A new study from the University of Ottawa attempts to resolve the insurmountable challenges facing the Big Bang theory by proposing the universe is almost twice as old as previously believed and that light loses energy over the eons. The scientific community appears to have largely shrugged, but it’s a good start.
Almost two years ago, the James Webb Space Telescope began capturing images of the early universe that did not align with the expectations of the Big Bang theory, showing far more fully formed galaxies and far more galaxies in general than one would expect when time itself was only 500 million to two billion years old. “We’re not surprised to see disk galaxies…I think the surprise is to see so many of them. . . . We’re really not seeing the earliest stages of galaxy formation yet,” explained Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri described 87 galaxies as early as 200 million years after the purported Big Bang. “Our previously favored picture of galaxy formation in the early universe must be revised,” he said in a rather dramatic understatement. Jordan Mirocha of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory put it this way. “There’s either an overabundance of galaxies, or they’re much brighter than our typical models predict.” “I think we have more to think about,” he added. Unfortunately, many in the physics community took a precisely nothing to see here approach, claiming that data which fails to comply with their predictions, isn’t really a big deal. CNET dutifully stepped into the breach for the general public, claiming “No, James Webb Space Telescope Images Do Not Debunk the Big Bang.” The author, Jackson Ryan, began his argument with the necessary appeal to a higher authority, the tried and true logical fallacy perhaps older than the universe itself. “The Big Bang theory is currently the best model we have for the birth of our universe. Astrophysicists have shown the theory explains, fairly comprehensively, phenomena we’ve observed in space over decades, like lingering background radiation and elemental abundances. It’s a robust framework that gives us a pretty good idea of how the cosmos came into being some 13.8 billion years ago.” In his view, a “flurry of preprint papers and popular science articles about the James Webb Space Telescope’s first images” were prompting the renewal of “old, erroneous claims that the Big Bang never happened at all.” An actual scientist, Dr. Allison Kirkpatrick, was recruited to the cause. “We as scientists have a responsibility to educate the public, and I take that responsibility very seriously,” she told CNET. “Deliberately misleading the public makes it difficult for them to trust real scientists and to know fact from fiction,” she added without directly addressing any of the issues.
Fortunately, there remain at least a few scientists in the world who can think for themselves, rather than positioning themselves as unimpeachable while going completely woke, and an enterprising physicist proposed a major upheaval in how we view the universe late last year. Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa believes the universe is almost twice as old as the Big Bang predicts. This alleviates the challenges with galaxy formation in the early universe, and because of the longer time period involved, there’s no need for dark matter or dark energy to explain any discrepancies with the predictions of the General Theory of Relativity compared to the amount of visible energy and matter in the universe. He has also proposed, albeit circumspectly, that the laws of physics themselves are not completely fixed in time as claimed. “The study’s findings confirm that our previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist,” explained Dr. Gupta. “In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy,” he continued. Specifically, Dr. Gupta took aim at the “coupling constant” that determines the strength of a force exerted in an interaction and has been used to assume that the light reaching us from the early universe, traveling across billions of years, has exactly the same energy as the sun in the center of the solar system or a common light bulb located in the same room. A century ago scientists noted that light arriving from deep space was shifted red, meaning the wavelength had grown longer as it traveled in the classic Doppler Shift. At the time, Fritz Swicky proposed that this could be caused by lost energy, meaning that light itself changes its behavior – slightly – over long distances, an idea referred to as “tired light.” This view was abandoned in favor of the expansion of the universe itself driving the elongation of the wavelengths, which had the benefit of preserving the conservation of energy, which remains no small thing, more on that in a moment. Dr. Gupta has updated the tired light concept, referring to as Covarying Coupling Constants Plus Tired Light (CCT+TL). In addition to the universe being around much longer than the thought, he believes this new approach also provides a better explanation of the fluctuations in the distribution of visible matter, proposing that they are caused by the equivalent of sound waves in the early universe, suggesting his ideas might be testable against reality in the near future.
