Is the universe twice as old as previously thought?
Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe’s currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces.
Gupta’s latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims.
“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,” says 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.” …
To replace existing models with CCC+TL, Gupta would need to convince cosmologists his model does a better job of explaining what we see at large. His latest paper attempts to do that by using CCC+TL to explain fluctuations in the spread of visible matter across space caused by sound waves in a newborn Universe, and the glow of ancient dawn known as the cosmic microwave background.
While his analysis concludes his hybrid tired light theory can play nicely with certain features of the Universe’s residual echoes of light and sound, it does so only if we also ditch the idea that dark matter is also a thing.
I don’t pretend for even a moment to be able to evaluate the competing theories, but wouldn’t the jettisoning of dark matter be a feature rather than a bug?
Calling all astrophysicists and cosmologists!
How would you determine that is there any light we have seem from thaf distance.
But… but… but… I thought the science was SETTLED!?!?
The ” tired” light idea has been around for quite awhile. I’m glad people are trying new ideas as Webb is forcing new thinking. I still like the idea of a fluid structure to spacetime as it gets rid of dark matter also.
I also think these are all bandaids until QM and GR find a happy living arrangement.
Yes, I think getting rid of the dark is a good thing. Never the less, it’s just a theory that must be born out by observation. Cosmologists are right to be skeptical at this point. But they’ve been tying themselves into pretzels to find and explain dark matter and energy. So this is a good thing!
Not just QM micro and GR macro, but also what is gravity?
AI will start helping soon, tho likely also with errors.
My Sci-Fi reading enjoyment has long been reduced by total disbelief in any usable FTL drive, tho many space operas remain grand.
Dark matter was postulated to exist as a means to reconcile actual astronomical measurements with current thinking. An explanation that does not need to postulate the existence of dark matter is a simpler explanation and according to Occam’s razor a preferred explanation.
When you need a fiction to make your equations work, you should name it something snappier than “dark matter”!
Try “Phlogiston”. It has worked once before!
but wouldn’t the jettisoning of dark matter be a feature rather than a bug?
It would. Even astronomers don’t exactly like it, but it’s not that simple.
I haven’t read the actual paper yet but I will when I get time. I have read three articles now about the paper, and none have addressed what I think is the obvious question. There isn’t just one reason to think dark matter exists, there are a few. Gupta’s paper addresses one, and not the one I think is the most compelling – the rotation speed of galaxies.
Spiral galaxies rotate too fast and altogether wrong. Newtonian gravity can’t explain it, and Einstein’s new and improved version doesn’t either. That’s enough for now.
Mike Plaiss
Absolutely. Until somebody finds out we’ve been measuring the speed of galactic rotation wrong.
Saw a recorded presentation on quantum theory and string theory. As to the latter, one physicist remarked that we don’t know if it’s a thing, or just some convenient numbers.
But, anyway, the science is settled for this week. I feel better.
Still, I was always fond of Hoyle. Even I could understand how that was supposed to work.
Well dark matter hasnt been proven but i dont see how the distance could have doubled
Fred Hoyle was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. It is a shame that he’s most famous for being wrong. Someone here recently brought up Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote about those who do and those who criticize after the fact. In the scientific quest for knowledge, probing the unknown, groping around in the dark, being right is actually highly overrated.
You can have a hypothesis but you need to able to prove it
}}} When you need a fiction to make your equations work, you should name it something snappier than “dark matter”!
“Deep” matter? 😀
}}} Well dark matter hasn’t been proven but i don’t see how the distance could have doubled
Take twice as long to get there. 😛
Obviously, we need to get Sheldon on the case. 😀
Any answer is good as long as it isn’t the one that Dirac came up with:
“This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.” 😛
}}} You can have a hypothesis but you need to able to prove it
Not precisely. You really only need for it to be disprovable AND not be able to disprove it. ;-D
While it might seem farfetched to postulate the existence of dark matter and dark energy to maintain the existing laws of physics, it is not unprecedented. In 1930 Wolfgang Pauli postulated the existence of the neutrino, a particle that could not be detected, to maintain the conservation of energy and momentum in beta decay. It took 35 years before an experiment was devised that was able to detect the neutrino.
