Galaxies in early universe were surprisingly diverse, James Webb Space Telescope finds

[Helio]

The OP's article doesn't seem all that "surprising" to me if we are to ponder if this dooms BBT. It is surprising that the galaxies found are more mature than what was expected. But we are looking at galaxies about one billion years after the CMBR, and stars may have formed around 200 million years after the CMBR. But, such estimates admit to being off a 100 million years or so. There are a lot of variables that affect formation.

Those who think this is harmful to BBT are missing the real story -- we are learning more that will help improve a model that was never claimed to be perfect. Lemaitre, as well as Hubble, produced expansion rates that were almost 10x too high. It took more astronomy to get us to today's rate.

As Rod has noted in the past, there are two different lines of evidence that produce two different rates, though they are close to one another, yet outside their margin of error. Perhaps this and other JWST evidence will allow us to tighten these two rates to make more sense.

Prior to the CMBR, things get messier since we only have a few labs capable of replicating the expected conditions after the first nanosecond. Neutrino scopes, someday, might change this.

So, the BBT, no doubt, will get tweaked a little, then a little more, etc. Why would anyone suggest this shouldn't happen? We want these kinds of surprises; they're fun, IMO. Such things have been happening to it since 1931. At one point, the stars were shown to be older than the universe. Was that the death nail in BBT? It was soon discovered that there is more than one kind of Cepheid, and, suddenly, the universe became much older.

There is no viable alternate theory, btw.

[Added: I also have compared, but not in a while, the BBT with Darwin's "Origin of the Species". Darwin's work was never about the origin of life, but how one species can slowly evolve into another. Similarly, BBT will likely never be able to get past the Hot BB model, where Inflation happened and quantum stuff ruled. We may hope it can, but it doesn't fail if it can't, at least not on this basis.]

 

[billslugg]

Note that we can never find another universe, by definition. If we did, it would simply be part of "The Universe".

 

[Helio]

Note that we can never find another universe, by definition. If we did, it would simply be part of "The Universe".

I suspect quite a list of names would emerge.

I propose, of course, we name it “George”, Herschel’s name for his planetary discovery.

George

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I don't expect Webb to find things that cannot be accomodated by tuning the BBT. The BBT is just so amorphously tunable that it can accomodate just about any finding of galaxy evolution.

So, I think we are going to need to learn something really different than we expect about dark matter or dark energy to make us work up a different theory.

I am always a little disgusted with the people who post a list of things that the BBT fits and then say that any other competing theory must "explain" those things just as well. Realizing that the BBT does not really "explain" its tuning parameters, and that those parameters require 20 times as much energy and matter as we can observe or even understand, it does not seem that another theory that "fits" the observations could not be made up with a similar overpowering of observations by imaginations.

The BBT is basically an extrapolation of the observed redshifts interpreted as recession velocities, going backwards in time until everything we can observe is hypothesized to have been in a space of subatomic dimension, if not an actual single point.

To "fit" that model, it is necessary to transition from astronomical measurements on the order of billions of light years to quantum world measurements on the order of individual sub-atomic particles. The problem is that we do not have a single, unified, verified theory that can span that transition in scale. So, there is plenty of need for and room for imagination to combine those 2 worlds into a single BBT model.

I have tries to post some thought experiments here and elsewhere that go to the problem of extrapolating from the quantum world to the macro world to the astronomical world, but it seems that there are a lot of ways that people just put those difficult concepts our of their minds and their replies.

When I see concepts like "the energy of the universe is constanty increasing", it runs against both my training and my understanding of physical processes. Yes, people can imagine that the universe was a "false vacuum", etc. But, that is only speculation. It avoids rather than explains.

And one thing that I think anybody who has taken and passed a physics course should have learned is that you don't get the right answer if you don't set up the mathematics well enough to properly represent the physics. To the people who say "Trust the math," I can only say that the math is simply a limited quantitative model of physical reality at best. We don't have a "model of everything" and don't (yet?) know how to make one. We don't even seem to know what "everything" is. Just calling it "the universe" isn't providing any information, but seems to be a rhetorical escape hatch for those who don't want to consider what may be beyond what we are postulating for the BBT.

So, these discussions about how the BBT needs to change to accomodate new information are just going to continue as we continue to get more information. Unless we find something that challenges the idea that redshift is due to recession, either by velocity through space or expansion of space itself, we are going to be stuck with a theory that is adjustable for everything, but not good at predicting what we don't already know.

