2y ago

James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe

www.livescience.com James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe

Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.

299 comments

No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
One of the Wright brothers said that. It's actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we're wrong about.
- No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.
  googles
  Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:
  Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909
  No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.
  
  See? I was wrong.
  HUMANS
  
  Oh, and to provide numbers:
  https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris
  That's 5,837.07 km.
  As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Atlantic_GlobalFlyer
  In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).
  That's 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.
  As for time:
  No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping...
  The longest flight by time:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager
  The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base's 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.
  
  “Brought in its train” what an interesting phrase, do people still say this? Is it the same as “in its wake” we use today?
  
  Wilbur clearly didn't know about in-flight refueling.
  It also makes me wonder if trans-atlantic gliding is a feat that could be feasibly attempted with modern technology.
  
  He also isn't talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.
  
  So context matter, you say. This is revolutionary! But it will never catch on.
- At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
  
  That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.
  It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.
  
  I think the context was for computers at the time.
  
  That one is apocryphal if I remember correctly, but even if he did say it, at the time it was pretty much true.
- Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.
  
  *1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.
  https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56594-6_11
- And 100 years later, in one generation, humans land on the moon.

This is amazing news. It's like being shown that Neutonian physics are wrong, so now we have the ability to come up with a better model, then massive advancements in technology can occur.
- We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.
  
  No, Newtonian physics works just fine. Unless things are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow.
  At least that's what a meme I once saw said.
  
  I think it's better to say that Newtonian physics is incomplete rather than wrong.
  
  I think that's the point they were making.
- I'd like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect
  
  The trouble with that is the difference in time. Since the light has to travel such a vast distance, multiple images of the same galaxy will show different stages of maturity. Even the stars will have been recycled. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ever demonstrate that two galaxies separated by billions of light years are actually the same galaxy in a curved Universe.
  
  I believe that would be a Torus-shaped universe that could produce that effect, basically a donut where space loops back in on itself. I think it's something that's been considered, though it sounds as if there's no evidence for or against that idea, and it's not considered likely.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/07/21/why-the-universe-probably-isnt-shaped-like-a-donut/?sh=11e56b426e60
- Neutonian physics are wrong
  Dangerous way of putting that since we have so many easily weaponized idiots who will carry that water, a better way to say it would be "our understanding of neutonian physics is incomplete at the moment"
  
  I agree, it is more accurate that way. English is not my first language, so I missed that detail. In South Africa, we also don't have a significant anti-science movement, so it does not always occur to me naturally. The scientific approach is generally well respected and understood here.

We have a very limited view of the universe so it's no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.
- yeah, but it's always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it's almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.
  
  That's because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn't really an acceptable solution.
  
  Don't dare question dark matter in front of a physicist.
- It's always funny to me when people bring up how science was wrong in the past, as evidence for why we shouldn't trust it now.
  You know what replaced the bad science? Good science.
  
  Or rather, we replace the bad science with the best explanations we can offer, right now.
  I'll take the plumb pudding model over "deity did it, stop asking questions" any day, because you can still do something useful with it.
  Doesn't even matter if our understanding is wrong and will be updated later.
  Science is the best philosophy 💪

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…'” --Isaac Asimov
- TIL Columbo was the ultimate scientist.
  
  "Oh, just one more thing..."
  The scientific spirit at work!

The Hubble constant seemed determined not to be constant.
- Sounds like a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide
  
  Get your freaking towel and get outta here, man!
- The Hubble Suggestion just doesn’t sound the same.
- It's called Webb-constant now.

Dogulas knew:
I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
-- Arthur Dent, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series.

Maybe Maybe there's something seriously wrong with the Universe? Why is it always US who are wrong?
- Hey, it's me, the Universe. I just wanted to say, this is no longer working for me. And if it makes you feel better, sure it's not you, it's me. Please don't call.
- The universe is, frankly, a complete shitshow.
  
  I've heard this has made many people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move
  
  I mean it's got some valid points but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
- I like to think that whenever we discover something new, the universe just got an update and we discovered the patch notes.

It seems odd to me that the universe would be expanding at the same consistent spherical shape. I've seen plenty of explosions and they never look like that. The big bang, which consisted of literally all matter in the universe would surely be no different.
- Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.
  The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.
  So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.
  
  It’s because CMB stopped for coffee, obviously.
  (That was a great explanation, btw.)
  
  It just wraps around, like a videogame. Duh...
  
  Just to confirm, the expansion is the same in different directions under both methods of measuring?
  
