The Ancient Galaxy Paradox
On September 7 I published Scientific News. In the Sunday, September 3, issue of… | by Wes Hansen | Sep, 2023 | Medium, linking to an op-ed in the New York Times about data from the James Webb telescope — it’s Near-Infrared tools, demonstrating the existence of galaxies in the early Universe which shouldn’t, according to the standard model of cosmology, exist. I have since noticed that this has gone a bit viral, here on Medium and elsewhere. For instance, Glenn Borchardt — Medium has published a couple of recent articles on the subject, one linking to and criticizing the same op-ed:
The second article mentions what Borchardt calls an ad hoc explanation from Rajendra Gupta, a theorist at the University of Ottawa. Curiously, if not hilariously, Gupta resurrects Fritz Zwicky’s “tired light” hypothesis, using it in conjunction with Paul Dirac’s variable coupling constant hypothesis.
If you are unaware, Zwicky was a fascinating character holding court at Cal Tech through the 1930’s and 1940’s.
In my opinion, a good, free, article on the so-called “ancient galaxy paradox” is The James Webb Space Telescope discovers enormous distant galaxies that should not exist, published back in February. An earlier article is in Nature, but it is behind a paywall: Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies. What I am interested in is Gupta’s reference to Dirac’s variable coupling constant hypothesis. From the first link immediately above:
In addition to Zwicky’s tired light theory, Gupta introduces the idea of evolving “coupling constants,” as hypothesized by Paul Dirac. Coupling constants are fundamental physical constants that govern the interactions between particles. According to Dirac, these constants might have varied over time. By allowing them to evolve, the timeframe for the formation of early galaxies observed by the Webb telescope at high redshifts can be extended from a few hundred million years to several billion years. This provides a more feasible explanation for the advanced level of development and mass observed in these ancient galaxies.
Moreover, Gupta suggests that the traditional interpretation of the “cosmological constant,” which represents dark energy responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe, needs revision. Instead, he proposes a constant that accounts for the evolution of the coupling constants. This modification in the cosmological model helps address the puzzle of small galaxy sizes observed in the early universe, allowing for more accurate observations.
Coupling constants have been around for a while, but their modern version appears in gauge theories — quantum field theories. You can read the Wikipedia page or there is a nice page on the Hyperphysics website which also discusses the coupling constants in question. Borchardt claims in his article that Gupta’s ideas are simply more ad hoc additions to theory, but this is, to say the least, disingenuous if Borchardt is, as he claims on his profile, a scientific philosopher and theoretical physicist. In my September 7 article, linked to above, I state at the very end, “What they fail to mention is the existence already of alternative conceptualizations . . . “ and one of these is the Running Vacuum Model. In that article, featured in the open-access European Physical Journal C, they state in their introduction:
The possibility that the so-called “constants” of Nature (such as the particle masses and the couplings associated to their interactions) are actually not constants, but time evolving quantities following the slow pace of the current cosmological evolution, has been investigated in the literature since long time ago [1]. The history of these investigations traces back to early ideas in the 1930s on the possibility of a time evolving gravitational constant G by Milne [2, 3] and the suggestion by Dirac of the large number hypothesis [4, 5], which led him also to propose in 1937 the time evolution of G. The same year Jordan speculated that the fine-structure constant α_em together with G could be both space and time dependent [6, 7] — see also [8, 9].
These are all big names in the field. I also link, in my September 7 article, to two additional articles of mine:
Torsion On My Mind. Clearly, for a system which is still… | by Wes Hansen | Aug, 2023 | Medium; and,
In the first of these I link to an additional article of mine, Searching for New Physics with Precision Clocks | by Wes Hansen | Medium, and in that article I link to modern empirical data which shows variation in the fine structure constant both spatially and temporally:
New findings suggest laws of nature not as constant as previously thought.
In a paper published in prestigious journal Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that found tiny variations in the fine structure constant.
[“W]e found a hint that that number of the fine structure constant was different in certain regions of the universe. Not just as a function of time, but actually also in direction in the universe, which is really quite odd if it’s correct … but that’s what we found.”
My own ideas, of course, are heavily influenced by the Zitter work of David Hestenes and the broader work of those embracing Geometric Algebra and its Calculus, the work of Kevin Knuth and Ulf Klein in the foundations, and William Tillers PsychoEnergetics. It’s actually Tiller’s PsychoEnergetics which comes to the fore here. He has an alpha variable — a coupling variable, that represents the strength of the coupling between the distance/time domain (spacetime) and the frequency domain in his dual-space reference frame; as this coupling strength varies, it changes the structure of the vacuum, hence, it alters the physics in that volume of spacetime. This is actually a simplification representing a deltron (his name for the coupling agent, i. e. the gauge boson of the field) activation function, which, in his theory, is under the integral in the Fourier transform (every property in spacetime has a reciprocal, thermodynamical equilibrium conjugate property in the frequency domain and these are related via Fourier transform pairs). Due to empirical ignorance, he reduces this to a “constant” and pulls it out from under the integral. You can see the Appendix I in his paper A Theoretical Interpretation of Non-Local, Spatial, Room Temperature, Macroscopic Size Information Entanglement, for the actual Fourier transforms. He does have data informing his deltron activation function in limited cases.