I will throw in one more conceptual challenge: One of the original arguments that the universe could not be infinite was that the night sky would look white instead of dark, if there were stars in every direction stretching to infinity. But, when we found that the universe does appear to be "white" in the sense of black body radiation in the microwave region, that information was fit into a theory of a finite universe that created a flash of light in a "Big Bang". If a theorist is "allowed" to borrow the concept of "Inflation" from the BBT and use it to expand only a region of an infinite universe, why could that not result in what looks like the CMBR inside that region, due to the expansion of that star light coming in from an infinity of sources? Most of the arguments I see against that rely on the assumption that the universe is the same, everywhere (at large enough scales). But, we have been making that mistake for our entire recorded history, first thinking our universe was the solar system, then our galaxy, then what we can postulate resulted from the expansion of a fixed amount of energy/matter. To turn a saying I read here around to the opposite: "The univese may be much bigger than our imagination."

 

[Helio]

I don't expect Webb to find things that cannot be accomodated by tuning the BBT. The BBT is just so amorphously tunable that it can accomodate just about any finding of galaxy evolution.

Yet it's also easily falsifiable. Find heavy metals from 20 billion years ago and you have doubly falsified it. All theories must be falsifiable. The BBT makes tons of predictions, including elemental abundance for each element.

So, I think we are going to need to learn something really different than we expect about dark matter or dark energy to make us work up a different theory.

If these are found to contradict GR, then any damage to GR is a blow to BBT since GR is its framework. Conversely, the very high regard for GR has greatly helped BBT.

I am always a little disgusted with the people who post a list of things that the BBT fits and then say that any other competing theory must "explain" those things just as well.

Why does this bother you? The list I presented (Big Bang Bullets) includes only observed evidence. It would make no sense to propose a theory that ignores what is clearly before our eyes. So, of course, a theory must be objective-based and it must address all the objective evidence.

Realizing that the BBT does not really "explain" its tuning parameters, and that those parameters require 20 times as much energy and matter as we can observe or even understand, it does not seem that another theory that "fits" the observations could not be made up with a similar overpowering of observations by imaginations.

There's nothing wrong with ATM theories that try, but they must stand the scrutiny that science is required to bring them. That scrutiny was applied to BBT from day one.

The BBT is basically an extrapolation of the observed redshifts interpreted as recession velocities, going backwards in time until everything we can observe is hypothesized to have been in a space of subatomic dimension, if not an actual single point.

Yep. That's a fair nutshell. But the expansion should not be seen as an assumption, but a derivation directly from GR. GR is what allows the BBT to have bone and muscle.

When I see concepts like "the energy of the universe is constanty increasing", it runs against both my training and my understanding of physical processes. Yes, people can imagine that the universe was a "false vacuum", etc. But, that is only speculation. It avoids rather than explains.

There is significant evidence for the false vacuum, strange as it seems to be. Increasing energy, I assume, is energy leaked or transferred from that vacuum, so energy isn't being created. Or do I have that wrong?

And one thing that I think anybody who has taken and passed a physics course should have learned is that you don't get the right answer if you don't set up the mathematics well enough to properly represent the physics. To the people who say "Trust the math," I can only say that the math is simply a limited quantitative model of physical reality at best. We don't have a "model of everything" and don't (yet?) know how to make one. We don't even seem to know what "everything" is. Just calling it "the universe" isn't providing any information, but seems to be a rhetorical escape hatch for those who don't want to consider what may be beyond what we are postulating for the BBT.

Agreed. Almost every engineer project requires knowledge of the initial condition. The Given data can feed the project's requirements to produced the solution. If the Given is in error or short of information, solutions won't be found.

I think one reason people struggle with BBT is that the common Given-Required-Solution view doesn't exist for BBT; we aren't given the true initial conditions, so we must infer them, which is problematic. We can, however, be reasonably confident in assuming initial conditions for a time, say, just after the first thousandth of a second, and will find the BBT does great. When we push it to sooner than the first trillionth of a second, that reliability turns to mush, apparently. This is why I discourage others from pushing BBT to a time it really can't go, at least until we have a better handle of just what those earlier initial conditions likely are.

... we are going to be stuck with a theory that is adjustable for everything, but not good at predicting what we don't already know.

It has been its remarkable success with its predictions that has moved it from obscurity to the respect it has today. It predicted the CMBR, which put the nail in the coffin of the only strong competitor - the Steady State theory.

If a theorist is "allowed" to borrow the concept of "Inflation" from the BBT and use it to expand only a region of an infinite universe, why could that not result in what looks like the CMBR inside that region, due to the expansion of that star light coming in from an infinity of sources? Most of the arguments I see against that rely on the assumption that the universe is the same, everywhere (at large enough scales). But, we have been making that mistake for our entire recorded history, first thinking our universe was the solar system, then our galaxy, then what we can postulate resulted from the expansion of a fixed amount of energy/matter. To turn a saying I read here around to the opposite: "The univese may be much bigger than our imagination."

I'm unclear with how an infinity no. of light sources might produce a CMBR using inflation, which lasted for less than a nanosecond. Wouldn't all that light flood us by now given the slow rate of expansion seen today?

