Back to the cosmology drawing board
I’ve had many occasions over the years to quote this line from “Hamlet,” and I’m going to do it again:
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
It was true in Shakespeare’s day. And it’s true now:
The universe is getting bigger every second. In fact, it’s expanding at a much faster rate than it should [according to conventional predictions]…
When scientists look at what was going on 13 billion years ago, via Planck, and then extrapolate that into the present, the results don’t match what Hubble sees today. For several years, there’s been an assumption that the disagreement is due to a lack of precision in the measurements. But as scientists have fine-tuned their tools, the discrepancy has remained. On Thursday, researchers using Hubble said the chances the mismatch is some sort of user error or fluke have gone from 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 100,000…
Riess says the discrepancy strongly suggests there’s a piece missing in the puzzle that scientists have put together over the years to model the history of the universe.
Oh, I wouldn’t doubt it. And I’d wager it’s more than “a piece.”
I believe the same.
The discrepancy is due to the assumptions/assertions about the intermediate space and time, processes, and fidelity, which while matched with inference from the signals, and what some people hope to be true, are mismatched with reality. Perhaps some more fudging with dark matter and energy will fill in the missing links, and conflation of logical domains will bear secular incentives to people who want to, need to, believe in something. That said, we have barely made near-space observation at the edge of our solar system, but have extrapolated to a universe and beyond. Keep it philosophical until there is sufficient cause (i.e. near-space and time observation and replication) to transition.
About that Hamlet quote, may I commend to you Paul Cantor’s “Shakespeare and Politics” channel on YouTube? There, Professor Cantor in his “Hamlet” lectures makes a hardy and cogent argument that Hamlet is aiming at Horatio’s embrace of a particular philosophical Stoicism, which is to say, not against “philosophy” in general terms or as such.
https://www.youtube.com/user/ShakespeareFCG
Not a problem, as we will not be around 12 years from now.
sdferr:
I’ve read that theory before.
I don’t buy it.
I think there are more things in Shakespeare than are dreamt of in Paul Cantor’s philosophy.
I think Neo has it right…there’s a lot of missing pieces. To account for the relative “smoothness” of the general structure of the universe the inflation era had to be introduced. It’s really an ad hoc fix. Now that the expansion rates between early and the current universe are in disagreement that adds another problem. I think the catch-all “dark energy” is just another band-aid.
This is really all to the good, as it’s only through finding the observations don’t match the model that pushes the science to come up with a better model. The Ptolemaic system finally collapsed, despite predicting planetary positions very well, up until better observations (mainly due to Tycho) continued to show it in error. They kept trying to patch it up with more epicycles on epicycles, until Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton showed that there was a better way to deal with the data. The modern day patches on the Big Bang are inflation and dark energy.
The best quote from the article: “The Hubble tension between the early and late universe may be the most exciting development in cosmology in decades,” Now, we just need a Copernicus and a Newton.
“… new physics may be needed to complete the puzzle.
Previously, theorists would say to me, ‘it can’t be. It’s going to break everything.’ Now they are saying, ‘we actually could do this,’ Riess said.”
A theoretical physicist friend of mine once said, “I don’t know of a theoretician worth his salt who can’t pull a minus sign out of thin air.” I laughed, appropriately he thought. Of course he was being largely serious about necessity being the mother of invention.
Though Copernicus used epicycles too. It was Kepler who showed another way.
I suspect that we will eventually discover that we have not fully understood the nature and effects of gravity, and that things work differently “out there” where the gravitational gradient is closer to being flat.
In order to TEST that, we’re going to need to get out there well into or beyond the Kuiper Belt, very far from the Sun. And then spend several years out there re-learning all of our physics.
“God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”
Might even be that?
R.A. Heinlein related his observation that, “Most ‘scientists’ are bottle washers and button sorters”.
He then went on to explain why this is so, “To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits.
To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.”
I have observed that there are far more academics, authoritarians and most of all, those who acquiesce to ‘expert’ authority than there are scientists willing to junk theory “when it no longer fits”.
A critical element left unsaid in Heinlein’s definition of the scientific mind is the ability to make creative breakthroughs in theory and invention. Which, BTW are the only scientists whom posterity remembers.
It won’t be the first time that scientists have had to back up and figure out where they went wrong. Remember “phlogiston”?
