The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel
Category: Other
Via: hallux • last year • 53 commentsBy: Part 1 Ariel Kaminer - Part 2 Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser - NYT
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Part 1:
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Cosmology, the study of the universe, isn’t like other sciences. You can’t step outside the universe to observe it, the way you might observe rats in a maze or cells in a petri dish. Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, says it’s a realm where science starts to get pretty close to philosophy — an inquiry into the nature of existence. |
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That’s something that he and Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College, have spent a lot of time talking about, especially in the months since the James Webb Space Telescope started beaming back information at the very end of last year. That information included images so extraordinary that my colleague Dennis Overbye called them “eye candy from heaven.” But it also included data that was not what cosmologists expected. Which got Frank and Gleiser thinking: How much of what’s known as the standard model — the basis for most cosmological research — is right, and how much is just a kind of elaborate patch? |
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Take dark matter and energy, for example, the catchall term scientists use for the vast majority of the universe we cannot currently measure or see. Gleiser thinks that 100 years from now, the concept will seem risible. “When 96 percent of the universe is something you’re calling dark, meaning you have no idea what it is,” he told me, “that may be an indication that there’s really something much deeper going on that you’re missing.” |
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That possibility is the subject of a somewhat mind-bending guest essay they wrote for Times Opinion . “Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong,” they explain. “It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.” |
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I asked the two scientists how it felt to peer into that abyss. I expected them to say they were terrified, since that’s how I would feel if the possibility arose that everything I thought I knew might be wrong. But my guess couldn’t have been farther from the mark. |
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“It’s wonderful,” Gleiser exclaimed, “because if it’s true, we’re going to be witnessing a revolution in thinking about how the universe works.” |
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Frank said, “It’s actually the most exciting thing ever when things don’t work, because that means you’re on the frontier of what you know and what you don’t know, and that’s the most exciting place for a scientist to be.” |
Part 2:
Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.
Launched at the end of 2021 as a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb, a tool with unmatched powers of observation, is on an exciting mission to look back in time, in effect, at the first stars and galaxies. But one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology.
According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.
The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.
Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.
At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data have gotten far more precise. And now new data from the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in the model, not in the data.
Two serious issues with the standard model of cosmology would be concerning enough. But the model has already been patched up numerous times over the past half century to better conform with the best available data — alterations that may well be necessary and correct, but which, in light of the problems we are now confronting, could strike a skeptic as a bit too convenient.
Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.
A potent mix of hard-won data and rarefied abstract mathematical physics, the standard model of cosmology is rightfully understood as a triumph of human ingenuity. It has its origins in Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s that the universe was expanding — the first piece of evidence for the Big Bang. Then, in 1964, radio astronomers discovered the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background , the “fossil” radiation reaching us from shortly after the universe began expanding. That finding told us that the early universe was a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles that has been continually cooling and becoming less dense ever since.
Over the past 60 years, cosmology has become ever more precise in its ability to account for the best available data about the universe. But along the way, to gain such a high degree of precision, astrophysicists have had to postulate the existence of components of the universe for which we have no direct evidence. The standard model today holds that “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and everything else we can see — constitutes only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).
Cosmic inflation is an example of yet another exotic adjustment made to the standard model. Devised in 1981 to resolve paradoxes arising from an older version of the Big Bang, the theory holds that the early universe expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This theory solves certain problems but creates others. Notably, according to most versions of the theory, rather than there being one universe, ours is just one universe in a multiverse — an infinite number of universes, the others of which may be forever unobservable to us not just in practice but also in principle.
There is nothing inherently fishy about these features of the standard model. Scientists often discover good indirect evidence for things that we cannot see, such as the hyperdense singularities inside a black hole. But in the wake of the Webb’s confounding data about galaxy formation, and the worsening problem with the Hubble constant, you can’t be blamed for starting to wonder if the model is out of joint.
A familiar narrative about how science works is often trotted out at this point to assuage anxieties. It goes like this: Researchers think they have a successful theory, but new data show it is flawed. Courageously rolling up their sleeves, the scientists go back to their blackboards and come up with new ideas that allow them to improve their theory by better matching the evidence.
It’s a story of both humility and triumph, and we scientists love to tell it. And it may be what happens in this case, too. Perhaps the solution to the problems the Webb is forcing us to confront will require only that cosmologists come up with a new “dark” something or other that will allow our picture of the universe to continue to match the best cosmological data.
There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.
Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.
These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science (though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.
But that’s precisely the sort of assumption we might have to start questioning in order to figure out what’s wrong with the standard model. One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness. An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe. (Dr. Wheeler, working to understand the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, conceived of a “ participatory universe ” in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.)
But a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.
The philosopher Robert Crease has written that philosophy is what’s required when doing more science may not answer a scientific question. It’s not clear yet if that’s what’s needed to overcome the crisis in cosmology. But if more tweaks and adjustments don’t do the trick, we may need not just a new story of the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it.
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The Cloud of Unknowing stretches outward, forever outward.
Thanks, an interesting and informative, refreshingly different seed.
It fell in my path and I tripped over it.
The nice thing about scientific theory, unlike ideology, is that it is forever self correcting.
Exactly, ideology never changes, it remains static for centuries.
Does that include the theory of climate change, which many consider to be an ideology?
I don’t know anyone who considers climate science to be an ideology. It’s a science.
I so, it certainly isn't settled
Anthropogenic global warming/climate change is likely to be how this planet becomes uninhabitable.
Won't even take a meteor strike. Humans are committing suicide.
