The James Webb Space Telescope has been sending images to Earth since July 2022
and has already delivered a startling finding: seeing galaxies orders of magnitude
brighter in the early Universe than astronomers had anticipated.
The Webb telescope was designed to see deeper into the infrared spectrum of
light than the Hubble Space Telescope. Infrared light does not get as scattered
by dust and filament clouds as does the visible light spectrum. Consequently,
photographs of deep space, using the infrared spectrum, reveal many more
stars hiding in the haze of outer space. Additionally, there is a redshift factor.
The older the galaxy, the faster it is moving away from us, making the Doppler effect
on the light waves coming from deep space, stronger the faster the receding velocity is.
The Doppler effect is familiar to us in the change of pitch of a train's horn as it passes by.
As the train moves away from us, the sound waves are stretched out, making the
horn's tone lower. In the case of light, the Doppler effect lowers the received
light frequency towards the red end of the visible spectrum, and if pronounced
enough, into the invisible infrared part of the spectrum. In order to photograph galaxies that are
so old that the redshift has moved to visible light wave spectral lines into
the infrared range, the telescope’s mirror and imaging chips are engineered to be
sensitive to red light and rays that our eyes can't see. In the standard model of cosmology,
evolutionary cosmologists say the first stars formed 400 million years after the so-called Big Bang and the first
galaxies then formed a few hundred million years later. High redshift values
are a measure of the age of a galaxy, and the degree of shift that the Webb telescope
is showing, implies that the galaxies existed 180 million years or less after
the Big Bang, a clear violation of the theory. A galaxy of 180 million years old
is considered young in a universe that is believed to be over 13 billion years old. Following Webb's findings that
surprisingly mature galaxies are located in a very young part of the universe,
theorists and observers have been scrambling to explain them. Reaching back
to a comparatively young 180 million years after the theoretical Big Bang, the
telescope found some galaxies with large fully formed disk-like structures that
were not expected to exist so early in cosmic history. Stacy McGaugh, cosmologist Case Western
Reserve University, was quoted in the September 14, 2022 Scientific American
saying, “We should see lots of these little protogalactic fragments that have
not yet merged to make a big galaxy. Instead, we're seeing a few things that are already big galaxies.”
Early proto-galaxies are expected to be small, dim, and thinly populated fuzzy
blobs of stars, but what is seen are fully formed and evolved galaxies, well
defined with spiral arms, and many times the size and energy of our Milky Way galaxy.
The Einsteinian gravity-fed Standard Model of the Universe's evolution is
falling under the wheels of increasing observational resolution factors, greater
levels of detail from which to extract predictive patterns. This is science in
action, doing what it is supposed to do, make new discoveries, not validate old ideas.
This is the Platonic underpinning of scientific method, the replacement of old
hypotheses by new and better ones. When science refuses to be updated, it
ceases to be science and begins to resemble an authoritarian cult, a collection of fetishes.
Mainstream astronomers, instead of being excited about new discovery, act like
they were caught flat-footed and not at all happy about a 10 billion dollar
investment that appears to have paid off. When Michael Boylan Kolchin, theoretical
astrophysicists, University of Texas Austin said in Science Journal, 12 August 2022,
”No one was expecting anything like this.” One can only ask, why the heck not. The
entire point of science is to toss obsolete ideas into the dustbin of history. This is precisely what
scientists should be prepared to expect. It is unsure whether current galaxy
formation models need a revision, or abandonment. One can only marvel at the
kluging of band-aid concepts to paper over observations that were unexpected.
The invocation of dark matter and dark energy in the face of the failure of
Einsteinian empty space to account for the high rotational speeds of galaxies,
seems more like a parlor conjurer’s ’rabbit in a hat-trick’ than a science
eager for a better understanding, even if it dynamites cherished canards like the
Big Bang Theory and black holes. Models hold that gas clouds should be
far slower to coalesce into stars and galaxies than is suggested by the Webb’s
galaxy-rich images of the early universe, less than 500 million years after the Big Bang.