Obloody: You talking Hari Sheldon? Been a while.
If light gets tired, its energy has to go someplace….
Richard+Aubrey:
My guess is ObloodyHell is talking about Sheldon Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory” sitcom.
As I understand things, in my strictly layman fashion, dark matter and inflation of the early universe are linked together.
So if dark matter goes away, so too would inflation?
Good riddance. I disliked both features of current cosmology. They both seemed like kludges, as we programmers like to say for brute force code that works around a problem rather than solving it.
Perhaps physicsguy might weigh in…
Well im not ruling the alcubiere drive
Would mass expansion slow down over time
The first 20 million years were the hardest.
_________
When 19th century geologists speculated that the earth and the universe might be millions of years old, the number must have seemed astounding and impossible to people, but now that deficits are in the trillions, 26 million years doesn’t seem all that daunting. Even the number of stars — if Carl Sagan was right — is billions and billions, so it seems like the universe is just a baby by comparison.
Huxley. Thanks. I was kind of punning. I never watched that show but I was interested in Foundation and Empire. If I recall, Junior Scholastic–imagine that–offered some SF when I was in the fifth grade.That was going on seventy years ago. Got Foundation and Empire by Asimov, Last Planet by Norton, and one I don’t recall by Paul Anderson. Liked hard SF ever since.
Richard+Aubrey:
Asimov’s “Foundation” series was big stuff for me too.
Turns out it was influential for a rather mixed bag of intellectuals since:
Martin Seligman
Newt Gingrich
Paul Krugman
Carl Sagan
Elon Musk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
The current best guess is that the Universe started somehow out of nothing. And it will exist for a while, run out of energy, and become cold and motionless. How can this make sense?
“ caused by sound waves in a newborn Universe”
Sound waves?
Fred Hoyle was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. It is a shame that he’s most famous for being wrong.
Mike Plaiss:
I’m holding out for Hoyle’s and others’ Panspermia, the theory that life on earth did not originate on Earth, but came from elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
I just can’t make the numbers work for the appearance of oh-so-complex DNA life on Earth appearing so soon after the planet was formed and during the Hadean, i.e. Hellish, period when Earth was constantly in the throes of meteor impacts and local volcanoes.
Of course, it does kick the can further down the road for the origin of life but gives it a bit more time than a few hundred million years without panspermia.
The current best guess is that the Universe started somehow out of nothing. And it will exist for a while, run out of energy, and become cold and motionless. How can this make sense?
JackWayne:
Physics and math, basically. It’s not really a guess.
What I find interesting is that scientists had to be dragged to the Big Bang because it sounded a bit too much like “In the Beginning…” from Genesis.
The term “Big Bang” was coined by — alley-oop — British astronomer Fred Hoyle during a BBC radio broadcast in 1949. Hoyle was actually a proponent of the steady-state theory of the universe, which was a competing theory to the Big Bang theory at that time. The steady-state theory suggested that the universe had no beginning and was in a constant state of creation and expansion.
During the broadcast, Hoyle used the term “Big Bang” in a somewhat derogatory manner to describe the rival theory, which proposed that the universe began with a massive explosion from a singular point. The name stuck, and despite Hoyle’s skepticism, the Big Bang theory eventually gained widespread acceptance in the scientific community as more evidence supported it.
huxley:
The Big Bang is certainly not a guess. But it could always be revised if new and contradictory information is revealed, and in particular the ultimate fate of the universe is somewhat contested by those who subscribe to to any of the cyclic models..
neo:
Of course. Everything can be revised in the event of new and contradictory information.
Likewise, the Big Bang can be considered a phase in an overarching cyclic model.
But within the bracketing of the Big Bang and the Heat Death, it’s a reasonable theory.
I’m going with Bohr here: “Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true” 🙂
As a rule of thumb, new wonder theories tend to be wrong. The interesting thing about Einstein’s work is that it descended from a few general principles and he had a knack for picking out those central ideas. I don’t see anything like that yet in modern theories. Agreeing with one set of data is more like curve fitting.
Back in my 2000s Episcopalian period I was impressed by a fellow congregant’s library and asked about Roger Penrose’s “The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe” which looked like it covered that waterfront.
