But I thought the science was settled…
Apparently not [emphasis mine]:
Recent studies show [scientists] may have overestimated the age of the universe by more than a billion years — a surprising realization that is forcing them to rethink key parts of the scientific story of how we got from the Big Bang to today.
The lost time is especially vexing because, in a universe full of mysteries, its age has been viewed as one of the few near-certainties…
A few teams, including one led by Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, set out to make those observations. Instead of confirming Planck’s measurements, they started getting a distinctly different result.
Let’s call them “universe-age deniers.”
Or let’s just call them scientists, struggling to find the truth:
At first, the common assumption was that Riess and the other galaxy-watchers had made a mistake. But as their observations continued to come in, the results didn’t budge. Reanalysis of the Planck data didn’t show any problems, either.
If all the numbers are correct, then the problem must run deeper. It must lie in our interpretation of those numbers — that is, in our fundamental models of how the universe works. “The discrepancy suggests that there’s something in the cosmological model that we’re not understanding right,” Riess says. What that something could be, nobody knows.
Back to the drawing board?
I have no way of evaluating any of this; the math is beyond me. I do know that from the time I first heard about the Big Bang and the age of the universe, as well as its expanding nature, I’ve been willing to trust the scientists on this—but only up to a point. I’ve always been aware that it’s just a working theory, for now, and subject to revision. That’s science, isn’t it?
Neo, this fellow Anton ( https://youtu.be/9KaPANafHZM )might be able to help a little bit. Not to say resolve the problem, but bring the problem into a better focus, so to speak.
I attended a physics colloquium in the early 2000’s that was a fascinating retrospective of all of the various measurements and estimates of the age of the universe.
I’ve forgotten most of the details, but over and over again the results came in with modest error bars, like +/- 10% or 15%, only to have the next definitive measurement be different by a very much bigger margin. It’s safe to say it is a very tough determination.
Reading Neo’s quote, I thought “What, Max Plank himself?” No it’s the ESA sponsored space telescope/observatory designed to measure the “3 degree” (microwave) cosmic background radiation, in detail. The whole history of this cosmic background radiation is also fascinating and produced at least one Nobel prize for the guy that discovered it.
Here is an image or map of the oldest light in the universe that we can detect as produced by the Planck observatory. This is a map of all 4pi steradians and the false colors represent differences in temperature, the caption says. That is, the temperature of the matter that produced the EM radiation.
Originally, it was assumed that directional variation in this radiation was nil; it was supposed to be the same in all directions. Other instruments showed some variation, now Planck shows lots of structure in great detail.
There’s been an interesting idea kicking about lately: that spacetime is actually a fluid. There was a paper in the mid-2000s that showed the the GR equations map onto the standard Navier-Stokes equations for fluids. More recently, Stefan Liberati in Italy has been pushing this idea further in several papers.
This new data could fit in with this idea. The local universe is just flowing at a different rate than the farther parts; just like the flow in a river is never the same in all places.
A really interesting conjecture in this is that of the directionality of time. The so-called time arrow is really just the flow of spacetime in that particular “direction”. And the seeming age of the universe is just the flow of time from a particular “place”. Trying to use ideas/words of “place” and “moments” does not really convey the actual 4 dimensional math, but maybe you get the idea.
But I thought the science was settled, just like climate science.
There’s been an interesting idea kicking about lately: that spacetime is actually a fluid. There was a paper in the mid-2000s that showed the the GR equations map onto the standard Navier-Stokes equations for fluids.
It’s used to get around the problem of how Navier Stokes doesn’t graduate finely from water/atmosphere to vacuum. Rendering the entire global Earth model non functional, even with gravity holding down the air and water, which doesn’t even obey the inverse square law: both versions of the gravity equation, Einstein and Newton.
There’s still a small rear-guard of astronomers opposed to the Big Bang entirely.
Halton Arp was their big gun. Arp was one of the top observational astronomers of his era. Arp estimated he had spent a year’s worth of time over three decades in the captain’s chair, so to speak, controlling Mount Palomar’s 200-inch reflector, then the most powerful telescope in the world.
Arp assembled a catalog of photographs showing high-red-shift and low-red-shift objects seemingly linked together, which should be impossible according to Big Bang Theory. Arp, being a stubborn fellow, wouldn’t let go of inconvenient observations in the face of a beautiful theory. He was eventually marginalized out of his job. He died in 2013.
Much more work has been done to validate the Big Bang and examine many thousands more objects, so it appears Arp was wrong — whatever other problems the Big Bang may have.
Still I salute Arp for his courage and integrity not to be ground down by groupthink. IMO we could use some Arps in the 21st century.
For those that don’t know the background to this: Navier Stokes is fluid dynamics equation that is often used to counter the “vacuum vs atmosphere” problem of a global Earth model.
