Scientific News
In the Sunday, September 3, issue of The New York Times, there is an interesting op-ed by astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, The Story of Our Universe May be Starting to Unravel. It’s a decent article, although I could’ve done without the reference to John Wheeler’s “participatory universe” hypothesis.
[B]ut one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.
According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.
The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least accoriing to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.
It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.
Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.
At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data have gotten for more precise. And now new data from the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in the model, not in the data.
[P]hysicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.
Gee, I guess I didn’t see that coming. What they fail to mention is the existence already of alternative conceptualizations, many of which involve an aether.
Torsion On My Mind. Clearly, for a system which is still… | by Wes Hansen | Aug, 2023 | Medium