So I bought my own copy and skipped around in it, but I did pay special attention to the chapter, “The Big Bang and its thermodynamic legacy.” In fact tonight I noticed I still had a bookmark there.
Penrose has his own Cyclic Theory of multiple Big Bangs.
‘Bone Sticks—Mammoth Tusks—Cave Drawings’ dating back to around 35,000 BC might have been some kind of star charts.
Mesopotamia Civilization, Egyptian Civilization, Indus Valley Civilization, and Chinese Civilization all studied the stars (from what I’ve read). Aztecs & Mayans were no slouches at star studying either. Europe and I guess others also – have all studied the stars.
Have read that by the 1920’s AD some priest came up w/ the “Big Bang” theory—that’s like some 36,920+ years after the ‘Bone Sticks—Mammoth Tusks—Cave Drawings’.
Personally, the “Big Bang” theory never seemed to sound right to me, but I am no scientist and never studied the stars. A finite speck, in apparently some kind of nothingness, having to apparently explode suddenly. Then this speck in nothingness expands massively/infinitely in this nothingness…hold on, where did nothingness come from?!
Anyway, some 104 years since 1920 AD, and theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta suggests that the Universe is “twice as old as previously thought?”!?! And humble me was tossed into a jail cell for living with a woman!?
Roughly 37,024 years after the ‘Bone Sticks—Mammoth Tusks—Cave Drawings’ mankind is theorizing that the Universe is older than we thought some 5-20 years ago, and that there is no “Dark Matter”!?
Wonder how many man-hours have been spent studying the Universe—since the ‘Bone Sticks—Mammoth Tusks—Cave Drawings’ days?
Personally, the “Big Bang” theory never seemed to sound right to me, but I am no scientist and never studied the stars. A finite speck, in apparently some kind of nothingness, having to apparently explode suddenly.
Karmi:
Check out the first chapter of Genesis.
Of course, scientists don’t mention God, but that’s the way God made them. 🙂
George LeMaitre is your man Karmi. Jesuit priest, brilliant man, who grasped Einstein’s general theory of relativity and concluded that the universe must be in motion, almost certainly expanding, and thus must have emerged from a single point. That was 1927. He corresponded with Einstein, who famously told him, “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable.” Two years later Hubble showed the universe was expanding. At heart Einstein was a steady-state guy.
Heading off anyone at the pass, I’m sure the story above is only mostly right, but who the hell cares?
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/priest-invented-big-bang/#:~:text=Albert%20Einstein%20himself%2C%20after%20hearing,favor%20of%20the%20astronomer%20priest.
Huxley:
Yeah, I have—quite extensively. Have also read the The Age of Reason (by Thomas Paine) and its take on Genesis. And also noted the similarities of Genesis to the Enuma Elish:
Enuma Elish predates the Genesis creation story “by at least 600 years” – so I have no trust in Genesis, or the scientists for that matter.
Mike Plaiss:
Yes, that is his name – George LeMaitre.
I may be wrong, but it seems that there are some ancient Hindu texts that described an expanding Universe long before Einstein & LeMaitre.
Thanks for the link!
Update: I was right – Some google quotes about ancient Hindi texts:
“The universe is described as a cosmic egg that cycles between expansion and total collapse”
“the universe existed in a form of tiny ball of gas, which exploded and gave birth to the universe.”
Have also read the The Age of Reason (by Thomas Paine).
Karmi:
Of course. Thomas Paine is up there with Timothy Leary in my youthful turn-ons.
My point to you was that the Big Bang is paralleled in the Book of Genesis. So perhaps not so weird.
Did you get that?
huxley:
Yes – thanks!
Before Leary, Payne, Einstein, LeMaitre, Genesis & Enuma Elish – much older Hindu texts were talking about the Universe expansions and collapsing.
Footnote to anyone confused by the OBH / huxley /Richard comments on “we need to get Sheldon on the case.”:
The Asimov character in his Foundation series is Hari Seldon, not Sheldon.
I often have to correct myself when referring to him, and spell-check is apparently not a classic-SF fan.
}}} My guess is ObloodyHell is talking about Sheldon Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory” sitcom.