Eventually, the air of the atmosphere has to become vacuum. The consensus majority argument is that air “gradually” thins out into vacuum, so there is no suction effect. In effect, they treat it as a single closed system rather than as two closed system that have a pressure difference when opened to each other. The secondary argument attached to that is that even if there is a suction effect, water and air on Earth is held down by gravity and the vacuum of near infinite space can’t lift it off the surface or gravity of the Earth.
The Navier Stokes equation argument appears to resolve the issue, except there is a problem with the Navier Stokes equation. It does not continue on in a smooth progression for Earth. This is mathematically unsolvable so far. They see the phenomenon of smoothness or leaps, but there is no math to describe it consistent with the principle.
The secondary argument is a trap essentially, as vacuum cleaners and a human mouth can demonstrably suck water and air from gravity’s pull. It isn’t all that hard, just use a straw people.
A lot of these problems in science have to do with the hard math behind why it doesn’t work. A lot of it is just high level math that is unsolvable, because the theory doesn’t match the observed observations, so people just replace the observations and overwrite them over with the theory. This happened with dark matter/energy. The Theory of Gravity didn’t account for galactic spin rates, so obviously to make the numbers of observation and the math work, there must be more matter out there, that is invisible, un testable, and provable only because it has to exist to make the math work. That’s science. Or maybe just a dream fantasy.
As for the problems with the Theory of Gravity, I already described some of it. It tends to offend the status quo scientists and teachers though.
Cosmology and astronomy is not off by a billion years of space time. They are off by 120 zeroes. Ten to the power 120.
The whole history of this cosmic background radiation is also fascinating and produced at least one Nobel prize for the guy that discovered it.
Some of the physicists have been forced to admit that the universe and the multiverse even, was fine tuned for life. Evolution takes too many years, and the conditions after the Big Bang is too mathematically perfect.
What’s really happening is that they have put the output of their theory as the input/data/observation of the experiment proving the theory. They have confused cause and effect.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/common-misconceptions-about-science-i-scientific-proof
Even the ones for the theory of evolution have had to admit certain things when it comes to the scientific method. All of this may be obscure and opaque to most people, because they are taught early on to accept the indoctrination and statements of their scientific priesthood, Doctor classes, political masters, and slave masters. It’s time for people to consider what it is like to think for themselves as a free individual.
Popular science is not corrosive because the science is wrong.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this one. Here is more detail on Riess’ project.
Mr. Riess already got his Nobel prize, so he can afford to stick his neck out on a possibly pointless, high risk endeavor. It reminds me of the science history of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. Everyone thought it was too simple and the outcome obvious; it wasn’t.
This also reminds me of climate change measurements. I always like to look at Dr. Roy Spencer’s work because he works with the satellite data of atmospheric temperatures across the entire globe. It’s a nearly perfect spatial average of the whole enchilada. Similarly, the Planck observatory data is a spatial average of radiation from the entire outer surface (region?) of the universe very shortly after the big bang. Game over, full stop: Age of Universe = 13.8 +/- 0.04 Gy.
The cool thing about Riess’ work is that while the Planck obs. gives us a precise number originating from very near the beginning of the big bang, his work using a nearby galaxy is only looking a tiny bit backward in time from today. So the two determinations are on the opposite ends of the time spectrum. This really puts the entire big bang model through the wringer.
He is measuring the Hubble expansion constant to high precision, which historically wasn’t possible. But my problem is that he is only looking at our tiny corner of the universe. I suppose there is some theoretical reason to assume that the expansion rate of the universe is very highly homogeneous. The simple answer to the age conundrum is that the universe isn’t that homogeneous.
physicsguy on May 23, 2019 at 3:46 pm at 3:46 pm said:
There’s been an interesting idea kicking about lately: that spacetime is actually a fluid.
* *
Are we back to the ether now??
A billion here, a billion there – hardly anything to fuss about.
“There’s currently no consistent story that works for all our cosmological data,”
This is the key, and as ymar notes above, they add stuff (dark matter, dark energy) in order to “fit” the actual data with the theory.
For climate change, “There’s currently no consistent model that works for all our known prior data –the know Ice Ages and their ending.” Change models fail to predict part of the past from the rest of past. So these change models are inadequate, NOT to be trusted.
Even taking the history from Plato up to the “Little Ice Age” ( from the early 14th century through the mid-19th century, when mountain glaciers expanded at several locations; others have different dates.) – why did the Earth cool? Why did it then increase in temp? We don’t know.
Important unasked question about CO2, which plants need to “breathe”:
What is the minimum amount of CO2 for most current plants? I think about 170 ppm (parts per million). The craze is based on going up from 240 to about 400 ppm over the last 100 years or so.
But CO2 is not as important as water vapor, nor as sun & sunspots.