Tiller’s work is, unto itself, rather well-motivated, and taken in the context of David Hestenes’ Zitter work it becomes even more well-motivated. This is what I write about here on Medium, so I’ll just link to the articles and summarize the motivation. To begin, if you haven’t already read the free pdf from Johann Rafelski and Berndt Muller, Thinking About Nothing: The Structured Vacuum, then you might wish to give it a read.
In my article THE Unfounded Assumption. This article from Deepak Chopra, Why… | by Wes Hansen | Jul, 2023 | Medium I quote Tiller from his book Some Science Adventures with Real Magic, page 122:
Walter Harrison, in his textbook on quantum mechanics states that everything is at the same time a particle and a wave and that simply figuring out how this seemingly self-contradictory statement can be true leads one to all of quantum theory. In the ensuing 300 plus pages of his book, he goes on to quantitatively show how this is true for most of the major phenomena embraced by today’s material science and engineering.
This, of course, is reminiscent of the “Pair Postulate” Philip Goyal, Kevin Knuth, and John Skilling use in their paper Origin of Complex Quantum Amplitudes and Feynman’s Rules. It is also reminiscent of David Hestenes’ Zitter Interpretation of quantum theory, as demonstrated in his papers Quantum Mechanics From Self-Interaction and The Zitterbewegung Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It’s the particle/pilot wave duality introduced by de Broglie and the orthodox physics community seems allergic to it: why?
But read the entire article. What it all comes down to is relationship between the fundamental particle, the group wave, which is the so-called pilot wave, and the phase waves. Actually, it is the velocities of these which are important. Let v_w be the phase velocity, v_g the group velocity, and v_p the particle velocity, then both Tiller and Feynman show that v_g = v_p and v_wv_g = c², hence, v_w > c, always, i. e. it is superluminal. But the phase waves literally create the pilot wave, the wave group, hence, there is a thermodynamic free energy exchange taking place in apparent contradiction to Einstein’s relativity. This is what motivates Tiller’s deltron moiety, his coupling field. Actually, this is what motivates his dual-space reference frame AND the deltron moiety. But unlike so-called string theory, Tiller’s dual-space is just a reference frame; it doesn’t require extra physical dimensions. We don’t perceive these superluminal waves because they are superluminal.
In Alain Aspect, John Clauser, Anton Zeilinger and Bohr’s Correspondence Principle: A Myth Dispelled. | by Wes Hansen | Medium I summarize the work of Ulf Klein in which he shows that Newtonian Mechanics is NOT the limit theory of Quantum Mechanics, as \hbar (Planck’s constant reduced) goes to zero, rather, it is a probabilistic theory of classical mechanics he calls Probabilistic Hamilton Jacobi theory, PHJ. In his paper he also links to a couple of explicit counter-examples to the so-called Bohr Correspondence Principle. As I point out in Bekenstein Bounds. This barn-burning I’ve been engaged in… | by Wes Hansen | Medium, Zitterbewegung is a great candidate for explaining Klein’s result, because in the Zitter model the Planck’s constant disappears when the particle velocity goes to c, the speed of light:
This is consistent with Hestenes’ Zitter model, where the electron is a point charge orbiting a center of mass at the speed of light with radius r = ℏ/mc. With translational velocity it traces out a helix in spacetime, with the radius of the helix going to zero as the translational velocity goes to c, obviously, i. e. per the Pythagorean Theorem, c² = (v_t)² + (vr)², where v_t is translational velocity and v_r rotational. This is a great candidate for explaining Ulf Klein’s result showing that the so-called Bohr Correspondence Principle does not hold in general [12]; it doesn’t hold because ℏ → 0 as v_t → c, a rather elegant explanation.
Finally, in The Phase of the Schoedinger Wave Function and Spin: An Improper Transformation | by Wes Hansen | Medium I summarize Klein’s more recent work in which he derives Quantum Mechanics for spinning particles and show how everything he uncovers fully supports Hestenes’ Zitter model. And Zitterbewegung, German for “trembling motion,” was coined by Schroedinger when he discovered, while investigating the Dirac equation, that the velocity eigenvalues are +- c (plus or minus the speed of light).
So, well-motivated indeed. But all we hear about is string theory and its Pope, Ed Witten; string theory cannot, at the present moment, explain a goddamn thing . . .
But yeah, Zwicky, what a character . . . the establishment came to hate him, I think.
