Webb telescope helps refine Hubble constant
phys.org
phys.org
Ugh, this is so frustrating. We know our current theories cannot be complete but the LHC has mostly just confirmed assumptions, and now this. Everything seems to well contained.
If measurements point to some sort of incongruity, questioning the accuracy of one's ruler is a fools trap. Altering the rulers to remove incongruities results in a spiral of compromises, internal debates that don't result in progress. If one suspects that the rulers are wrong, the answer is to build a better ruler. Not to arbitrarily chop bits off until the difficult observations go away.
I have no doubt that there are great scientist spending their entire careers trying to improve these rulers and measurements, but I also know that there are great scientists spending their entire careers basing everything on the best rulers they have...
> That brings her value into statistical agreement with recent measurements from the cosmic microwave background, which is 67.4, plus or minus 0.7%.
Does it? As a lay person who can do basic arithmetic, this seems incorrect? Maybe there is some rounding or truncation, since I didn't check the source paper, or maybe I don't understand how confidence intervals work.
`70.4 × 0.97 = 68.288` and `67.4 × 1.007 = 67.8718`
These numbers are certainly close, but to my naive interpretation, the ranges don't overlap?
For a null hypothesis of “their differences are consistent with zero”, the p-value is 17%, equivalent to a 1.4 sigma difference. That’s pretty far from a reasonable rejection criterion for the null hypothesis. I think most people would agree that that means these measurements are plausibly consistent.
As is typical, the tolerances given are sigma values for an assumed normal distribution, not the width of a uniform distribution. The disagreement is less than five sigma, so (in the domain of physics) the disagreement is not considered significant enough to be a high-confidence indicator of new physics.
It's amazing just rich the electromagnetic spectrum is for analyzing the universe, from radio to X-rays, and how complementary the pictures are. Though we get visually pleasing pictures in the visible spectrum, most of the really intellectually pleasing stuff of the past century has been outside the visible range.
It's a bit of a misnomer though, because it's only constant through space, not time. At the time of discovery it was assumed to be constant in time, too.
I'm not a physicist, but from my understanding, the situation is a bit more complicated than the phrasing in your question suggests.
Observation #1: The light from far-away galaxies is redshifted (spectral lines are a bit off from where we'd expect them to be). This suggests that these galaxies are moving away from us. The farther away the galaxy, the more it is redshifted. This suggests that the farther away the galaxy, the faster it is moving. Observations indicate that the recession speed is directly proportional to distance.
This observation is consistent with general relativity, which suggests an expanding universe with homogeneous mass.
But on a smaller scale, gravitational binding somehow takes over, and on even smaller scale, things like electromagnetic and nuclear interactions start having a greater impact, and that's why the Milky Way isn't itself expanding. For that matter, even Andromeda (0.8 Mpc) is too close to be affected by Hubble-style expansion, which only becomes observable at the multi-megaparsec scale.
Imagine inflating a balloon onto which you've painted dots. All the dots move apart. But the ones furthest apart move apart faster than those close together. This is how you know the dots aren't just moving in their local environment, the entire space is expanding (everywhere).
(If you want a 1D representation, move your fingers apart at a constant rate. Consider how much further apart your pinky and index finger are compared with your middle and ring finger. That wouldn't happen if you just make a Spock hand.)
It is not an article about a resolution having been confirmed.
Alternatives: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-profit_space_age...
>There was very little government funding for any kind of biomedical research. The polio research was privately funded through the March of Dimes,” explained Randy Juhl, Dean Emeritus and Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the School of Pharmacy.
https://www.pittwire.pitt.edu/pittwire/features-articles/ann...
Which is why we live in a republic. (And since the Industrial Revolution and Battle of Jena, one twinned to a technocratic administrative state.)
But the cuts go far beyond that, to things that are less showy but with more direct effects on the lives of people. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, with microscopic effects on the bottom line, but with myriad small effects on our parks, our roads, even national security.
Space is the "charismatic mega fauna" of the budget, but the whole "ecosystem" is ravaged. It must be saved, but take it as an indicator of just how much damage has been done. Spare a thought and a word for the NIH, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Social Security administrators whose jobs are not glamorous but nonetheless critical to people who depend on them.
Those issues have their cheerleaders, so I see no reason to start with “that’s good, BUT”.
I really hate this trend of pretending people are supposed to care about A more than B and that, more than C. Let people champion the things they’re passionate about. Everyone is already suffering from compassion fatigue.
Not sure framing this in terms of sympathy for jobless bureaucrats is as effective as considering the impact on babies who will die of diseases in cancelled pipelines, ecosystems and fisheries that will collapse due to negligence or proud grandmas who will go hungry because SSA fucked up their cheques.
The U.S. government just got red teamed by an extremely adversarial auditor in DOGE. They weren’t able to find almost any fraud (outside the DoD, which they didn’t touch). They found maybe tens of billions of spending they didn’t like out of a budget of trillions.
Also, we’re on a start-up board. Are you seriously arguing that every start-up, or even the median start-up, is less wasteful than the median century-old company?
To the extent there is documented inefficiency at NASA, it's in the way it manages its contractors for manned exploration. Its science budget is a paragon of institutional efficiency.
> It's not bottom up waste and fraud
Read the GAO report [1]. (Ctrl + F Bechtel.)
But for sake of argument, let's assume this is true. How does cutting the science budget while preserving SLS make sense?
The rest of the cuts are around propulsion systems and mars science missions. The administration and some parts of NASA see the commercial segment becoming more developed and more capable and are hoping they will be able to fill the gap. This also accelerates the plan to retire the ISS and move to commercial orbital platforms.
Interestingly this budget does allocate $646 million more to exploration in 2025 than it did in 2024. Showing a shift in priorities from Earth based science missions to full manned missions returning to the Moon and eventually to Mars.