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| It seems the universe didn't get the Hawking Memo, and all those galaxies are not flying ever outward into the abyss. They're all just sitting there, minding their own business. |
Waitwhat?
Hmm.
Fully-formed galaxies, old and young, hang speckled throughout the cosmos, as though Someone had one day just hung them up there hither and yon like enormous Christmas tree ornaments.
I wonder what that could mean, when a physical event and process no longer explains the existence of the cosmos. However will they explain this away next?
Cue the "It's just a great black sheet, with holes punched in it to let the light through, because aliens are trying to hornswoggle us" Theory, in 3, 2, ...
We were taught, and hold to the notion, that All Truth Is God's Truth, and firmly believe that we weren't given a mind and strong arms if not to help us understand the mechanism we inhabit, and we applaud all such exploration and illumination.
But the more of this we see, the greater our suspicion that cosmologists are intensely studying the rococo backgrounds and brick-a-brac on the stage with binoculars and telescopes, to the point of counting the buttons and threads-per-inch in the performers' garments, while entirely missing the glorious performance that is the main focus of this opera.
YMMV
34 comments:
https://youtu.be/taKaFUNJ6Ec
The Mandelbrot Set, the above video adds further dimensions to what we see.
“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.”
Probably so Alison. See, when you "scientists" just started making things up in order to support your world view the truth was bound to come out eventually. I wish I could feel sorry for you, but I don't. Maybe it's not too late to go back to U of K and get a degree in something more useful like gender studies...
Beautifully stated, Brother. They WERE just hung there by the Master.
Boat Guy
A hypothesis is proposed, evidence is collected, a theory is presented, the theory is tested. Does the theory hold against continued evidence presentation. This how knowledge progresses.
If true, and I ain't a lawyer or a rocket scientist, this removes the need for all that dark energy and matter stuff that nobody can see but which so royally screws up their calcs.
Spooky!
I am of the Robert Anton Wilson school of radical agnosticism. Our feeble, partially evolved chimpanzee brains are not remotely capable of comprehending reality. I also see inscrutable complexity at the other end of cosmology, in molecular biology. Any honest textbook of the subject with have a statement every few pages to the effect that "the mechanism for these observations is not understood at this time."
Ps 19's in-your-face apologetic certainly applies. Plant at wrong time, crop fail, kids die, so serious. Ancients in many cultures tracked sun so that could identify solstice and from it determine planting time. Concluded sun in control. Aztecs, pyramids, sun worship ID'd in Bible. Also saw which set of stars (read constellations) sun rose thru during course of year. Zodiac. Worshipped stars as in control. Ps 19 says, "Stars? God made 'em. And, BTW, that sun that courses the sky and gives heat? Made it too."
RE Big Bang. First wrestled with this in grad physics over half century ago. Took on in particular puzzle of spiral galaxies (see wiki for details). Still unresolved puzzle--even if it did exist, dark matter not solve it. Wondered also about Hubble Constant, variety of data (more than red shift) that suggests expansion at increasing rate as distance increases. Dark energy, lamda of field equations. Knew that Webb telescope might confirm suspicions already hinted at in Hubble data.
When first info of Webb released, began to suspect that one of these Kuhnian revolutions (Revolutions in Scientific Thought, T Kuhn) was taking shape. When the fellow Aesop linked posted 11Aug got even more excited. Somethings gotta change.
But I'd be careful about concluding what that might be. Between late 1800s and early 1900s measured known universe tm increased in size (and thus, given light speed, apparent age) not by an amount of a million, but a factor of a million (from thousands of light years to furthest detectable light source to billions of light years). I've long insisted as measuring tools improved, we'd push those boundries. AFter all, God is more ancient and bigger than we can fathom; what else might give us a metaphorical hint of his glory? However, there are nonetheless some mind-boggling restraints that confound our pondering how far is up. cf, eg, Olbers Paradox.
Roy Kerns
S. Hawking was a prime example of an over educated, self impressed, and dimwit BS artist. Second in line is Carl Sagan.
New data blows models of reality. Put down the donuts, time to think again. It is called "Science".
Good catch and thanks for posting. Staggering impact.
One of your best including Tier 1 rants and that's saying quite a bit.
Interesting. I have known for years that physicists are stuck in a dogmatic rut. General relativity, for example, makes a few nonsensical predictions when carried too far - and they always carry things too far. The quantum physics community is just filled to the brim with those who believe in magic and nonsense. (Bell's Theorem is a straw man argument, for crying out loud!) The entire physics community has lost the thread of reality, and consistently mistakes the map for the territory.
Simple corrections to make GR work better:
1. The total energy at every point is a constant.
2. There is no such thing as negative energy.
3. Spacetime is a field of potential energy whose domain is motion.
4. Space is Euclidean. Time is hyperbolic.
All else follows. There are no contradictions. There are no infinities. There are no singularities (inverse infinities). Hyperbolic time allows photons to lose energy with time (which is equivalent to distance). Black holes are hollow shells of maximal energy density with nothing inside.
If these galaxies are not flying ever outward, how does someone explain red shift?
