The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel
Sept. 2, 2023
Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.
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Paraphrasing:
Data from Webb shows that some galaxies formed very early on, well before the standard model could account for, this was not isolated as recently other occurrences where we see evidence that science’s basic understanding have been inconsistent.
For instance, the universe expands, but the different ways we use to calculate that have never come into synch. The two main ways used to calculate the expansion rate are: measurements of the early universe using such data as the telescope in question is providing, the second way involves measurements of nearby starts, despite decades of effort and increasingly precise data these two methods do not provide a consistent answer and it was exacerbated by Webb telescope suggesting that the model is flawed, not the data.
These serious issues can be serious enough, but updating the model to match with the current data will bring skepticism into the resulting model. Physicists and astronomers begin to believe that the current model may be fundamentally flawed and we may need to rethink basic features of our universe, a conceptual revolution that can change more than just science.
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From the article:
A potent mix of hard-won data and rarefied abstract mathematical physics, the standard model of cosmology is rightfully understood as a triumph of human ingenuity. It has its origins in Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s that the universe was expanding — the first piece of evidence for the Big Bang. Then, in 1964, radio astronomers discovered the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background, the “fossil” radiation reaching us from shortly after the universe began expanding. That finding told us that the early universe was a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles that has been continually cooling and becoming less dense ever since.
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More paraphrasing:
Cosmology becomes more precise accounting for the best data, however in order to get there over the last half a century or so they had to make educated guesses as to the existence of things for which there is no evidence, in science they call this postulating but really it is an attempt to account for what we cannot observe. Dark Matter is one of these things making up ~27% of the universe, and energy with 68%, leaving just 4% or so for normal matter that you and I interact with each day.
Cosmic inflation (Not Bidenflation, but nearly as misunderstood), is another “adjustment” we’ve made to the standard model, in 1981 they devised this to explain paradoxes that arose from an older version of the Big Bang theory, it holds that early on the universe expanded at a faster rate for a fraction of a second just after the Big Bang, this was posited to resolve certain problems but then itself creates others. Notably, such an assumption brings into play the multiverse, an infinite number of universes that we cannot observe.
Science often can find indirect evidence for things we cannot observe, so it isn’t the postulating that is at issue. Such things include hyperdense singularities inside black holes, but with Webb bringing into question the Hubble Constant it begins to bring into question the standard model.
Theories involve with evidence, this is a normal thing. Once a working model is found to be flawed scientist rethink and “remath” until it better matches current evidence. It may be that Webb is telling us that there is evidence of yet another “dark” thing that we cannot observe other than through indirect evidence. However another possibility may be that we need to a radical new theory from the standard model.
Cosmology, unlike other scientific endeavors, cannot be studied from the outside, you cannot put it in a box and experiment. It is the study of “everything”.
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From the article again:
Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.
These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science (though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.
But that’s precisely the sort of assumption we might have to start questioning in order to figure out what’s wrong with the standard model. One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness. An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe. (Dr. Wheeler, working to understand the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, conceived of a “participatory universe” in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.)
It is not obvious, to say the least, how such revolutionary reconsiderations of our science might help us better understand the cosmological data that is flummoxing us. (Part of the difficulty is that the data themselves are shaped by the theoretical assumptions of those who collect them.) It would necessarily be a leap of faith to step back and rethink such fundamentals about our science.
But a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.
The philosopher Robert Crease has written that philosophy is what’s required when doing more science may not answer a scientific question. It’s not clear yet if that’s what’s needed to overcome the crisis in cosmology. But if more tweaks and adjustments don’t do the trick, we may need not just a new story of the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/opinion/cosmology-crisis-webb-telescope.html
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