  Ah ok. Thanks for the correction.
- The only thing spherical is the visible universe from earth that we can see. Both in time and distance. Due to the expansion of space that volume is increasing.
  The entire universe could be infinite and take on any number of infinite shapes. Our local universe could be completely different from the rest of the universe and we'll never be able to know..it's wild.
  Recent experiments trying to determine what the curvature of space-time is in the visible universe has concluded that it's pretty much flat But it's entirely possible that we're just on a very very very large (infinite?) curved surface of spacetime that just looks flat to us..
  
  I would bet on it in fact. It makes logical sense to from my perspective.
- I'm no way an expert in this, but I've been told it's wrong to think of the expansion of the universe like an explosion where everything moves away from a single point, but rather that the space between each object is expanding, comparing it to the way the surface of a balloon expands (if you were to paint multiple dots on the surface of a balloon they would all move away from each other when you inflate the balloon), though I like to think of it as yeast bread expanding since that's 3d.
  
  Have you considered the universe may actually be a torus instead of a sphere, eg: bagel-verse?
- Spherical? We don't know if the universe is of finite size.
  As far as we know, it could just as well be infinite, and the expansion happens everywhere.
  Everything is relative so the only thing we know is that the distance between galaxies increases. But we don't know if there's a “border” of the universe or not.
- The big bang (if it is still a valid theory) would have been unlike any explosion you have ever witnessed. The big bang was not an explosion of only matter, since time and space were both created during this event as well.
  
  Really, calling it an explosion is not right in the first place. It's one of those unfortunate cases of bad naming in science, another being 'The God Particle' (which was originally supposed to be The Goddamn Particle.) Physicists prefer using the word 'expansion.'
- I think it gets more spherical the larger it gets. The initial explosion from nukes are fairly spherical if you look at the old film. https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/09/28/130183266/abomb
  
  One of the images from that slideshow begs to differ.
- I like the donut universe.
  https://www.livescience.com/the-universe-might-be-shaped-like-a-doughnut-not-like-a-pancake-new-research-suggests
- There's some interesting ways of understanding "dark energy." This is just one.
- I feel (intuitively (which is almost certainly wrong)) that it's expanding like a fluidic wave. Think lighting a gasoline puddle on fire.

Yay! We are learning something new!
- This is what I was very very excited for. The Hubble photos were more exciting because they’re visual spectrum. The James web is all about discoveries.
- But moooom, I hate learning new things

TLDR: Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. We can now confirm it's not measurement error.
- It's not a matter of where we look, it's the method we use to calculate the expansion. The 2 methods to calculate the expansion rate give us different results. For a good explanation, here is a YouTube playlist of videos by Dr. Becky Smethurst where she discusses & explains the "Crisis in Cosmology": https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
- Oh. Well. That's. Terrifying?
  
  don't worry, we're expanding with it!
  
  Uh, why?

Over and over again. That scope is really opening things up.
- It was the same for the Hubble telescope back in the day (and still!)

Good riddance, the answer can never be too simple.
- The human need for 'constants' may already be too simple. Gravity for example is treated as a constant value in Physics but is actually variable.
  
  I might have missed something, but AFAIK, gravity is the same everywhere. Bigger things, bigger gravity, sure, but two equal things in different locations don't have different gravitational attraction
  
  Your understanding of what constitutes "Physics" (tip: it's not a bunch of kids in a classroom) tells me that we can safely ignore your opinion.

The ~~cake~~ BigBang is a lie.
original source :
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad1ddd
see also :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law
Hubble tension
In the 21st century, multiple methods have been used to determine the Hubble constant. "Late universe" measurements using calibrated distance ladder techniques have converged on a value of approximately 73 (km/s)/Mpc. Since 2000, "early universe" techniques based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background have become available, and these agree on a value near 67.7 (km/s)/Mpc. (...)
(...) The most exciting possibility is new physics beyond the currently accepted cosmological model of the universe, (...)
- Can someone give me the spark notes I started reading but I'll never get through that or probably even understand all of it
  
  As I understand it, there are two measures of cosmic distance/expansion rate in which we are pretty confident.
  One is using supernovas as a measure. Since one kind of supernova has very particular characteristics, it is easy to calculate the distance. It is like knowing that everyone has the same kind of candle, if you see a bunch of lights around you, you could make certain assumptions about how far they are from you by how bright they are. Also, with more precise measurements, we can use the doppler effect to know how fast they are moving. We have observed the area around or Galaxy and have come up with a very precise measurement for how fast the universe is expanding.
  The other measurement is by looking at the cosmic wave background. This is the "first" thing we are able to see after the big bang. I don't really understand the details of this one, but scientists have also been able to calculate the expansion rate of the universe very accurately with this radiation.
  As we have done more experiments to measure these two numbers, instead of converging on the same number, the results are actually diverging. Recent results have even made it so the error bars no longer overlap.
  So, we have some big questions -
  Are our measurements wrong? There are no strong candidates for alternative understandings of how we measure things, so we don't really know how.
  Are the expansion rates at the beginning of the universe and current times different? Maybe, but again, we don't have any theories for why.
  Does the Universe expand at different rates in different places? Maybe, but again, we don't have any strong candidates that we can test.
  All of this is called the Hubble Tension. It is probably one of the biggest questions in cosmology currently.
  