I really don't care. The images from the new telescope and the old ones are still spectacular. I have several in my desk top background slide show. We citizens have to get some ROI for all of the billions NASA has spent.
Nemo
There have been issues with the big bang theory all along. Every time they get a more powerful telescope and look further away (and further into the past), they see fully formed and "mature" galaxies. The James Webb telescope is just the latest example.
What is very clear is that the universe is a lot larger and a lot older than the big bang theory presumes. In any case, we're all still here on Earth. Once we get out into space and have spread to nearby stars, along with a comparable level of technological development, we will be able to do much better observations that we can now. We've got plenty of time to figure out this cosmology stuff. Its not like we have to figure it all out by next week.
Very curious.
I don't know that I'm ready to scrap the Big Bang theory entirely on the strength of this one article (though it does seem reflective of a larger crisis); but if all this is true, it would certainly dispense with the need for "dark energy" and all these other concepts astronomers have never had a good handle on in the first place.
The architects and Keepers Of The Sacred Flame are ready to scrap the BBT, which is good enough for me.
And yes, this is how Science works. It's what happens when Reality steps in, to let you know your Scienceism Theory has gotten too big for its britches.
And as Greg noted, it works the same way going down in size as well as up.
For those of theological bent, I point it out the in the bible, God's first miracle was creation.
Set that aside for a moment.
Christ's first miracle was changing water into wine. Pay attention.
Back in the day, wine was made from dried concentrate. (Yes, really.)
You added the concentrate to water, stirred, and Presto! Vino.
Hence his command to fill the jars to the rim. This demonstrated that he didn't add the concentrate afterwards and make the jugs overflow, so no parlor trick here.
But there was another thing of note.
When the resultant wine was tasted, it wasn't the stuff fermented last Saturday.
It was "the good stuff", fully fermented old vintage stuff. Really old.
Is there another lesson wrapped in there that folks ain't been thinking about much?
Now suppose that when God created everything ex nihilo he did it the same way: i.e., making everything look like it would if it was a lot older than it was in time-space.
(As if that would be hard for such a being, or any harder than the original act itself.)
Now realize that those two creation descriptions were written down over 2000 and 3500ish years ago, respectively, by people separated about as far from each other in time as we are from the most recent of them.
Now explain, if such is true, how you're going to estimate the true age of the universe, whether looking outward or inward, and whether it matters a whit whether a Creator made a new old universe, or did it the hard way, and just let it age untouched after that first set of "Fiat..."s.
I want people to go looking in telescopes and microscopes, and learning all they can. I'm not afraid of anything they find out there, providing they're not pulling assumptions out of their underpants like a popcorn machine of nonsense. But as a sporting assumption, I think they'll miss the mark and be subsequently embarrassed a lot less if they come at their explorations from a bedrock of faith in a Creator orders of magnitude smarter than them, rather than from a belief in their own boundless and infallible intelligence.
It worked for Newton and Pascal, among a legion of others, and they seem to have been pretty bright fellows.
Just saying.
Aesop 20Aug22 9:34 a.m. Good on you. Parallel to your comment on John 2, water to wine, "age" in that just created. 1) Fish and bread of John 6. What lake did those fish swim in? What field did the bread grow in? 2) Eve's age when Adam first saw her. Right answer: old enough. To be wife, mother. A babe, not a baby, not a zygote, tho only minutes, maybe seconds ago not existing. She had everything appropriate for what she was. 3) Could Adam see stars? The nearest other than the Sun 4 light years away? Tho created only 3 days earlier? How about the most-far-away light in the sky, about 250,000 light years away? (And if he had access to technology such as Webb, 13 billion years.) 4) What about a rock Adam could pick up? Did it look a rock, with all the characteristics appropriate to rockness, say igneous or sedimentary? Including age? Although just created. 5) Try to imagine anything that does not have age as an inherent feature. Now ponder Creation as portrayed in the Bible: not only ex nihilo, but eis nihilo. And even the "nothing" is created.
Like everything else they have been lying form the beginning to fit their agenda. So everything from TPTB is a lie, don't forget that.
There are other theories out there...
https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/
There are always other theories out there, including the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The point is the Long-Cherished Notion is now just so much fishwrap.
One man's theory is another's "proven science".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Wbb1cqubo
Ajātivāda, the Buddhist and Hindu doctrine of non-creation/non-originaion
The non-theistic religions.
These include all of Jainism, all of Buddhism, and two-and-a-half of the six philosophic schools of Hinduism (Sankhya, Vaisheshika, and part of Advaita Vedanta.
About the time that I was put in long pants, the question was "particle" vs "wave". The answer was "neither" or "both". The "real" world doesn't even know what those concepts are. I suspect that what Webb is looking at is similarly of its own existence. He/They/It made our reality simple and linear so we'd have a chance. Not so "down there" or "out there". Time to comprehend more of reality.
Regardless of personal beliefs, I just think it's healthy that Science, Inc. slams into the seatbelts hard once in awhile and gets their Precious Notion bulldozed by Reality.
