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Comment by gregorymichael | Hacker News Reader

What are the implications?

Basically it means that we can't regard the Hubble result as a mismeasurement and the age of the universe seems to be different depending on how you measure it.

From the article:

"The bottom line is that the so-called Hubble Tension between what happens in the nearby Universe compared to the early Universe’s expansion remains a nagging puzzle for cosmologists. There may be something woven into the fabric of space that we don’t yet understand."

I just think it means the expansion rate is not a constant, but a variable.

I kind of agree with this conclusion.

Before we know better it can be just that spacetime was expanding at a different rate (we still would need at least one another Planck that operates in roughly same range to confirm this).

Hubble wavelenght range - 0.1 to 0.8 μm Webb wavelenght range - 0.6 to 28.3 μm Planck wavelenght range - 330 to 10000 μm

My understanding is that Planck was observing photons that have happened much more earlier.

Sounds like they don't want to spoil everyone's research grants!

Outside of the tinfoil, it just sounds like the universe is complex and not always predictable.

It's amazing that barely a 100 years ago The Great Debate in astronomy was weather the Milky Way was the extent of the universe or things like Andromeda were their own 'island universes'. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble showed that Andromeda was far outside the Milky Way by measuring Cepheid variable stars. These are the same stars that we are measuring today in this debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Debate_(astronomy)

And not much longer before that the discussion was how long would the sun last - 5,000 years or so was the estimate if it was a big ball of burning gas (source: A scientific American article I read, wish I could find it again, hoping someone here knows)

I think it’s this one you’re referring to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-doubt-the...

That's the one, thanks, I've been looking for it for ages

I meant it as a comment on the phrasing. Potentially jeopardizing a field's cash flow is a legitimate worry, and I see a few have felt that, as well.

There's a whole lot of open problems in cosmology, nobody's going to be out of work if they solve this one.

Either we live in an unusually under dense region of the universe or our models are wrong ("new physics").

Or it's a simulation and someone keeps pushing changes to production.

Which would also count as new physics.

With even more literal meaning of new.

Someone keeps running gparted on our partition

All the expert software engineers agree this is the most likely explanation. Have physicists looked into this?

> All the expert software engineers agree this is the most likely explanation.

That's quite a strong claim. I'm skeptical. Sources?

> Have physicists looked into this?

They shelved it right next to "God Made The Universe" in the "Unfalsifiable Propositions" section, under the title "Grad Students Made The Universe."

I'm reading their comment as a joke about how software engineers tend to overestimate their own expertise on things like physics and are not actually anywhere close to experts.

Software engineers presenting weird pseudo science as serious physics is one way this manifests.

I could be wrong.

I wonder if their introspection is good enough to have our population on a Grafana dashboard somewhere

Somewhere aliens are making fun of how shoddy our simulation is coded.

It's definitely a simulation at this point

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