The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215

by jtbayly • 4 years ago

96 106 4 years ago

behnamoh• 4 years ago

Summary by a commenter in the link: Radio astronomy observations of Pulsars indicate that the Hubble Red Shift is caused by “Tired Light” rather than the expansion of the universe.

When Hubble published his observations of red shifted light from distant objects there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zwicky, was that light lost energy as it traveled, termed "tired light". At that time, ca. 1930, interstellar and intergalactic space were assumed to be perfect vacuums and thus there was no mechanism to redden the light. Now, 90 years later, we have actual observational evidence that Zwicky was right.

In the radio astronomy of Pulsars we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant but varies by wavelength. This time dispersion is proportional to the distance from us of the pulsar, indicating that the reduction in velocity is cumulative. The observed effect is isotropic. The interstellar medium is not a vacuum but rather affects light waves in a way best described as having an Index of Refraction greater than 1, unity. We find the same phenomenon in the observation of Fast Radio Bursts from other galaxies, thus indicating that the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum.

ramesh312• 4 years ago

Sounds like this commenter should write a paper.

DiggyJohnson2• 4 years ago

I think it would be more apt to suggest they write/consult for science programming, but I certainly agree with your sentiment.

kurupt2133• 4 years ago

why, it won't make it through peer review. high frequency light arrives first because it interacts less with matter. remember, c is only constant in a true vacuum. the speed of light varies as it travels through matter (refraction). there is a lot of "stuff" to interact with between us and a galaxy 14 billion light years away

i wonder if the energy of empty space (yes, empty space has energy) plays a role in slowly dissipating the energy from light.

andrewclunn• 4 years ago

So no unavailable pitch black sky save for our local group? This is the best freaking cosmological news I've ever heard!

peterlk• 4 years ago

Ok…. So I’m going to try to rephrase what I just learned from this comment. Can someone tell me how far off I am?

The universe is not 100% empty, so the index of refraction is not 1. This could be explained by lots of phenomena like dust particles or stray radiation, etc. Because of this effect, for practical purposes, light that we see as res “travels slower” because it has traveled through more media than blue light.

starwind3• 4 years ago

Curious, I googled "In the radio astronomy of Pulsars we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant but varies by wavelength" and something interesting came up:

"interstellar clouds of electrons retard the velocity of radio waves in direct proportion to their wavelength" in an article from a 1968 edition of Scientific American written by Anthony Hewish...the same guy who discovered pulsars

eecc8• 4 years ago

Look up Hannes Halven then, also very interesting.

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

Dispersion has been evident since FRBs were discovered in 2007. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst]

"The component frequencies of each burst are delayed by different amounts of time depending on the wavelength. This delay is described by a value referred to as a dispersion measure (DM). This results in a received signal that sweeps rapidly down in frequency, as longer wavelengths are delayed more."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_(optics)#Pulsar_emi...]

"dispersion measure (DM) is the column density of free electrons (total electron content) — i.e. the number density of electrons (electrons/cm3) integrated along the path traveled by the photon from the pulsar to the Earth"

pdonis9• 4 years ago

Tired Light

Is a hypothesis that, as a sole or primary explanation of observed redshifts of galaxies, has been thoroughly debunked in the scientific literature.

the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum

This is true, but it cannot explain the observed data by itself, because the observed data is not "redshifts" by themselves. The observed data is a combination of redshifts, apparent luminosity, and angular size for thousands of observed galaxies. These data have observable relationships that can only be explained by cosmological expansion. If the redshifts were caused solely by dispersion in the intergalactic medium, their relationships with apparent luminosity and angular size would be very, very different. That is a quick summary of the thorough debunking of "tired light" that can be found in the scientific literature over a period of some decades.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Inter galactic space not being empty makes lot of sense. After all everything that is matter(stars etc.) had to come from somewhere.

If universe is expanding is it getting thinner? That is same amount of matter is spreading over larger space. Thus wouldn't the refraction index be higher on average when observing the path from really old objects?

luhn2• 4 years ago

One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”

Completely burying the full title "Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field" which is the best Panic! at the Disco pun I've seen in a long time.

soneil• 4 years ago

Not just burying, but very disingenuously so. Than you for looking that up, it speaks volumes.

luhn2• 4 years ago

"Looking that up" is giving me too much credit, I just clicked the link :)

I don't think it's disingenuous, just out of touch. The author is 75 years old; he probably didn't recognize a 2000s-2010s pop culture pun.

ericlerner3• 4 years ago

The reference to the band is only funny because the paper clearly shows that the whole collision-merger theory that is fundamental to cosmology today is wrong, so the theorists will panic. It's an inside joke. As my article says, no mergers, no growth of galaxies, no tiny galaxies long ago, no expansion optical illusion and thus no expansion.

kirykl• 4 years ago

“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.”

