How far do you think science still has to go? How much do you estimate
is still unknown to humankind? And might we have already made
mistakes in the past that have led us in entirely the wrong direction?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question;
did scientists just discover that cosmology is all wrong?
Do you need the big questions answered? Are you constantly curious? Then why not subscribe
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One of the beauties of science is that it’s ever-changing. It’s never the case
that any one rule or theory is totally safe from being tweaked, rewritten,
or entirely thrown out. Even with the most fundamental pillars of scientific thought,
it is possible to alter how we understand them, when and if new evidence comes to light. In a 2022
video, we took a closer look at how one particular study had potentially proved all of physics wrong…
so be sure to check that out after this. But, for today, it’s all eyes on space and the universe,
as researchers believe they may have found something that could change everything.
When we look to the sky above we see stars, but no one star is the same as
any other. And they’re all positioned at different distances away from the Earth.
Some are just a few lightyears from us, some are a few million. The farthest star ever recorded
is Earendel, clocked by the Hubble telescope in 2022, and calculated to be a staggering
twenty-eight billion lightyears away from us - about double the distance of any other star,
ever discovered. It’s thought that Earendel formed somewhere around the end of the first
billion years of the universe’s life, after the Big Bang. But there’s some confusion here,
and possible discrepancy. Earendel is twenty-eight billion lightyears away, but it’s only twelve
billion or so years old… in a universe that’s only 13.8 billion years old. How can that be?
Broadly, the answer is universal expansion. We know that the universe is expanding out and out,
seemingly pushed by an unknowable force - potentially that of dark energy. We
also know that the rate of the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Over the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, scientists and astronomers - including the likes of Albert Einstein and Edwin
Hubble - have been able to reach that conclusion thanks largely to a natural phenomenon known as
redshift. Redshift is the apparent reddening of a distant object, as the light that it
emits gets effectively stretched out. While it’s bluer if it’s nearer; if it’s redder, then it’s
further away. Famously, Einstein hadn’t originally allowed for an expanding universe in his theories,
but conceded his mistake when the work of Hubble and others showed it to be the case.
There are, of course, variations on this line of understanding, even today,
but in general the model of an expanding universe that’s accelerating has come to
be widely accepted by contemporary science. Now, though, thanks to one controversial but
potentially ground-breaking study, all of that might suddenly be turned on its head. And we
might even be reverting back to a static universe, bizarrely more in line with early Einstein.
On June 29th, 2023, one Lucas Lombriser - a theoretical cosmologist, dark energy specialist,
and professor at the University of Geneva - had his extremely fresh take published,
in the journal “IOPScience”. In the paper, titled “Cosmology in Minkowski Space”, Lombriser suggests
that traditional ideas on universal expansion can, in fact, be reinterpreted… so that, actually,
no expansion needs to take place at all. At least, not in the typical sense. Lombriser purports that,
while the universe might seem like it’s spreading out and out, it’s not. Instead,
it’s static but fluctuating at the particle level, which is what really drives change.
What was originally driving Lombriser was the infamous problem of the cosmological constant.
Frustratingly enough, the cosmological constant is an unknown in science… but, at the same time,
it’s required in order to make everything else make sense. It’s the term then attributed to
whatever it is that’s driving universal expansion, at the rate that we can observe. However,
the numbers don’t crunch the same at the macro and micro levels. Studies in particle physics propose
that there’s what’s known as vacuum energy in the universe, responsible for driving it apart… but
the cosmological constant as calculated through vacuum energy is up to 120 orders of magnitude
higher than what more traditional observations suggest. Essentially, there’s a huge disagreement
as to the strength of the cosmological constant, and therein lies the problem.
But back to Lombriser’s paper, and the suggestion is that the problem is solved because it isn’t
actually there to begin with. Lombriser re-pitches what we already know, so that instead of expansion
we have an evolution of the mass of particles over a massive amount of time… which might create the
illusion of expansion, from our perspective observing on Earth. Lombriser writes that,
“this frame exhibits a variation of mass, length and time scales across spacetime”. He goes on to
explain that the phenomenon of redshift might be reinterpreted as a result. Science has always seen
redshift as proof of an expanding universe, but actually - applying Lombriser’s theory - it might
really show changing mass throughout the universe. In which case, the universe can be static, and our
observations still hold. There are implications in our search for dark energy, too, because all
of a sudden it might not even be there… because, if the universe isn’t expanding as most mainstream
science says it is, then dark energy isn’t needed. It’s unknown because it’s wholly not real.
Unsurprisingly, these have quickly become controversial ideas. For many,
as neat as it seems to just flip the numbers and make them work in
a different way, there are still way too many aspects of the universe that can’t
be proven (or fail) when forced through Lombriser’s model. However, for others,
this could be the start of a revolution in our understanding. Again, no matter where it leads,
and no matter how any one person feels about it, that’s the beauty of science. It’s never
finished, it’s never complete, and this latest shakeup is, at the very least, proof of that.
Lucas Lombriser is certainly no stranger to making bold predictions such as this latest one,
however. In 2020, he led on research which concluded that we could be living inside
what was then dubbed a Hubble Bubble - a 250 million lightyear wide structure,
inside of which the density of matter might be fifty percent lower than on the outside (i.e.,
than in the rest of the universe). There were then further suggestions that the wider universe might
be populated with multiple Hubble Bubbles. Lombriser isn’t alone in proposing such a
setup - with many a multiverse argument also centering on bubbles in reality - although,
again, his particular tweaks do appear to result in a unique understanding of how the
universe might really work. At this stage, the more recent kickback to expansion hasn’t
been merged with the Hubble Bubble model, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time.
But, what’s your verdict? Are you prepared to question everything we thought we knew
about the universe? To rethink redshift not as evidence of expansion, but instead
as hinting toward a cosmos that evolves and changes in an entirely different way?
What is true is that, although the fundamentals of physics and astrophysics can feel as though
they’ve been entrenched forever… against the full backdrop of human history, it’s actually all quite
recently acquired knowledge. Travel just 150 years back, and most of all the major theories,
models and terms were either unknown or little understood. The Big Bang,
universal expansion, dark energy, even the makeup and distribution of smaller galaxies…
science had yet to properly figure any of it out. And, of course, we know that there have
been some major revisions to our collective wisdom before - be that through Einstein,
Charles Darwin, or more recently a figure like Peter Higgs. Change is always on the horizon;
a complete U-turn is never quite out of the question.
If the universe were found to be static after all; if it were proved that all
of us had been looking at it all wrong, for decades… then that would constitute
a hugely major breakthrough. Right now, it’s research (only) that kicks hard against the
mainstream. A lot more work and study has to be carried out before it becomes
accepted. But that’s how scientists may have just discovered that cosmology is all wrong.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
clips from Unveiled, and make sure you subscribe and ring the bell for our latest content.