 

[billslugg]

Unclear Engineer:
"When I see concepts like "the energy of the universe is constanty increasing", it runs against both my training and my understanding of physical processes. Yes, people can imagine that the universe was a "false vacuum", etc. But, that is only speculation. It avoids rather than explains."

Helio:
"There is significant evidence for the false vacuum, strange as it seems to be. Increasing energy, I assume, is energy leaked or transferred from that vacuum, so energy isn't being created. Or do I have that wrong?"

The energy of the universe is not "constantly increasing", this would violate the first law of thermodynamics which says that energy is conserved in any closed sytem.
As I understand it, the newly created positive energy of the vacuum is exactly balanced by the negative gravitational potential energy of galaxies moving farther away.

 

[rod]

Helio, your post #30 is interesting. I find lists of evidence are commonly thrown up to bolster a model and make it perhaps, seem more reliable than it may be. An example from your post, "Yet it's also easily falsifiable. Find heavy metals from 20 billion years ago and you have doubly falsified it. All theories must be falsifiable. The BBT makes tons of predictions, including elemental abundance for each element."

How this falsifies BBT seems more difficult to test and falsify, I think. Where are the original pristine gas clouds created during BBN, well before the origin of the CMBR as visible light - observed and documented? The same can be said for Population III stars that formed later, after CMBR light appears in the BB cosmology timeline. From all that I read, there are no gas clouds or stars with zero metals in them, some have more, others have less and determing the metal content of remote gas clouds is not easy. What seems needed here, a z scale report documenting metal content from z = 0 (near Earth) out to say z = 20 or larger. At some point, z values 20 or larger will show only zero metal content in any gas I would think.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Helio, I don't think that finding heavy elements in distant galaxies could not be "tuned" into the BBT. With "inflation" occurring so fast and then "expansion" occurring at a different and variable rate, there seems to be plenty of wiggle room to simply change the time frame and "dimension" of the universe (which I put in quotes because it somehow is supposed to have a finite radius, but no edge, in "flat space"). That might lead to some other unanswered questions, but the BBT is already full of those, such as where did all the antimatter go and why aren't we seeing magnetic monopoles.

Regarding "

I'm unclear with how an infinity no. of light sources might produce a CMBR using inflation, which lasted for less than a nanosecond. Wouldn't all that light flood us by now given the slow rate of expansion seen today?

I don't see any reason to expect light to get to us with sources in space regions that are expanding faster than the speed of light away from us. With taking some of the liberties in assumption that we allow in the BBT, I don't see any reason why somebody could not construct a theory that produces something like the CMBR with a similar time-dependent tuning of the expansion rate within approximately the range of rates already "accepted" for the BBT.

Yes. that would still look something like the aftermath of a "Bang", but might not need to be extrapolated as far back into the infinitesimals as the BBT takes it.

I doubt that we will be able to measure isotope distributions out to "20 billion light years", at least during my lifetime, since that requires using electromagnetic radiation, and we are having trouble seeing much in the CMBR, specifically no alpha lines for hydrogen.

But, perhaps we will get some interesting measurements from gravity waves that upset the BBT story a bit more.

 

[rod]

Unclear Engineer in post #33 said, "I doubt that we will be able to measure isotope distributions out to "20 billion light years", at least during my lifetime, since that requires using electromagnetic radiation, and we are having trouble seeing much in the CMBR, specifically no alpha lines for hydrogen."

This looks important Is there sources for this statement about the CMBR?

 

[rod]

Concerning my post #34 and what Unclear Engineer said about *no alpha lines for hydrogen* documented in the CMBR light we see today. It is important. Hydrogen Absorption Lines in the Cosmic Microwave BackgroundSpectrum, https://www.researchgate.net/public...s_in_the_cosmic_microwave_background_spectrum, 04-Nov-2003. It seems you cannot state for certainty that H, He, or some Li existed when the CMBR formed as visible light. This looks important if the issue continues in cosmology.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

The energy of the universe is not "constantly increasing", this would violate the first law of thermodynamics which says that energy is conserved in any closed sytem.
As I understand it, the newly created positive energy of the vacuum is exactly balanced by the negative gravitational potential energy of galaxies moving farther away.

Bill, Good, it seems we agree on the universe's total energy not contantly increasing. But, there are plenty of "explanations" of the BBT that say that the amount of "dark energy" in the universe is expanding as the square of the linear expansion rate, and that is why the universe will always keep expanding, rather than collapse. I have some quibbles with the way those explanations deal with the other energy forms in the universe, too. So, I am not a believer in the quantifications that I have seen for energy balance.

But, there is another aspect of the "false vacuum" concept that seems to be inconsistent with the idea that the universe is expanding from "nothing" or from a highly dense form of "something". A "false vacuum" depends on "something" to have energy states that can change and release energy to other things.

