Physicist Eric J. Lerner gets to the point:
For all who see it, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the universe are beautifully stunning. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also quite surprising—not at all what the theory predicted. In the deluge of technical astronomical research papers published online since July 12, the authors repeatedly state that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, not necessarily pleasant ones. The headline of a newspaper begins with the exclamation: “Panic!”
Why are the JWST images causing panic among cosmologists? What are the predictions of the theory that contradict it? Newspapers do not actually say. The fact that these papers fail to mention is that the hypothesis that the JWST images contrast starkly and repeatedly is the Big Bang hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an extremely hot, dense and expanding state ever since. Since this hypothesis has been defended for decades as an indisputable fact by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “I now find myself lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering if everything I did was wrong,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
Eric J Lerner“The Big Bang Didn’t Happen” in IAI.TV (August 11, 2022)
Although we don’t usually hear about it, there has been resentment of the Standard Model, which begins with the Big Bang, since it was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre nearly a century ago. But no one expects the James Webb Space Telescope to contribute to the debate.
Now, Lerner is the author of a book called The Big Bang didn’t happen (1992) But—while this makes him an interested party—it doesn’t make him wrong. He will speak at the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival in London (September 17-18, 2022) sponsored by the Institute of Arts and Ideas (IAI), as a participant in the “Cosmology and the Great Statue” debate.
The next debate involving philosopher of science Bjorn Ekberg and astrophysicist Yale Priamvada Natarajan, along with Lerner, is as follows:
The Big Bang theory is based primarily on the “inflation” hypothesis that initially the universe expanded many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. But experiments failed to prove evidence of cosmic inflation, and from the start of the theory it was exposed to deep mysteries. Now one of its founders, Paul Steinhardt has denounced the theory as false and “scientifically meaningless”.
Should we abandon cosmic inflation and look for a radical alternative? Can alternative theories such as the great bounce, or the abandonment of the speed of light offer a solution? Or are such alternatives simply plastering over to avoid the more radical conclusion that it is time to abandon the Big Bang altogether?
Here’s a discussion on this general topic from last year’s festival (but without the JWST data). Features theoretical physicist Sabine Hüsseinfelder, author Lost in Mathematics: How Beauty Leads Physics astray, With Ekeberg and particle physicist Sam Henry.
So yeah, it’s been a serious topic of discussion for a while. Now, what to make of Eric Lerner’s approach? Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon presents Mind Matters News Some ideas and possible solution:
The current thinking is that the nucleosynthesis era of the Big Bang produced 75% hydrogen, 25% helium (by weight) and a little more lithium, but no more. Then, after 300,000 years, the universe has cooled enough to produce atoms, the gravitational pull is slowly, and stars are slowly forming. The early waves were large enough to explode, and the shock waves sent through the hydrogen gas caused pockets that began to form stars in earnest. But it still takes 500 million years to get enough stars for a galaxy. Now, the earlier a galaxy formed, the more it recedes in time and distances it from today’s astronomers, and the further away it is from it, the faster it will move away from us. This movement causes the light to shift red. This relationship is so strong, that astronomers replace ‘time’ with ‘red shift’. But the Hubble Space Telescope could only see visible light, and those early galaxies were so redshifted that they were only “visible” in the infrared, as the James Webb Telescope lights up. So one of the goals of the James Webb Telescope was to see the first galaxies, and in fact, they see a lot.
So what does this mean for the Standard Model?
Theorists have an answer. Too much dark matter clumping to make hydrogen gas clump early. Which leads to the question, “Why isn’t dark matter agglomerating now?”
I don’t have the stamina to run every rabbit trail that cosmologists suggest. Instead, I suggest that the first stars weren’t made of hydrogen, but rather of ice. The Big Bang synthesized copious amounts of C and O which were combined with H to form H20, CO2, CH4, etc. These gases freeze relatively early in the universe’s time frame, so the agglomeration was not gravitational but physicochemical, in the same way that snowflakes form. So we didn’t have to wait 500 million years for the snowflakes to clump, it happens very quickly once the universe cools below freezing. Hence James Webb sees a lot of redshifted galaxies from the early universe.
The paper on that (and perhaps a prediction of what James Webb will find?) is in my Open Access paper at Blyth Institute Communications in 2021.
This is one possible solution. We know he knows when he always poses challenges.
This sometimes appears: has the universe always existed? The problem is that if the universe has existed for an infinite amount of time, then everything that could happen must have already happened an infinite number of times – including that we don’t exist and we’ve never risen. But we know we exist. As Robert J. Marks has pointed out, playing with infinity at speed produces absurdity. To do science, we must accept that some events are real and not mutually contradictory. So we can assume that the universe began but we are now less certain of how this happened.
You may also like to read: Did the physicists open a gateway to the extra time dimension, as claimed? This is how the story is read at Scientific American. But experimental physicist Rob Sheldon says not so fast… The physicists, who built “time crystals,” happened upon the error-correcting technology of quantum computers. The rest is the story we all wish we were in.