Keeps 'em humble, and honest.
I recall a couple of statements by my college biology professor, who was also a deacon in the Roman Catholic church.
"Science is not atheistic, science is non-theistic. There is a big difference."
Also,
"Scientists, politicians, and religious leaders all occasionally should admit that "Sometimes, we just don't know".
The problem with theoretical physics, which cosmology is a part of, is that it has become a religion over the past 50 years or so. Take String Theory as example. String Theory is, of yet, untestable. Since science is supposed to be based on testability and observation, String Theory cannot be considered science in any meaningful sense. Throw in the "publish or parish" culture coupled with the group-think phenomenon, a lot of science has degenerated in this manner over the past 3-4 decades.
The big bang theory got its credibility in the early 60's when the cosmic background radiation was detected. However, as we're seeing now, other observations do not square with it and there are other explanations for the cosmic background radiation.
Curiouser and curiouser.
>About the time that I was put in long pants, the question was "particle" vs "wave".
Bullshit. Michaelson-Morley (disproving the ether) was in 1887. 1927 was when they proved wave/particle duality extended to electrons; by that time they already knew it applied to light. If you're a centenarian going around arguing on political blogs - no, there's no "if", you're just not.
As for the rest of it - there've long been questions about the Big Bang, with observable red dwarf stars that definitely looked older than 14 billion years, with the cosmologists and astronomers getting into heated arguments about how each side has damn well done the math correctly, it must be YOU guys that screwed up. So this isn't new, it's just more so. The Big Bang has always had the philosophical problem that based on observed mass, motion, and redshift, there is not enough mass in the universe to prevent everything spreading out into infinite dark and cold, whereas a "special" universe could be expected to be asymptotic (endlessly slowing expansion).
Dark matter is also not disproven by these results, as dark matter is not Big Bang related; instead it's derived from simple gravity and observed redshift/blueshift of stars within galaxies - the galaxies are all rotating too fast and should tear themselves apart without a lot more mass spread out into the discs. Whether it exists or not awaits experiment, but if it doesn't, our understanding of either gravity or light is totally wrong. And both of those have been pretty extensively tested.
From the religious side though - the Big Bang was a provable moment of creation. The alternative is either a steady state universe, with hydrogen popping into existence in the intergalactic spaces to fill in as space expands and existing objects move away from each other, or a universe that began existing in some other fashion, currently not understood. Having it just suddenly start existing fully formed, "God made the universe and put all the galaxies in place so they looked like they'd been there for a long time" is the same kind of argument as "The earth is 6000 years old but God put all the dinosaur bones in place so it looks like it's older".
It makes God into a liar.
Don't do that.
By that logic, creating old wine makes God into a liar too.
Don't do that.
Recheck your assumptions.
Darwinism is even worse- the fossil record doesn’t match, to the point where their “best evidence” is comprised of fakes and rigged tests!
Aesopm 22Aug 1:11 a.m. Kudos again. Right on with the crushing observation that an error in logic makes God into a liar. However, I'd add to "Recheck your assumptions" the need to actually identify and state those assumptions. That sounds as if it were a blowing smoke quibble. But it is not.
Consider the term "age." What does it mean? No, really. What unstated assumptions, does the person using that term rely upon?
What is T nought, time zero, at which one starts the clock and from which age is determined? What assumptions must one make to assert--or deny!--a given age of a given whatever (wine, Eve, water in Eden's rivers, the stars visible to Adam's--or our--unaided eye, additional layers of assumptions to stars "visible" via technology, soil in Eden--not just rock but soil, so with all the properties of soil, eg, gasp, decaying organic material).
Lot of stuff that folks never thought about here.
Exactly so. People keep tripping over their assumptions WRT "time" and "age".
Assumptions are not evidentiary.
"Anonymous Ole Grump said...
A hypothesis is proposed, evidence is collected, a theory is presented, the theory is tested. Does the theory hold against continued evidence presentation. This how knowledge progresses."
You forgot the part where "the university professor whose job depends on the theory dies".
Then the knowledge can progress. No-one wants to go down in history as being the guy who was wrong about the theory and taught everyone else things that are now wrong.
There is no ex-post facto protection in academia.
It's not too long ago that rabid atheists and communists fought hard against the big bang model and the 2nd law of thermodynamics because they couldn't accept that the universe had a beginning, and by implication a creator. The author of the linked article wrote "The Big Bang Never Happened" about 30 years ago, where he promoted plasma cosmology and argued against the universal application of thermodynamic. Einstein added a fudge factor to general relativity (the cosmologic constant) to make it compatible with an eternal, steady state universe. Hoyle, the originator of the term "big bang" used that term to poke fun at the theory. He couldn't accept that the universe had a beginning, nor could he accept a theory like relativity which showed a universe constructed with too much mathematical beauty for a world without a designer.
Academic contortions to avoid any hint of the inescapable likelihood of a Creator should be an Olympic sport, like gymnastics.
Or, as befits them, a televised sport, like pro wrestling, noting that in both cases, it's fixed, and purely theater, not an actual contest.
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