NASA's James Webb Space Telescope may soon dismiss the Big Bang theory. Let's dive into this.
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