I was thinking about this given my original wont was physics…
lots of people toy with such…
there is no multiverse… it would require more than one void..
The void is infinite and time passes infinitely fast
making its empty period an instant relatively
[zero time would be static, and so, would never birth matter]
Matter appears on the stage in a form that allows it all to occupy a finite space
The classical physics of the big bang is great work, but there is a problem with it, that ALWAYS bugged me… (given my line of thinking above)
You will read the gedanken descriptions of the first instants of the universe, ticking off the stages from pure energy, to quark soup, etc… up until inflation, which they know happened, but dont know how or why, etc…
The problem i have is thinking that nothing is nothing without time
and that they don’t treat time correctly, given matter changes its rate.
when the universe and all that matter started expanding, it could not be that fast…
or rather, time was moving really slow… if you look at the problem linearly this isn’t much an issue. however, when they do their fun calculations comparing figures to things they see in the past, and they account for the time difference… they don’t account for the difference in overall time speed due to a more dense universe. 🙂
the property of time belongs to space, they are intertwined, as space-time
when space is empty an a void, time moves at infinite speed…
while it seems irrelevant as there is nothing there to tick it off, it has to be there
inflation could be (this is just for fun), when the density of the universe finally was low enough (cold enough), the void came in as the matter went out… causation was born in this interaction, but this wasn’t a fast thing… because at the interface there was so much matter/energy that time wasn’t moving on the inside, but was only moving on the horizon..
time and the void were slowly burrowing into the static and finite matter
this is seen as cooling, till there is a balance and the pieces are finite sized..
but the point is that the void is infinite…
the finite will keep spreading out and more void will fill the gaps
There are only two types of fundamental particle known in the entire Universe: fermions and bosons and one of them expands slower than the other
there are no antibosons for the bosons… they fly at the speed of light…
the farther out they go, the larger their wavelengths get…
the fermions are slower, but as they slap together and annilate each other and release energy, more bosons go bye bye…
the universe is evaporating into the void…
eventually, the largest pieces of matter in black holes, evaporate into bosons
the smallest pieces of matter cool down below 5×10?8 K, they smear out…
they are so cold time can get between the waves of energy that make them
eventually, as this all happens overall average time is speeding up…
the big bang at one end is followed by the softest possible whisper in dissipation
or not – 🙂
Heck, billions seem unable to understand human nature, or the lessons of observable human nature via history. Understanding cosmology is way beyond our most fevered imagination. If we can not understand our inate nature, how can we expect to understand the heavens?
May I just remind that there still is no unified field theory of the type Einstein tried to construct in his last 30 years? And that General Relativity is still incompatible with quantum physics? But gravity and 3 other fundamental forces obviously should be involved in any cosmological theory, but we just do not know how they interact and interplay. So it is not just a small bit is absent, but a whole paradigm of theoretical physics is fundamentally incomplete. No serious change here in more than half a century. And when and if such change will happen, it would be either credible scientific revolution or total capitulation of the scientific method before mystery of the Creation.
Goethe, Faust:
“Mysterious even in open day,
Nature retains her veil, despite our clamours :
That which she doth not willingly display
Cannot be wrenched from her with levers, screws, and hammers.”
parker: As Niels Bohr famously said, understanding of quantum physics is a children’s play compared to understanding of children’s play.
Neo, a great astronomer named Halton Arp has, over the last half century (he died recently) catalogued at least 100 galaxies which contradict Plancks theory that red shift is necessarily an indicator of a doppler effect, which forms the basis of the expanding universe. He observed that quasars clearly belonging to the parent galaxies had dramatically higher redshifts.
In fact Planck himself was uncertain of the meaning of the redshift he had discovered. As is frequently the case, the disciples are more dogmatic than their hero. Needless to say Arp was ostracized in the science community, if such a word can describe a world so characterized by bigotry and gatekeeping.
Sadly modern theoretical physicists seem frequently to be ‘stunned’ by new observations, before they hastily come up with some complex add-on to their precious theory.
Modern theoretical physics is in an awkward position when it tries to extract scientific knowledge from cosmology. The latter is necessary intertwined with cosmogony, that is, with origin of everything. But there is not and cannot be any scientific understanding of emergence of everything from nothing, since for the needs of such understanding the nature must already exist to govern its birth. So it is necessary a miracle, something obviously supernatural. But no scientific knowledge of supernatural is possible by definition of the science.