Ding ding ding.
I suppose many may not remember but proving string theory and other significant cosmological questions was the uber-brilliant Sheldon’s stock in trade. Hence he would obviously be interested in this theory.
To those who (sorry, oddly in my mind) thought I was referring to Hari Seldon, why would I put a social statistician onto it, when it’s a major physics problem?
😉
I ack my reference was apparently more obscure than I thought it would be, given that it was one of the most popular shows on TV for a number of years running. That’s my bad, I suppose. 😛
}}} Personally, the “Big Bang” theory never seemed to sound right to me, but I am no scientist and never studied the stars.
Well, TBH, the science they do is at the edge of human understanding, and there are probably less than 1000 people who Really Get It. I do have *some* of the knowledge needed (not enough, I’m not in the 100,000, much less the 1000) but I gather they actually did have people in that 1000 from CalTech looking over their science to give it at least a semblance of validity. And it’s a fair bet that the bioscience that Mayim Bialik “did” got THAT right, she has the actual PhD that her character claims.
}}} theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta suggests that the Universe is “twice as old as previously thought?”!?!
You DO realize that, since 1920, the number for the age of the universe has been steadily pushed back further and further? It’s been at its current number for at least 20-30 years, but the more data we get, the more time is involved in doing what He is supposed to have done in seven days. 😛
Thanks Mike Plaiss and Karmi – I was hoping to see LaMaitre’s name mentioned in this thread. He doesn’t get enough credit. The story about LaMaitre and Einstein is very telling. Was Einstein’s cosmological constant another forerunner of dark matter? I don’t know. Maybe not. Dark matter was postulated to make the equations fit observations. Einstein postulated his cosmological constant to prevent the equations from predicting something inconsistent with his preconceived notions of how the universe ought to be. I think the story illustrates that even the most brilliant among us suffer from the same infirmities of human nature.
Anyway, LaMaitre was famously hesitant to ascribe theological meaning to his theory. As was noted, he was not the one who coined the phrase “Big Bang.” It was an attempt by his critics to discredit his theory as religious nonsense from a Catholic priest. On the other hand, the pope at the time wanted to use LaMaitre’s theory as evidence of biblical creation. LaMaitre cautioned against this on the grounds that science would continue to advance and that his theory may well be wrong.
I’ve always admired LaMaitre. I also think that, even if this new theory about the age of the universe stands a for a while, we are probably many, many layers away from understanding the ultimate reality of the universe from a scientific perspective, if such an understanding is even possible for human intellect. The joy is in the pursuit.
ObloodyHell: “Well, TBH, the science they do is at the edge of human understanding, and there are probably less than 1000 people who Really Get It.” 🙂 Yeah, and I ain’t one of them.
Sleeping on it last night – after my first comment on the subject, and then later during conversations w/ others, I remembered reading about ancient writers from India writing about Universe expansions and collapsing. Examples from a google search: ‘The universe is described as a cosmic egg that cycles between expansion and total collapse’ and ‘the universe existed in a form of tiny ball of gas, which exploded and gave birth to the universe.’
Some 3,500+ years later—we have someone claiming that the Universe is twice as old as thought just 5-20 years ago, and that there is no “Dark Matter.” Oh yeah, George LeMaitre only came up w/ the modern version of the “Big Bang” theory around 1920+ AD. Frankly I am more impressed by what those ancient Indians were writing about their big bang stuff than where modern mankind is at now on the subject.
Sure, there have certainly been side benefits from LeMaitre’s “Big Bang” theory, but the concept of an expanding & contracting Universe is nothing new. Heck, off the top of my head—I suspect that the Universe is at least a 1000 times older than theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta suggests, but I am no theoretical physicist or such. 🙂
I thought the dimensions might be the inverse of planks constant
Dr. Becky is skeptical, which to be fair is probably the correct reaction to anything that challenges long established theories. Carl Sagan said “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and there seems to be a number of other more reasonable explanations. But we shall see I guess.
I was wondering why I was beginning to feel so run down recently.
I was watching, ironically enough, reruns of the Big Bang Theory last night, so just arriving here this morning.
