our current hot Big Bang model
In your first post you're fine with lumping together well established theories with loads of evidence like Big Bang and a philosophers zero evidence theories based on their intuition alone. The two extremes of theory legitimacy.
In your second post you're strongly rejecting the middle of some-to-little-evidence theories to back up your original easily refuted claim that theories rarely if ever get ruled out by evidence.
I think you just didn't think through or spell out your original argument very carefully.
I don't know where you're getting this from. It should be clear from the post you refer to that by "theories" I meant models like our current hot Big Bang model, not "zero evidence theories based on intuition alone".
Exactly. This is the problem.
Hey, I get it, we're not talking about Galileo rolling things down ramps here. Cosmology is huge and messy and there's going to be a lot of noise in all observations. I'm not claiming that the Big Bang is wrong, and I would never say that we should jettison decades of science because of some preliminary data from a weeks-old instrument. But, if the contradictory data were to mount, and be confirmed and reconfirmed by multiple researchers over time, well, I'd like to think that we'd have the intellectual courage to admit that this explanation doesn't seem right, even though we don't have a better one. We clearly don't, though.
If we don't have a better one, and if our current model makes reasonably good predictions about many things, even if its predictions aren't as good about some things, we wouldn't say our current model is wrong because it isn't wrong. What we would do is to start having more conversations about our current model's domain of validity.
Perhaps some historical observations will help. Consider the history of physics, or more specifically mechanics. Before Galileo and Newton the best model of mechanics we had was Aristotelian physics. When Galileo and Newton came along and gave us a better model, we dropped Aristotelian physics, and now if you asked most physicists they would probably say Aristotelian physics was wrong, period, without feeling the need to add qualifiers or explanations. This is the kind of case I think most people are thinking of when they talk about falsifying a theory with contradictory data.
But since that transition, there have been no theories of mechanics that have been falsified by contradictory data. When special relativity came along, we didn't drop Newtonian mechanics, and physicists now don't say Newtonian mechanics is wrong. They just say it has a limited domain of validity: it's an approximation to relativity that works reasonably well for relative speeds much smaller than the speed of light.
Similarly, when general relativity came along, we didn't drop Newtonian gravity and say it was wrong; we just clarified that the domain of validity of Newtonian mechanics is also limited to weak gravitational fields. And even if GR hadn't been discovered, physicists would still have continued using Newtonian mechanics even though there was data known in the 19th century, like the extra precession of Mercury's perihelion, that was not consistent with Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics still gets taught to physics students today, and is still used for practical computations in all kinds of contexts.
When Eric Lerner claims that "the Big Bang didn't happen", he is claiming that the Big Bang theory is destined to go the way of Aristotelian physics. But none of the data he cites justifies that claim. At best the data justifies a claim that the standard Big Bang model that assumes homogeneity and isotropy is an approximation with a limited domain of validity--which cosmologists all already agree on anyway! What we are still working out are the exact limits of its domain of validity. In other words, cosmologists in general expect our current Big Bang theory to work like Newtonian mechanics: we might discover models in the future that are more comprehensive and to which our current model is an approximation in some limited domain, but that's very, very different from it being falsified.
Somebody talking 'bout me? Why don't you all tune in next month to our debate in London https://howthelightgetsin.org/events/cosmology-and-the-big-b... Science advances by comparing predictions with subsequent observations. Right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong quantitative predictions and one right one. The details are not in serious dispute in the literature. My conclusions are what's controversial. The consensus is "well we can fix all these problems, just wait." Sort of like getting on an airline that just had 16 crashes out of 17 flights. But throw out the Big Bang and you've got a lot of correct predictions. Details here: https://youtu.be/tK3OStArUqE
Also, I have the feeling Gravitational Cosmology has reached a point where most effort goes into “refining the constants” - was it Hilbert that said that was all that was left to do, right before Quantum Mechanics was introduced? - so a little bombshell discovery would make things very exiting and fresh.
Keep it up!
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/lord-kelvin-...
But for a moment I was just imagining a world where scientists agreed that the Big Bang never happened. How many physicists' work would be thrown in the trash? How many high school science books would have to be updated? How would the general public's trust in science change?
Would be such an interesting thing to observe.
Who? I've never heard of such an idea.
Definitely not ether, those foolish old scientists got the name wrong :D
Depending how it was taught.
When I was a kid, the T-Rex tail slid along the ground like a crocodile. Now we know dino tails were used for balance and they generally remained rigid.
Dinos didn't have feathers when I was a kid.
Pluto was a planet when I was a kid.
However, one crackpot clickbait article didn't change the three things listed above. Millions of person-hours of research did.
If the work is good, it's reasonably independent of the story being told.
One of the features of Big Bang is how it’s sufficient to explain the structure of the universe via Gravity alone, yet there’s a ton of data indicating that pervading Plasma and Electromagnetic interactions within are at play.
But since they have no place in the BB model they’re discounted as marginal phenomena.
But, if the paradigm shifted - to put it in Popper terms - a whole new box of interesting goodies would pop open!
Since photons travel at the speed of light, neither distance nor time are measurable. All that remains is the relative angular concentration of photons. If you imagine the universe as a sphere, the relative concentration of photons represents the pattern on the surface of the sphere.
However there's no longer any way to determine that sphere's size nor whether it is expanding, contracting or even the existence of time itself.
The crazy thing is how close this is to the early universe. You start with the cosmic microwave background pattern and that's basically also exactly what you end up with: a pattern/projection of photons where space and time basically become meaningless or cease to exist.
Science is /= fact or truth. Science is a process.
There should never be a “trust in science.” In fact, science only works if nobody trusts anything and every experiment is questioned and repeated. If this doesn’t happen, then that’s when the general public should be concerned.
according to wikipedia hes been funded by nasa. and also looks like youre incorrect about not being published
Quote: If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance. Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.
I just woke up and I don't get this...
We understood explosions and how atoms would interact based on that.
It is similar to how in the 1800s we thought of the body as a connection of pipes and fluids because that is how we understood things. Then as we built a greater understanding of electricity, we now see the electrical components of the body. Which doesn't negate the plumbing version, but we now have a greater understanding of how muscles and the brain work.
Interesting misunderstanding of inflation.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2622/
Unofficial Explanation: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2622:_Angular_Diamete...
Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter_distance#Angu...
any theory that gets rid of dark matter is better than what we have now. the cosmological constant was one thing (turns out Einstein found the quantized minimum energy of empty space, before quantum mechanics). This dark matter folly is taking fudge factor to the extreme. it's lazy.
Forget the ad-hominem "he's a known crank" arguments.
He raises valid questions in his article, if he's a crank, then refute his facts or conclusions.
Not entirety of their production is bad. And they can offer some different perspectives.
Anyone know why this took so long to discover, if true? Is the James Webb that much more powerful than the Hubble?
I'd love if this turned out to be an epicycle moment. It reinforces my belief that being paradigm-flexible is valuable.
Hubble could not see as far into the infra-red.
The merger stuff JWST has falsifed was never really on solid ground anyway but tuned cosmological simulations. The simulations probably got subgrid physics wrong (same issue as climate models face).
We really are in a moment where serious astronomers and astrophysicists are evaluating validity and correctness of some of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe, to a degree that we simply haven’t seen since at least the mapping of the CMB, and perhaps longer.
Umm, wormholes maybe. Flying cars have existed for the better part of a century. The fact that nobody has successfully brought one to market yet means that you and I don't have them. But humanity certainly does.
This is science. It differs from the media's Science™
Now we have to worry about Big Cosmo?