This is science. It differs from the media's Science™

mounceyboy• 4 years ago

Robert A Wilson's blog, hidden assumptions, has been arguing there are also problems with general relativity and the conservation of mass. His work, consistently rejected despite respect for his mathematical expertise, has recently been published in peer review. He has also questioned whether the Big bang doesn't raise more questions than it answers, alongside dark matter.

colechristensen4• 4 years ago

Lots of people do this. Come up with a theory with testable set of predictions that isn’t just a patchwork of models glued together to explain data and then you’ll convince people.

StanislavPetrov• 4 years ago

Come up with a theory with testable set of predictions that isn’t just a patchwork of models glued together to explain data and then you’ll convince people.

The dark matter crowd was able to convince quite a few people without hurdling such a high bar, not to mention stuff like string-theory..

cwp2• 4 years ago

Agreed, this his how things work in practice, but man, I wish we could do better. The question of whether new observations falsify the current theory is completely separate from the creation of a better theory. If the Big Bang theory is wrong, then it's wrong, and we just don't know how the universe began.

Sanzig• 4 years ago

Author's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner

I get the impression he's regarded as something of a crank in astrophysics communities.

chiefalchemist2• 4 years ago

But that's the problem with groupthink, isn't it? That is, wrong until it's not and then suddenly everyone pretends like they knew it was true all along. Science has ego-issues the same way sports and entertainment do. Scientists aren't any less human than the rest of us (tho' they often seem to pretend otherwise).

awb• 4 years ago

The alternative is for the group to exhaustively spend time entertaining every theory so as not to exclude anyone prematurely.

Shouldn’t the burden of proof be placed on the individual rather than the group?

karpierz• 4 years ago

The earth is round, until it isn't?

polemic• 4 years ago

On the other hand, scientific consensus isn't "groupthink", and being a contrarian doesn't automatically entitle you to other people's attention and time.

Tao33003• 4 years ago

I don't see how you get that impression from Wikipedia. You're just projecting your own bias and pretending it backs you up.

VikingCoder2• 4 years ago

Lerner's ideas have been rejected by the professional physicists and cosmologists who have reviewed them.

Are you being obtuse?

medo-bear6• 4 years ago

im also sceptical but in high school i learned about a bunch of people who were thought to be cranks but turned out to be right. for me personally its not too hard to immagine that big bang turns out to be false but i appreciate that it is the best model we have so far

cecilpl2• 4 years ago

But you didn't learn about the millions of cranks that turned out to be wrong.

y04nn• 4 years ago

The end of the article really feels like he is trying to sell me something.

We at LPPFusion have been applying that knowledge concretely to the development of a cheap, clean and unlimited source of energy that can entirely replace fossil fuels starting in this decade.

And I doubt that the website (iai.tv), that I have never head of, is a source that can be trusted.

bpodgursky• 4 years ago

They've been on WeFunder for a while trying to crowdfund operations.

I did not invest.

sdwr3• 4 years ago

He doesn't write like a crank. He's clear, concise, and has a history of work without sounding overly egotistical. I don't want to get prematurely hyped, but this could be the real deal.

jjulius• 4 years ago

He does write like a crank. He deliberately misquotes the "Panic!" title of a research paper, and misconstrues what Kirkpatrick is referencing when she talks about being kept up at night - her original quote is just her speaking broadly, not about The Big Bang possibly not being real.

That's two things he's bent to support his position within the first two paragraphs of this piece. Right out of the gate he's shown that he can't be trusted with data.

gomijacogeo• 4 years ago

I think he's the very model of a crank - he's been actively pushing a hypothesis mainly defined for what it isn't for at least 30 years that's been kicking around for over 60 years that's failed to make a single successful prediction and repeatedly gets falsified and instead cherrypicks new results and goes "See! Everything about that model is wrong and therefore mine must be right." The Big Bang just broke some people.

beanders• 4 years ago

I should think that after all these centuries we had learned to listen to the cranky physicists.

pdonis9• 4 years ago

Not so much a crank as a person pushing an agenda and being willing to bypass the normal scientific process to do it.

xqcgrek2• 4 years ago

Crackpot stuff, unfortunately. The CMB and host of other stuff is evidence for a Big Bang.

The merger stuff JWST has falsifed was never really on solid ground anyway but tuned cosmological simulations. The simulations probably got subgrid physics wrong (same issue as climate models face).