Just to clean up some notions:
The Big Bang is not describing an infinite density of energy expanding out, it describes actual “reality” expanding… ie before the BB there was literally nothing. This is very hard to conceptualize, but it was literally spacetime itself coming into existence and expanding. That’s what the equations describe. Yes, and the parallel to Genesis and other such creation stories is obvious. Source of the BB?? no idea. Some try to invoke the Heisenberg UP in that given a delta T, there can be a large delta E, but this never made sense to me as there was no T at all.
Heat death: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics shows, and observations back up, that entropy is increasing always for any closed system…can’t get much more closed than the universe. The BB was a low entropy state, so the universe is evolving towards high entropy at which point it will be all at the same temperature and no net energy flow anywhere. The linkage of the movement to high entropy and the “flow” of time is still being debated.
Cyclic Universes: Take the current observed expansion of the universe by observed redshifts of galaxies and then combine that with gravity; you don’t even really need GR, Newton works just fine, it’s fairly easy to calculate a critical density of matter. If the density of the universe is greater than this number, the expansion will slow, stop, and then reverse..ie a cyclic universe. If less, then the universe expands without slowing. At the critical density the universe barely continues expanding. All measurements so far indicate we are right on the knife edge of the critical density. The existence of dark matter would obviously change the measured value.
And just to add to the spices: the constants, G, h, c, etc seem to be finely tuned such small deviations from their values lead to an uninhabitable universe…another possible expression of the strong Anthropic principle.
Isn’t this all a hoot? 🙂
I would suggest that anyone looking at the supposed parallels between so-called “Vedic physics” and modern cosmology and physics, do a cautionary exploration of the textual and translation debates before getting too excited.
There seems to be a lot of motivated back-reading going on, if you catch my drift.
The famous 10.129 hymn is just one place to start.
And given the political situation in India, and those sctapping to take ownership of the texts, and declare their “true” meaning to suit a social agenda, I doubt it will get much better, speaking in a general way. A mess I would not even wish to engage with.
Mac: “Sound waves?”
Yeah, that was my first reaction when I heard this concept, quite popular these days, for the first time in reference to an extraterrestrial locale. After all, in space nobody can hear you scream, right?!
I think “density waves” would be a clearer term to use, since while “sound” is indeed a compression or density wave, the traditional context of “sound” is such a wave occurring within a planetary atmosphere, and perceptible by a biological organism.
So wouldnt dark matter move than regular matter
Ask Keith Richards.
Cappy,
Lololololololol, the “Strolling Bones”. Yes Neo it is that old, I was there when it started.
well how would you calculate maximum density, if the universe is some king of oblong shape, then there would that distance on the other side of the universe,
it would stand to reason,
The biggest problem with discussing dark energy is the assumption that it has something to do with dark matter. It does not; the unifying theme is ‘dark’ as in ‘hidden,’ like the ‘dark side of the moon’ is the side of the moon facing away from Earth, and therefore hidden from ground-based observation.
Dark matter is the ‘answer’ to why everything out there acts as if it’s heavier than it looks. The second most popular answer is that gravity is weirder than we think and that at short distances (for cosmological distances, anyway) the extra terms don’t matter, like the relativistic additions to the kinetic energy equation, which are effectively zero at the human scale.
Dark energy is the ‘answer’ to why the universe is expanding.
Me in physics class:
https://accordingtohoyt.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/rdt_20230404_0317275233603852168844426.jpg
Let’s have the Enterprise check this out.
https://accordingtohoyt.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/gogh.png
The truth behind the moon landing.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2024/03/IMG_1027.jpg
The earliest known painting of Keith Richards is still a bit late, sorry Cappy.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-7.02.52%E2%80%AFAM.png
@ OBH > “the science they do is at the edge of human understanding, and there are probably less than 1000 people who Really Get It”
Reminded me of this observation about Einstein.
(I cleaned up the typos.)
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/only-three-people-understand-general-relativity.935624/
Further down in the discussion is this limerick, just for fun.
The opinions expressed are the sole responsibility of the anonymous author.
There’s a wonderful family called Stein.
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.
Gert’s poems are bunk,
Ep’s statues are junk,
and no one can understand Ein.