  Basically,
  Everything you know is wrong.
  Black is white, up is down, and short is long
  
  It's simple, imagine you've got two smart friends that both have an opinion about a TV show you didn't watch - you can't tell who is right but the fact they disagree suggests they might be wrong when they say you can't have flying cars and time travel.

Yay, progress!
But maybe the measurement methods are not correctly understood either, as profen by the brightness of white stars used to determine age, lately.

Do all parts of a growing, living creature expand at the same speed?
- In America, our guts grow way faster than our brains, bc that's where we do most of our thinking. :-D
  
  Ohhh that makes sense! You have some REALLY smart people over there!
- Did you know that because your feet are closer to the gravitational center of the earth your head ages faster than your feet?
  
  I did, I have no grey hairs on my feet.
  
  Gonna go ahead and add "how much farther did my head travel than my feet due to the curvature of the earth" to my list of weird statistics I want an answer to
  
  A bat should be less affected by this uneven aging due to the whole sleeping upside down thing. They still spend some time upright so it balances out a little better than what you'd see with most of us who generally stay somewhere between prone/supine and standing up throughout the day.

It's like the stars when observed at veryx2 far distance they start to behave weird. Blinking a bit faster than normal this might cause the reason for much faster expansion when calculating. Entropy suppose to be improbable right but at far distance all those improbable they probably all eventually add up. Just my thought anyway.
- Have you ever had a dream that
  \ That you, um, you had, you'll, you would
  \ You could, you do, you would you want you
  \ You could do some, you...
  \ You'll do, you could you, you want
  \ You want him to do you so much
  You could do anything, do anything
  \ Have you ever had a dream
  \ You could do anything, do anything
  \ Have you ever had a dream
  \ You could do anything, do anything
  
  Perfect!
  
  Lmao

Anyone here an expert on Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity (STVG), Tensor-Vector-Scalar Gravity (TeVeS) or f(R) gravity?
- I took an undergrad course in stargazing, so I'm basically an expert in... whatever that is...
  Prof was a big spectroscopy nerd, so we mostly focused on that.
  What I gather from this article is that we still don't know what dark energy is. We haven't for decades. So the new telescope has failed to enlighten us about a mystery that's been around longer than half of the users here.
  
  Yes, we still don't know what dark energy is, but the article doesn't directly mention that.
  The new telescope has failed to enlighten us
  I would argue the opposite. It's entire purpose is to enlighten (gather EM data) and its done this to a higher accuracy than Hubble.
  It's just job is not to explain the measurements. That's ours.

Why couldn't this still be "big bang"? Look at a grenade for example. When it explodes, a shock wave expands from it in a near perfect sphere, but the fragments previous packed inside of it explode out at different speeds depending on their mass.
If you were in the center of that explosion, measuring the speed of fragments traveling away from you, they'd travel at different speeds. Only the initial shockwave would be constant.
- This is more like you measure the fragment speeds with both a laser and with radar, and get different readings off the same fragment.
- This problem is not AT ALL about the geometrical shape of the expansion of the universe. It's about 2 different formulas that should give the same result for the rate of the universe, but give different results. I don't blame you, the article title is extremely misleading.
- Maybe because the speed of things is not the same thing as the speed of space expansion.

Yay!

From my limited understanding, the discrepancy comes from the two ways to measure the universe's expansion: calculation from cosmic microwave background and calculating a cepheid variable, which uses pulsating stars (pulsars?)
Isn't it more likely that one, or both, ways of measuring are wrong? As in, they're not useful for measuring the universe's rate of expansion?
- Isn’t it more likely that one, or both, ways of measuring are wrong? As in, they’re not useful for measuring the universe’s rate of expansion?
  Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.
  I'm trying to understand the distinction you are making. Could you elaborate?
  
