Seeing Infinity
When the James Webb Space Telescope is fully operational, it will begin resolving the details of ever further galaxies out of the haze of the cosmic background radiation and those on the edge, currently described as young galaxies, because only the highest, bluest frequencies are visible to current observations, will present more of the spectrum and appear as mature galaxies.
What this means and how it will be interpreted are two different things.
What we will hear is a re-juggling of all the various ideas already taken for granted; Inflation, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc. and possibly some new patches, to explain the fact that observation failed to support theory. Again.
Is there some way to arrange all the pieces, so they come together as a coherent whole, or are some seriously flawed premises being taken for granted?
For those of us who have followed the evolution of cosmology over the decades, there are many details that haven’t been given the attention they deserve and for those following the field today, there are far more open questions and conflicting observations and theories than should allow the level of confidence currently expressed by the leading experts.
As someone with a lot of respect for expertise, I will give a fair amount of credence to even the more extreme ideas, such as multiverses, if there are no serious and obvious holes in the foundations on which they rest.
There is one gapping hole in the foundation that stands out like a sore thumb, to my elementary respect for basic logic.
When galactic redshift was first observed and measured, it was a logical assumption that it was Doppler Shift. That as the source moves away and the energy has to travel an ever increasing distance, the frequency of the waves would be stretched and thus shifted to a lower frequency.
Yet as this redshift was ever more carefully calibrated, it became obvious that galaxies were not all just moving about, but that overall redshift increased proportional to distance in all directions. Which either means that redshift is an optical effect, or that we happen to be at the exact center of the universe.