DiggyJohnson2• 4 years ago

You may be right, but I think referring to this perspective as “Crackpot stuff” is entirely too strong a criticism. Wormholes and flying cars are “crackpot stuff.” But regarding this question it feels like you are reaching for the strongest possible language to rebut a position you simply disagree with.

We really are in a moment where serious astronomers and astrophysicists are evaluating validity and correctness of some of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe, to a degree that we simply haven’t seen since at least the mapping of the CMB, and perhaps longer.

excalibur• 4 years ago

Wormholes and flying cars are “crackpot stuff.”

Umm, wormholes maybe. Flying cars have existed for the better part of a century. The fact that nobody has successfully brought one to market yet means that you and I don't have them. But humanity certainly does.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car

alex_young• 4 years ago

Is this from the same guy who started Birds Aren't Real?

timmg• 4 years ago

I have no idea if this is true or not.

But for a moment I was just imagining a world where scientists agreed that the Big Bang never happened. How many physicists' work would be thrown in the trash? How many high school science books would have to be updated? How would the general public's trust in science change?

Would be such an interesting thing to observe.

TT-392• 4 years ago

Wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. We used to think mars had civilization and canals until not too long ago (kinda funny that the drawings of those canals ended up looking a lot like the veins in a human eye). Also, the idea of radio waves going through the ether, on which a lot of science was based got disproved at some point.

HKH2• 4 years ago

We used to think mars had civilization and canals until not too long ago

Who? I've never heard of such an idea.

aeternum2• 4 years ago

Indeed, nowadays everyone knows that radio waves propagate through quantum fields which pervade the entire universe including vacuums.

Definitely not ether, those foolish old scientists got the name wrong :D

sbf501• 4 years ago

How would the general public's trust in science change?

Depending how it was taught.

When I was a kid, the T-Rex tail slid along the ground like a crocodile. Now we know dino tails were used for balance and they generally remained rigid.

Dinos didn't have feathers when I was a kid.

Pluto was a planet when I was a kid.

However, one crackpot clickbait article didn't change the three things listed above. Millions of person-hours of research did.

sdwr3• 4 years ago

This probably belies my ignorance, but I'm guessing not much would change. All the research on galaxy ages and star formation would have to be reinterpreted, but I bet most of it would be salvagable, just with a different first mover. Like refactoring a codebase to replace a dependency.

If the work is good, it's reasonably independent of the story being told.

eecc8• 4 years ago

Well, one of the most interesting and exiting outcomes would be renewed interest in the study of Electromagnetic interactions at cosmological level (not just signals to observe other processes).

One of the features of Big Bang is how it’s sufficient to explain the structure of the universe via Gravity alone, yet there’s a ton of data indicating that pervading Plasma and Electromagnetic interactions within are at play.

But since they have no place in the BB model they’re discounted as marginal phenomena.

But, if the paradigm shifted - to put it in Popper terms - a whole new box of interesting goodies would pop open!

aeternum2• 4 years ago

Penrose has a crazy theory where he considers what the universe looks like after the heat-death. After all the blackholes evaporate and photons are the only thing left.

Since photons travel at the speed of light, neither distance nor time are measurable. All that remains is the relative angular concentration of photons. If you imagine the universe as a sphere, the relative concentration of photons represents the pattern on the surface of the sphere.

However there's no longer any way to determine that sphere's size nor whether it is expanding, contracting or even the existence of time itself.

The crazy thing is how close this is to the early universe. You start with the cosmic microwave background pattern and that's basically also exactly what you end up with: a pattern/projection of photons where space and time basically become meaningless or cease to exist.

jschveibinz• 4 years ago

“the general public’s trust in science”

Science is /= fact or truth. Science is a process.

There should never be a “trust in science.” In fact, science only works if nobody trusts anything and every experiment is questioned and repeated. If this doesn’t happen, then that’s when the general public should be concerned.

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

So, interesting if true, but I have not the expertise to tell if I'm reading an article by a crackpot or not. If there are any H.N. readers who are experts in astronomy, by which I mean a Ph.D. in it or it's your paid profession, who could tell me just how "out there" this article is, I would be grateful.

sdwr3• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/U3Ak-SmyHHQ

Anyone know why this took so long to discover, if true? Is the James Webb that much more powerful than the Hubble?

I'd love if this turned out to be an epicycle moment. It reinforces my belief that being paradigm-flexible is valuable.

kurupt2133• 4 years ago

the james webb mirror is soooo much larger than the hubble's (6.5m vs 2.4m diameter). if i recall, the hubble telescope fits in the Orbiter cargo bay

RachelF2• 4 years ago

James web can see in the infra-red. Light from long ago is shifted into this band.