The reaction of the broader scientific community is unclear at this point, but if the popular science website, ScienceAlert, offers any indication, there is continued insistence to downplay just how dramatically damaged the Big Bang truly is as a result of the data from the JWST. ScienceAlert closed their summary of Dr. Gupta’s work by noting, “For now, our Universe remains 13.7 billion years young, even if it has a few curious skeletons in its closet,” implicitly suggesting that the challenges are minor and easily solved when they are catastrophic in truth by any objective standard. Even if you set aside the fact that dark energy, in particular, was invented specifically to save the Big Bang from an early demise and therefore both the theory and the existence of dark energy at all should always have been suspect, there is no easy means to accelerate galaxy formation on the scale required. Galaxy formation is primarily a property of the gravitational force, which is exceedingly well understood even at the extremes and has proven accurate down multiple decimals places for more than a century. The equations that govern galaxy formation are based on the same principles we use to make predictions about upcoming solar eclipses and other common cosmic – and even terrestrial – occurrences, only the scale is different. Therefore, it is almost impossible to believe that physicists are incorrect on the basic timeframes and forces required to assemble stars and galaxies from more uniform gasses, and yet the differences in the numbers they are trying to gloss over are staggering. Galaxies in the early universe appear to be 150 times smaller than our own, but 600 times brighter than any near us, something for which there is no obvious explanation. The fact that smooth spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are ten times more common than anticipated, and that there are some 100,000 times more galaxies overall than predicted by the Big Bang only adds to the complexity. In addition, the galaxies we are observing at the distant edge of the universe appear to be about twice as old as we thought. These are not minor challenges, akin to the media reporting on an upcoming solar eclipse, and learning the scientists were off on the date by six months. This, however, is what they are expecting us to believe.
The question is why? Obviously groupthink plays a role, as no establishment has ever gone down easily, but what makes the Big Bang so special that scientists literally invented dark energy to keep it alive rather than acknowledge that it was obviously flawed? The answer is deceptively simple: Energy itself, or specifically the conservation of it. The idea that the amount of energy in the universe is fixed and unchangeable is a bedrock principle of physics that scientists seek to preserve at all costs. Energy can be transformed, but not created or destroyed. To preserve that principle, physicists insist that the laws of physics themselves are symmetrical in time, and equally unchangeable. This is because an equation that generated a different output today versus a million years from now would necessitate a change in the amount of energy in the universe between the two time periods. The “tired light” concept asserts that the energy content of light, which is fixed by Maxwell’s famous equation, changes over time and distance. This would result in energy being lost and the equation itself producing a different result based on time and place. To be sure, there is a wealth of experimental evidence, going back billions of years, that suggests the laws of physics do not change and energy is conserved. Some of this evidence can be found on Earth itself where the traces of ancient radioactivity preserved in rocks that are billions of years old appears to conform to the very same equations we use today. There are also conceptual reasons to consider: A universe that leaks energy could quickly deflate, one that continually creates energy, explode. At the same time, the Big Bang theory also asserts that all of the matter and energy in the universe sprung into existence from nothing, meaning the idea that energy can be created is an essential part of the concept. Physicists dismiss this obvious “flaw” by insisting that time itself was created during the Big Bang, meaning the laws of physics sprung into existence as well. It is only after they exist that the law of conservation of energy applies. This, however, has always struck me as a largely circular argument, not that it’s necessarily wrong, merely that physicists are allowing a violation of their own law – indeed the grandest violation imaginable considering all the energy in the universe was created in one shot – at a specific point, then insisting that point is inherently special above all others, the rules do not apply beforehand. Nor is the only radical assumption required. Dark energy and dark matter are said to account for 96% of the universe, and yet are also supposed to be completely undetectable, unlike anything we have observed across some 13 billion light years, which has led me to claim that physics no longer describes anything like the universe we actually live in.
Given the obvious challenges with the Big Bang – and the small chance they can be fixed with anything resembling minor tweaks – Dr. Gupta has made a good start, potentially nudging the scientific community to reconsider some of their underlying assumptions, even if he is not proven entirely correct. The underlying issue, it seems to this layman at least, has always been time itself. The law of conservation and indeed all physical laws make the underlying assumption that there is nothing unique about this moment in the universe, or indeed any moment in the universe. They expect the equations to work the same and the amount of energy in the universe to be the same because time doesn’t impact physics, and nothing is truly “special.” This is a strange state of affairs considering that Einstein’s Special and General Theories allow for time to be distorted, time has never run backwards that we are aware of, and the output of two experiments, however carefully controlled, is never the same. Time – again to me at least– certainly seems to be special. If we were to assume that, and find a way to integrate it into our view of the world, it seems likely that issues with the conservation of energy can be resolved based on how the laws of physics functioned at that point in time, allowing for a new form of symmetry and equivalence. Putting this another way, energy might well be conserved as some form of varying function, where it is neither created nor destroyed but fluctuates based on the changes in underlying physical laws. “Tired light” on its own is likely unworkable because it introduces a specific form of energy loss, effectively a leak in the universe, but as part of a broader paradigm shift the problems might well resolve themselves. In this regard, I do not think Dr. Gupta is being bold enough and I encourage him – and others – to be even bolder in the future.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 