In questioning the validity of Big Bang, Paul J. Steinhardt, Professor of physics,
Director of the Princeton Center for theoretical science in Scientific
American, September 28, 2017, calls for reconsideration of the cosmic inflation
theory, or Big Bang as it has come to be known. He states, “The cosmology community
has not taken a cold, honest look at the Big Bang inflationary theory or paid
significant attention to critics who question whether inflation happened.”
But even before the experts could start incorporating the Webb telescope data
into their interpretive frameworks when the first Webb telescope pictures were
only days old, astronomers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland,
announced that they had found a galaxy with the incredible value of 17z. That
value would indicate that this galaxy had a redshift of 17, which would mean
this galaxy existed only 220 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy
CEERS-1749, but popularly called Schrodinger's Galaxy, shows in addition
to its unusual age, a huge mass which means that there are a lot of stars in the galaxy.
So, the oldest galaxy in the universe is anything but a small cluster of stars
that might have formed shortly after the Big Bang. With 5 billion solar masses,
Schrodinger's Galaxy is about five times more massive than our Milky Way.
Schrodinger's also exhibits an enormous luminosity. The galaxy’s brightness is much
too high for one that existed only 220 million years after the Big Bang.
Tomamaso Treu, Professor of physics, UC Santa Barbara, echoes the consensus of
consternation when he said in the October 2022 Astrophysical Journal Letters,
”Somehow, the universe has managed to form galaxies faster and earlier than we thought.”
The Webb telescope images from NASA also unexpectedly reveal for the first time
barred spiral galaxies located at a time when the universe was a mere 25 percent
of its present age. Barred spiral galaxies, similar to our Milky Way, are
considered to be a mature, not a young galaxy type, in fact to have evolved from
normal spiral galaxies, making them an older and more evolved galaxy type.
Garth Illingworth, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, UC Santa Cruz, in the 9
August 2022 issue of Science Journal, exclaimed, ”This is way outside the box of what
models were predicting.” One can only hope that the new box Illingsworth and his colleagues are
busily constructing, will be one capable of expansion. It will be interesting to see how the
’engine of orthodoxy’ integrates this new data which is very recent, and not fully
metabolized by the ‘ivory tower’. Whatever the outcome, it is certain that the cosmological discourse will
gravitate away from Einstein's ‘space-is- empty’ gravity model. Since that hypothesis has been defended
for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological
theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. Based on the published literature right
now, the Big Bang makes 15 wrong predictions, and only one right one,
the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. In the 27 July, 2022 Nature Journal,
Alison Kirkpatrick, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Kansas, Lawrence, appears to be not having much luck wrapping her
head around the new Webb data. Quote, “Right now I find myself lying
awake at three in the morning and wondering if everything I've done is wrong....”
Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, Research Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies,
has been wondering the same thing. Even before the Webb data entered the fray in
this panel discussion from 2021 sponsored by The Institute of Art and
Ideas. “...and that's exactly what I mean when I say we have a problem with theory
development. Because you have all these theorists, they literally guess their
models and it just leads nowhere. And I really think that theoretical physicists have to have a hard look at
their methods of theory development, and throughout what didn't work. We talk
about the scientific method as if it was a fixed thing. But it's a living and
evolving thing and what counts as good science at one point in history,
might no longer count as good science a hundred years later.” Dr. Hossenfelder is an example of a
scientist doing what they should all be doing: protecting the scientific method
and its process of hypothesis formation. Will this predictive failure of the
accepted cosmology reinvigorate discussion towards alternative cosmologies? What I mean specifically are
the steady state theories of William Duncan MacMillan, Hermann Bondi, Thomas
Gold and Fred Hoyle. And of course, the Electric Universe model of Wal
Thornhill, Don Scott, Dave Talbot, Ev Cochrane, Dwardu Cardona, Michael
Armstrong and Mel Atchison, to name a few. Perhaps a cosmology of the future is
already here, although not yet acknowledged in the mainstream. The field is entirely wide open for
those curious enough to invest the energy to think. The EU model of cosmology represents a
change in the categories of astrophysics, and most important the methodology of
thought, which must drill these new ideas into the lockstep mind of conventional science.
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