Who cares how it began or why. The bigger question is whether there is other life in the Universe, microbial or otherwise.
But it would be nice to know exactly how gravity works, and what is the repulsive force that causes the Universe to continue to expand.
Cosmologists care... obviously, and just as obviously the universe cares not what you nor I think.
“And if you don't mind heat in your river and
Fork tongue talking from me
Swim like an eel fantastic snake
Take my love when it's free
Electric feel with me
You call it loud
But the human crowd
Doesn't mean shit to a tree ”
Ya gotta love Neil deGrasse Tyson!
Met him once. Very smart guy!
Hell of a sense of humor.
Well...it had to happen someday.
Thankfully science is self correcting.
Are we going to have to re-write the laws of physics?
Perhaps only on how science approaches quantum physics. Right now the smaller one goes the weirder things behave.
Perhaps when we discard 'dark' as a placeholder we'll be on our way. I don't think this will happen in our lifetimes, but perhaps when we can push our equipment further out than what we now think possible we might further understand things we haven't even thought to question. The James Webb telescope is 1 million miles away from the Earth and orbits the sun. It's an incredible feat of human engineering. The Nancy Grace Roman telescope is expected to launch by 2027 and is expected to take photos of whole galaxies in one shot as opposed to the Webb telescope that has to take multiple photos and have them stitched together (the image of the Andromeda Galaxy is comprised of 400 shots).
The first telescopes were invented in1608. What will we be able to learn in the next 500 years?
That question just blew my mind considering humans are learning things at exponential rates these days
It makes me somewhat optimistic for the human race. We can be incredible when we put our minds to something.
Now we cant even trust science anymore. Maybe the end is nigh.
Science can still be trusted to ask questions whose answers will equip us to ask even better questions. In this way science is having your cake and eating it too.
Pretty sure we can trust science over dogma.
Dogma didn't land men on the moon.
Pretty sure it did....
“Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”
― Victor StengerDidn't the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the Bible as they entered lunar orbit on a live TV broadcast?
I think most of those that landed on the moon claimed to be religious..
I like that
well that's a dumb comment. How did dogma land anyone on the moon? IT took lots of math and science...not dogma
patronizing thumpers is so 20th century...
You brought up moon landings.
In this century, Victor Glover will pilot the 2024 Artemis II who claims to be a Christian and member of Churches of Christ.
The dogma that arose out of the cold war pushed the envelope of science to reach the moon first.
JFK, dogma victim.
No doubt..
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Robert Jastrow
Dr. Jastrow (who claimed to be agnostic) is making a very odd statement in this quote from his 1978 book. Scientists in general properly hold that they do not know the answer to the most profound questions whereas the theologians claim certain knowledge (with substantial details). And here the agnostic scientist (circa 1978) claims that religious beliefs (apparently) will prove to be truth. Something is awry here.
Nope. I go with those who follow the evidence to wherever it leads as opposed to those (even scientists) who merely invent answers to the most profound questions and work to confirm that bias regardless of evidence.
Why is it "odd"?
To be more specific, surely Jastrow knew of or held the same sort of attitude you expressed in the rest of your post, yet you seem to dismiss it.
Because he claimed to be an agnostic and we have quotes of him speaking more like an agnostic atheist yet this quote would be something a theist or agnostic theist would make.
I find that a bit odd.
It is also odd (but clearly not unheard of) for a professional scientist to think that the imaginative musings of theologians regarding the power, character and intentions of a supreme creator would, without any evidence, somehow be true.
It is also odd that one would offer a quote that presumes theological opinions of God are unified. That is, would the scientists discover (over the final rock) the Hindu gods, the Greek gods, Allah/Yahweh, the Trinity, or ...?
I do not know what you are picking up as 'attitude' so how do I respond to this?
The full quote, for some reason the first sentence (bolded) was omitted:
At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
I suppose it depends on what the author means by the mystery of creation. Seems to me we have already answered that question to a degree. We can go all the way back to the singularity. We have yet to understand the nature of the singularity and what triggered the expansion that resulted in our universe. But we certainly have a substantially good working theory on how all cosmological bodies and our universe itself was formed.
We might, in the future, discover that our singularity was seeded by some other universe. In that case, our creator (at that point) was another universe. Eventually we might get to a point where we understand the lowest level substance of existence and can theorize how it can cause universes to emerge.
Short of intentional revelation, it is unlikely that we will find a sentient creator through science. Thus if one exists, we may never know that with certainty.
Thanks for the correction. It wasn't there from the site I copied from. Had it been, I would have included it.
Change "attitude" with "view", then.
Drakk, obviously I do not know what you are talking about so I do not know what you think I am dismissing.
An attitude can be many things, same with view.
What, specifically, do you see in my comments that you consider an 'attitude' or 'view'?
This is what grabbed my attention:
Could this mean that 15 billion years ago, scientists in another galaxy were watching the Milky Way form? Think about that
Our galaxy is one of the oldest in the universe. But the concept of watching another galaxy form is certainly interesting and our scientists are on the job.
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I didn't realize the Milky Way is one of the oldest.
Thanks, it makes me think that my time is running out.
Our solar system is relatively young, but our galaxy is an old-timer.
Ah! I got it mixed up. thanks!
If you have Netflix, check this out...
Thanks! I will check it out
Looks very interesting, appreciate the heads up.
Not if you use the Big Bang as a starting point. The first half of the 15 billion years there wasn't enough of the heavier elements needed for life, then the next half you would still need a few billion just to get a species intelligent enough to care about what is beyond their own planet.