NASA's James Webb Space Telescope may soon dismiss the Big Bang theory. Let's dive into this.
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Physicist Eric J. Lerner comes to the point:
To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space
Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to
most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely
surprising — not at all what was predicted by theory.
In the flood of technical astronomical papers published
online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show
surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly
small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant
ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”
Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists?
And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The papers don’t actually
say.
The truth that these papers don’t report is that the
hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is
the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an
incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that
hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast
majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to
panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says
Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and
wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.” ERIC J. LERNER, “THE BIG BANG
DIDN’T HAPPEN” AT IAI.TV (AUGUST 11, 2022)
Although we didn’t usually hear of it, there’s been
dissatisfaction with the Standard Model, which begins with the Big Bang, ever
since it was first proposed by Georges Lemaître nearly a century ago. But no
one expected the James Webb Space Telescope to contribute to the debate.
An Interested Party
Now, Lerner is the author of a book called The Big Bang
Never Happened (1992) but — while that makes him an interested party — it
doesn’t make him wrong. He will be speaking at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival
in London (September 17–18, 2022) sponsored by the Institute for Art and Ideas
(IAI), as a participant in the “Cosmology and the Big Bust” debate.
The upcoming debate, which features philosopher of science
Bjørn Ekeberg and Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, along with Lerner,
is premised as follows:
The Big Bang theory crucially depends on the ‘inflation’
hypothesis that at the outset the universe expanded many orders of magnitude
faster than the speed of light. But experiments have failed to prove evidence
of cosmic inflation and since the theory’s inception it has been beset by deep
puzzles. Now one of its founders, Paul Steinhardt has denounced the theory as
mistaken and ‘scientifically meaningless’.
Do we have to give up the theory of cosmic inflation and
seek a radical alternative? Might alternative theories like the Big Bounce, or
abandoning the speed of light provide a solution? Or are such alternatives
merely sticking plasters to avoid the more radical conclusion that it is time
to give up on the Big Bang altogether?
A Potential Solution
Here’s a debate on this general topic from last year’s
festival (but without JWST data). It features theoretical physicist Sabine
Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, along
with Ekeberg and particle physicist Sam Henry.
Reference(s): iai news, Research Paper