Menzo
5416
JWST’s images are causing a stir and making people wonder if the Big Bang actually happened. This is a super exciting time!
Matt_W
5417
I’d wait to see more mainstream criticism of those papers. Eric Lerner has been beating this drum for decades and he doesn’t get traction because Big Bang cosmology has always worked better than plasma cosmology to explain observations. I’d take any putative refutation of BBC with a large grain of salt.
Sharpe
5418
So I have to wonder how valid is this challenge to the Big Bang? I clicked that second link in @Menzo’s post, entitled “The Big Bang didn’t happen” and it turns out to be posted by a guy who’s already published a book called “The Big Bang Didn’t Happen” and although I’m not an astro-physicist, his analysis sounded VERY thin and conclusory to me.
What is the general view on this? I get the sense the first linked article which discusses “challenges” to astronomical theory and urges the need for replication and further study is a better source than that second linked article which sounds like, IMO, book-selling hype.
Yeah, my gut reaction is that this is wishful thinking on Lerner’s part, and someone will soon explain all this without changing everything we know about the formation of the universe. But I’m no expert, and as it’s not exactly an urgent issue, I’m happy to wait for those who are to get to work on it.
Houngan
5420
If you’re grifting and somebody figures out the current game, you have to immediately expand the grift in to a bigger game. No idea if the guy is shady or whatever, but a quick confirmation bias is always suspect.
We’ve been waiting some 14 billion years or so, another several dozen won’t hurt!
You sound like George R. R. Martin!
jpinard
5423
It really feels like he’s trying to make a name for himself, so no matter how wrong he really is, he’s going to continue to double and triple-down his stake. He bet the farm on this, and it doesn’t hold water to my feeble mind.
Tim_N
5424
That Eric Lerner article throws up a few red flags in just a few paragraphs:
- It mentions one preprint paper starts with “Panic!”, but when you click through to the article it is obvious the authors did not mean panic in the same way that Eric Lerner implies.
- It cites a scientist on twitter mentioning that maybe everything they have known is wrong. Except again when you click through she claims the article hilariously misinterpreted her quote.
- Eric Lerner talks about a paper he “published”, which is just a arXiv preprint that anyone can upload anything to no matter how valid or true.
Romalar
5425
The consensus of the scientists I read seems to be that this is calling into question the current theories of very early galaxy formation at times starting at least many millions of years after the big bang, but not the big bang itself. We should learn a lot about this as JWST studies continue.
There are many lines of evidence for the big bang, but we can’t see it directly. One of the biggest (and first) lines of evidence is that we can see the cosmic microwave background (once the universe cooled down a few hundred thousand years after the big bang) directly with other instruments. This goes back to earlier in the universe than all of the observations that we’re talking about here and anything JWST can really ever be expected to see in its wavelengths.
In other words, it is science working as intended, adjusting theories to conform to the data as the data changes, and doing so methodically and with carefully delineated questions. Too often this sort of low-key if essential (and wonderful) work gets misinterpreted by people wanting BIG SHOCKING THINGS or whatever. Or who are not patient enough to do this sort of work themselves I suppose!
Matt_W
5427
To be fair to Lerner, there are problems with Big Bang cosmology. It has problems with baryonic asymmetry (why is there mostly matter and not anti-matter) and the 120 orders of magnitude that separate the predictions of GR and QM wrt vacuum energy. And inflation, dark matter, and dark energy are all basically kludges. (Mathematically rigorous kludges with well tested theoretical foundations, but also inelegant.) Plasma cosmology solves some of these issues, but also apparently doesn’t match other observations. I’m not at all a cosmologist, and cosmology is as weird and unintuitive as the rest of fundamental physics, but I hesitate to buck the overwhelming scientific consensus without really good reason.
This. It’s not that people like Lerner can’t be right, or that the majority of cosmologists can’t be wrong, it’s that you have to demonstrate those things properly. The method, the epistemology, is key, not the conclusions.
I just got around to reading this, and it’s pretty amazing. The images, of course, but also that a lot of the processing came from “citizen scientist” - read, amateur working on her own time - Judy Schmidt. Having all this data available to the public really opens up opportunities!
Tim_N
5431
This moon photo is really great:
Moon needs a dermatologist, for sure.
The detail is great but where do the colours come from?
Wolfie
5434
The Colour? Out of Space.
This is cool and all but why did we spend $10 billion to take more pictures of Jupiter? This telescope was supposed to take pictures of exoplanets.
Disprove the Big Bang? Fuck yes. More shit like that. We know what Jupiter looks like. Show me Proxima Centauri B.