  Not a scientist but the article seems to mean that they checked that the tools themselves had no defects giving incorrect measurements.
  This comment seems to be questioning the methodology of how we measure the rate of expansion so tackles a different aspect of the conversation.
  But that's about as much as I can contribute haha
  
  I think the distinction is between arguing that there's a discrepancy because the measurement is bad, or because the measurement doesn't measure what we think it measures.
  Is the theory right and we have a measurement error, or is the theory flat out wrong?

One day science will reach the Orphic understanding of the origin of the Cosmos.
- Well, maybe at least this version:
  Next after them, Epicurus introduced the world to the doctrine that there is no providence. He said that all things arise from atoms and revert back to atoms. All things, even the world, exist by chance, since nature is constantly generating, being used up again, and once more renewed out of itself—but it never ceases to be, since it arises out of itself and is worn down into itself.
  Originally the entire universe was like an egg and the spirit was then coiled snakewise round the egg, and bound nature tightly like a wreath or girdle.
  At one time it wanted to squeeze the entire matter, or nature, of all things more forcibly, and so divided all that existed into the two hemispheres and then, as the result of this, the atoms were separated.
  Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion book 1 chapter 8
  Very fun in the context of Neil Turok's CPT symmetric universe theory as an explanation for the baryon asymmetry problem, so its discussion of matter being squeezed and then splitting into two which divided the particles may end up on point even if incorrect in their interpretation regarding the atmosphere.

What are the different rates? How much variance is there?
- From memory it varies between about 67km/s per megaparsec to 74km/s per megaparsec.
  Also it's really weird to describe something in terms of km/s when you look at an area over millions of lightyears
  
  Those are weird units indeed :
  (1 km /s) / 1 mega parsec =
  (1000 m/s)/(10⁶ x 3.0857×10¹⁶ m) =
  1/3.0857×10¹⁹ seconds

We're just inside a cosmic space octopus, pretending we understand... With limbs of the CSP expanding as it moves through timespace.
And we, the cells inside a cell inside the octopus, like to believe ourselves enlightened.
I love space because it humbles even the most confident and intelligent members of our apish species.

We abandoning materialism yet?
- Not til we got them sweet, sweet asteroid mineralz. Parties responsible for that will dictate the direction humanity goes, imo

It's almost like cephid variable measurement is a shitty metric for measuring universe expansion because you're not actually measuring the edge of the universe just the rate of travel of two objects.
- How can you measure the edge of the universe? Firstly anywhere you hold the tape you are in the universe secondly its expanding faster than the speed of light which is a limit for movement without space not the expansion of space.

Seeing the universe expanding at different rates could just mean we're not as close to the center as we thought, and the parts further away from the center are moving faster. That's my layman's hypothesis though
- We're not thought to be at the center at all.
  We're at the center of what we can see. But that's just a limit of the speed of light and the age of the universe. The universe almost certainly goes beyond what we can see. And there's no way of knowing how big the universe is beyond that.
  It's like being on a ship in the ocean. You can see the horizon is 20miles in every direction. That doesn't mean you're in the center of the ocean. You're only in the center of what you can... Sea
  
  Kurzgesagt's latest video actually covers this. I found the hypotheses they covered pretty interesting.
  
  I sea what you did there. Whale done.
- There is no center of the universe fwiw, there is no middle everything is expanding out from. Just a substrate that exists everywhere that inflates
  
  That's what I believe as well. AFAIK from what we know the universe could be infinite or simply bigger than the observable part. But I think the only reason people default to assuming that it's finite is that infinity is hard to grasp and that illustrations of the big bang show a point and then disks of expanding size. People assume that means the universe is a sphere but nothing contradicts what you say so there's no reason not to believe that it's infinite.
  
  It's fun to think it might just start going backwards or something because we have literally no idea what is actually happening, like it's very possible we'll never actually be able to see or measure anything outside the universe but there could be all sorts of things going on.
- It's a decent testable hypothesis. If there were a center. Which seems obvious in the familiar mechanical way of say a firecracker. It certainly has a center with debris going every direction from that point.
  However (to use a problematic oversimplification): what if the universe has a similarity to the surface of a balloon being blown up, where is the center?
  Wherever you put your finger, the whole rest of the surface of the balloon is expanding away from that point. One center point is earth. Every other place in the universe also appears to be a center.
  When looking at the evidence, data from telescopes and such, describing the expansion of the universe is closer to the balloon surface theory than the firecracker theory. Even though the firecracker theory is easier to comprehend.
- When people are talking about the center they mean the relative center, in other words, our point of reference. This definitionally is where we are as the observer.
- There is no center.
  
  Yes there is and it is me.
  Can I have some money?
- Loose the centre assumption and you are there.
  Our section of the universe is not as uniform as it should be.

Is it capitalism? Please let it be capitalism.

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