What is unknown about Space? Cosmic Expansion

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James Webb Space Telescope makes us think again

Fascinating insights by Scientist Chris Duran for those who feel unhappy about the Big Bang Theory.

Bits of his science may be too difficult to understand, but just keep reading as there are also many easier bits of science that show how scientists have been fooling us.

Never be fooled by scientists who claim that the Bible is wrong.

This study will reveal many errors in the scientific thinking that established the so-called Big Bang theory. Scientists relied on this seriously flawed theory to try to do away with the need for a God to create the Universe.

I TIMOTHY 6:20   “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:”

For whatever reason, a hubristic mindset (Hubris means exaggerated pride or self-confidence) took hold in the cosmological and astrophysics communities several decades ago—one that assumed that what we can observe and measure fully explains the broader model of the universe. The new, very powerful James Webb space telescope will tell you that they got at least the age of the Universe wrong, if not the entire lot.

I am a scientific person and trust in science, but that’s why I have never subscribed to the Big Bang Theory. It has always just been too much of a stretch to say “We know how the things we observe billions of light years away would work if they were on a much smaller scale, so let’s apply those rules and come up with a theory that we can treat as 99.9% certain.”

It assumes that we understand all factors that go into cosmic expansion, or at least enough of the factors to do math on it.

E.g., nobody knows why there appears to be an expansion of the universe, but it has been presumed that we can use that expansion to explore its deep history. We don’t,  and never have understood the nature of the expansion well enough to confidently state that the universe is 13.8 billion years old.

The problems have been innumerable, although I’ll start with the single piece of evidence that finally convinced most physicists that the Big Bang is accurate: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and more specifically, the fact that it’s effectively a perfect black body.

The term arises because visible light will be absorbed rather than reflected, and therefore the surface will appear black.

This is a point that those not versed in the hard sciences might gloss over—yet it’s critical to the justification of the Big Bang.

The idea is that it can only be represented by a previous state of the universe that was much more dense, representing the light that was given off in those earlier epochs and which has since been stretched. Well, we see that the distant universe is redshifted, so this seems to check out without any doubt.

I won’t get into other possible explanations for the CMB and redshift, other than to say that there are other models that both have expansion and the CMB—and no, I’m not talking about Steady State theories.

The problems with a 13.8-billion-year universe include:

1. LIGO (a very big gravity wave detector in America) detects about 10x more stellar remnant collisions than what was expected for a universe that’s ‘only’ 13.8 billion years old. There shouldn’t have been enough time for these orbits to decay and collide.
2. Related to #1, the Final Parsec Problem. We have no idea how supermassive black holes could shed enough angular momentum to collide in such a short period of time. Even with exotic forms of Dark Matter to the rescue (self-interacting Dark Matter, for example), that final parsec separating two supermassive black holes is unbridgeable given what we know about them. Yet, we see colossal black holes, even out in the early universe.
3. To justify accelerated development of galaxies and black holes in the early universe, as observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, you need to introduce something magic—something never even confirmed to exist. You have two options: Dark Matter as a new particle, and primordial black holes. The number of primordial black holes required to accelerate galaxy formation to a sufficient extent? A lot. A lot, and magnitudes more than any prediction made before these observations were made.
4. Dark Matter as a new particle. Don’t get me wrong, dark matter definitely exists. Dark matter is the something that causes galaxy rotation curves to give us unexpected velocities. It’s most likely something with mass, and it is mass that we can’t detect with our telescopes (that’s the ‘dark’ part of it). Although it’s widely recognized that at least ~30 - 50% of dark matter is simply regular matter too dim to see, the idea is that the universe isn’t old enough for it all to be made from old dim stellar remnants and objects (stellar mass black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, gas/debris, and old red dwarfs). So, if you knew the universe was older, you don’t have to create a new particle to justify dark matter, and as a result, you no longer have a fudge factor to accelerate the formation of galaxies.
5. We have too much Lithium for a universe that hasn’t had enough time for it to have formed in the quantities observed, or at least not by any process we know of
6. We have never detected an unambiguous population III star. I.e., the first generation of stars with essentially no elements heavier than helium in them.
7. There hasn’t been a definitive detection of the CMB B-polarization modes. If there were, you could rule out pretty much every other explanation for the CMB that doesn’t involve expansion from an earlier time.
8. We don’t know why the constants of the universe have the values that they do. Why do G, the speed of light, or the fine-structure constant have the properties that they do? We don’t know, and thus, we can’t rule out that these varied in the distant past in ways we can’t perceive.
9. I have personally never been able to find any believable study that claimed that galaxies were smaller and younger as you peered out into the distance, although this claim had been made regularly before James Webb was launched. Based on that telescope’s data, I don’t think anybody is still claiming that galaxies from 13.5 billion years ago are characteristically smaller and younger in appearance. To me, that original claim just seems bogus, and results in lost credibility.
10. We still can’t pin down a solution to the Hubble Tension. Until we do, we have no idea what expansion rates to apply to the history of the universe in order to conclude an age of the universe
11. Expansion rates of the universe at the greatest distances are largely based on the brightness of Type 1a supernovae at those distances. However, they have been used incorrectly as standard candles and are not actually reliable distance indicators. This is a rarely made point, although it does appear in several respected journals. The assumption has been that these supernovae always detonate at more/less the same mass and thus detonating approximately the same quantity of nuclear fuel. They accumulate enough carbon, and they blow—at just above the critical mass of carbon in a white dwarf. Yet, it has become apparent that many of these Type 1a supernovae are actually “Super-Chandrasekhar Mass” supernovae. Instead of being from thermonuclear carbon detonation in a single white dwarf, this is when two white dwarfs collide. Again, this possibility has been discounted because a 13.8 billion year old universe wouldn’t have a significant frequency of these collisions. See #1 and 2 above. With an older universe, you can no longer trust this standard candle. Yet, LIGO tells us that a lot more stellar objects are colliding than previously believed. As a result of all of this, we don’t have reliable data on the rates of expansion of the universe.
12. Heavy elements detected in the planets around very old-looking stars are too abundant for planets that presumably formed from a generation of stars prior to their very old host star.

Of course, if the Big Bang Theory got the age of the universe wrong, then there are other questions that need answering:

1. Why does it appear that there are more quasars in the distant universe than in the near, more recent universe? Perhaps we only exist because we are nowhere near a quasar that could potentially fry life from within the local cluster.
2. Why do the abundances of hydrogen and helium seem to agree with a 13.8-billion-year-old universe? Maybe there are other ‘recycling’ processes not yet discovered. E.g., endothermic fission of elements lighter than Iron (would require a net input of energy, which stellar objects have an abundance of). Maybe hydrogen and helium are reintroduced via astrophysical jets, which we know to contain plasma of subatomic particles. Maybe pair production, or the disruption of neutron stars can turn heavier elements back into lighter ones.
3. How can you explain the CMB being such a perfect blackbody, if the Big Bang Theory isn’t right? I can only think of two other possibilities: EVERYTHING expands with the cosmos, including objects with mass. Or, the constants of the universe varied enough to throw the age estimations off, but not the entire theory. That first possibility would require that the constants scale alongside the size of the universe, lest atoms themselves break apart. Think about it though—if everything was expanding in lockstep with everything else, you wouldn’t even need Dark Energy—because no useful work will have been done by the process. This idea has been explored in at least a few papers by respected authors now, and might be referred to as “Cosmic Coupling”.

So, in summary, humans as a whole have not actually understood the data they have been using to conclude that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and those errors may actually invalidate the Big Bang Theory entirely…we just don’t have enough information and understanding to make that claim. I do think, however, we need to stop referring to the 13.8-billion-year age of the universe as essentially confirmed, as has been the case for decades now.

Humans are incredibly intelligent, at least with respect to the types of people who work on these existential problems. We are also very good at ignoring evidence that our beliefs are wrong, once those beliefs become part of one’s cultural identity. For decades, it was career-suicide to suggest that the Big Bang had any major flaws that might actually invalidate the confidence had in it—because it had become a pseudoreligion. It was and is a doctrine followed by a community of people who are bound together by tenets which they need to be consistent enough to use—as is the case with all religions.