Hubble could not see as far into the infra-red.

i_no_can_eat• 4 years ago

This guy is a known crackpot. He's not a serious researcher and has no published papers in astrophysics. File under "horseshit".

medo-bear6• 4 years ago

He's not a serious researcher and has no published papers in astrophysics.

according to wikipedia hes been funded by nasa. and also looks like youre incorrect about not being published

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08382

Tade0• 4 years ago

The "Panic!" bit is a reference to the pop-rock band Panic! At the Disco:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic!_at_the_Disco

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

“ If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance. Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.)”

Interesting misunderstanding of inflation.

gus_massa• 4 years ago

I think it's a real effect.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2622/

Unofficial Explanation: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2622:_Angular_Diamete...

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter_distance#Angu...

pedalpete• 4 years ago

Though the article is probably incorrect, it lead me to think about how the Big Bang is mostly built upon a paradigm of the understanding of the time.

We understood explosions and how atoms would interact based on that.

It is similar to how in the 1800s we thought of the body as a connection of pipes and fluids because that is how we understood things. Then as we built a greater understanding of electricity, we now see the electrical components of the body. Which doesn't negate the plumbing version, but we now have a greater understanding of how muscles and the brain work.

kurupt2133• 4 years ago

what does the [flagged] mean?

any theory that gets rid of dark matter is better than what we have now. the cosmological constant was one thing (turns out Einstein found the quantized minimum energy of empty space, before quantum mechanics). This dark matter folly is taking fudge factor to the extreme. it's lazy.

eikenberry• 4 years ago

It means that the topic was controversial enough that some people flagged it.

halfjoking• 4 years ago

Big Pharma and their fraudulent vaccine trials were enough for me…

Now we have to worry about Big Cosmo?

medo-bear6• 4 years ago

i think this is unfairly flagged

while_true_• 4 years ago

So the linked article is the work of a crank, but it does raise a fair question: is the density of small distant galaxy smudges on the Webb image consistent with Big Bang theory?

RachelF2• 4 years ago

Yes, this is the crux of the matter.

Forget the ad-hominem "he's a known crank" arguments.

He raises valid questions in his article, if he's a crank, then refute his facts or conclusions.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

I'm all for scientific community entertaining the valid questions of even the cranks. Specially when it should pretty quick answer or actually an interesting one that might be worth to spend bit of time on.

Not entirety of their production is bad. And they can offer some different perspectives.

arvigeus• 4 years ago

Expectations: Discussion about the article, the arguments, and what it got right and what it got wrong. Reality: Ad hominem “The author is a crackpot!”

Fatnino• 4 years ago

@dang can we get this domain banned? Everything coming from there is crank science and it seems to be showing up at least once a day this week. Mostly this same story.

nederland• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/sMpXv

Quote: If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance. Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.

I just woke up and I don't get this...

eecc8• 4 years ago

see this https://xkcd.com/2622/

xrayarx• 4 years ago

Having read the article, I also come to the conclusion that this is unfairly flagged. All ad hominem comments here should be removed. This is just one of many physicists arguing against the current mainstream hypothesis.

ericlerner3• 4 years ago

Hey all,

Somebody talking 'bout me? Why don't you all tune in next month to our debate in London https://howthelightgetsin.org/events/cosmology-and-the-big-b... Science advances by comparing predictions with subsequent observations. Right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong quantitative predictions and one right one. The details are not in serious dispute in the literature. My conclusions are what's controversial. The consensus is "well we can fix all these problems, just wait." Sort of like getting on an airline that just had 16 crashes out of 17 flights. But throw out the Big Bang and you've got a lot of correct predictions. Details here: https://youtu.be/tK3OStArUqE

eecc8• 4 years ago

Hey Eric, I wonder if that really you. Just wanted to say hi, read your book many years ago and found the Plasma Universe theory very fascinating and frankly less bleak than the Big Bang with its philosophical implications about irreversible decay and such (you make that point in the book itself.)

Also, I have the feeling Gravitational Cosmology has reached a point where most effort goes into “refining the constants” - was it Hilbert that said that was all that was left to do, right before Quantum Mechanics was introduced? - so a little bombshell discovery would make things very exiting and fresh.

Keep it up!

eecc8• 4 years ago

I was mistaken. It wasn’t Hilbert (who had a somewhat similar ambition in Mathematics) but Lord Kelvin.

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/lord-kelvin-...

ericlerner3• 4 years ago

Hi, It's really me. The equivalent these days is the term "Precision Cosmology", implying all that's left is the next decimal point. To which I reply: "Precision Cosmology is precisely wrong."

nonameking2026• 4 years ago

music autoplay ? really ?

The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

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