Yes, if there is a "false vacuum" and something makes a small piece of it drop to a lower state, then that phase change can spread through the rest of that "something" at a high rate of speed. But, understanding how that could happen at more than the speed of light seems at odds with the GRT, but is a foundationo of the BBT inflation concept. And, it implies that there was something that was already "space/time" somewhere for this phase change to propagate through.

But, somehow, many theorists seem to have become complacent with their concepts that seem paradoxical to physical interpretations, and seem to "trust the math" instead of questioning the mathematical formulation.

 

[billslugg]

A small piece of the false vacuum cannot drop to a lower state as it is already at the lowest possible state. Zero point energy is the lowest possible quantum state.

GRT only applies to things moving through space, not the expansion of space itself.

The expansion of the Universe does not propagate it through anything, there is nothing outside of the universe for it to propagate through simply because there is no "outside" to the universe.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Bill, The whole idea of a "false" vacuum is that it is not at its lowest energy state. That is what makes it "false". There is energy there that is not perceived. So it is really the perception that is "false", which is revealed when the "thing" does liberate energy as it drops to a lower energy state. A false vacuum does not even theoretically need to be at its next-to-lowest energy state, so the misimpretion that it is in its lowest state could conceivably be wrong more than once, even after revealing one energy state change.

The rest of the post is rhetorical symantics. We really have no idea if there is or is not anything "outside" what we are currently calling "the universe" and putting a finite dimension on that.

But, the concept about the universe being a "false vacuum" implies that there is something unperceived there that we are falsely calling a vacuum. Whether that vacuum is expanding with space or "space" is expanding through it would be impossible to determine if we can't perceive it, anyway. No, I don't "trust the math" on many of these conceptual "explanations". They seem much more designed to argue that something might be true, or at least argue that it can't be conclusively proven to be untrue, than to prove that it is true.

 

[billslugg]

From Big Think dot com:
"The vacuum is defined as the zero-point energy of empty space: how much energy-per-volume is left over after all physical quanta are removed. This value could have been zero, but isn't: it has a positive, non-zero value. If we live in a false, rather than true, vacuum, the vacuum could decay, with catastrophic consequences for the Universe."

From Wiki article on Zero Point Energy:
" ...the discrepancy between theorized and observed vacuum energy in the universe is a source of major contention."

Apparently some believe Zero Point Energy is the lowest possible state and some believe it is not, labelling it a False Vacuum.

 

[rod]

"false vacuum", I believe this comes from inflation physics and something we do not see operating in nature today. Also, the energy of the vacuum of space is a real problem in GR, the cosmological constant.

 

[Helio]

How this falsifies BBT seems more difficult to test and falsify, I think. Where are the original pristine gas clouds created during BBN, well before the origin of the CMBR as visible light - observed and documented? The same can be said for Population III stars that formed later, after CMBR light appears in the BB cosmology timeline. From all that I read, there are no gas clouds or stars with zero metals in them, some have more, others have less and determing the metal content of remote gas clouds is not easy.

The BBT predicts the reason they aren’t observed is because they are currently beyond our telescopic powers. The birth of that pristine environment was at z = 1100. But the observations of Pop II favors the BBT.

What seems needed here, a z scale report documenting metal content from z = 0 (near Earth) out to say z = 20 or larger. At some point, z values 20 or larger will show only zero metal content in any gas I would think.

Yes, that would take us back to just before the first stars formed, according to BBT. I wonder what the photon flux rate is for those highly redshifted emissions and how large a scope is needed?

 

[Helio]

"false vacuum", I believe this comes from inflation physics and something we do not see operating in nature today. Also, the energy of the vacuum of space is a real problem in GR, the cosmological constant.

Yes. The 10^120 energy difference from the quantum math is no small problem.

I don’t see it, however, as a burden to GR since GR models the observable universe without addressing the tiny influences from the virtual ones.

 

[rod]

The BBT predicts the reason they aren’t observed is because they are currently beyond our telescopic powers. The birth of that pristine environment was at z = 1100. But the observations of Pop II favors the BBT.

Yes, that would take us back to just before the first stars formed, according to BBT. I wonder what the photon flux rate is for those highly redshifted emissions and how large a scope is needed?

"The BBT predicts the reason they aren’t observed is because they are currently beyond our telescopic powers. The birth of that pristine environment was at z = 1100. But the observations of Pop II favors the BBT."

Helio, this is a great answer I will wait patiently then for bigger and better telescopes to show me this in the model, that it was in nature too.

 

[Helio]

Helio, I don't think that finding heavy elements in distant galaxies could not be "tuned" into the BBT. With "inflation" occurring so fast and then "expansion" occurring at a different and variable rate, there seems to be plenty of wiggle room to simply change the time frame and "dimension" of the universe (which I put in quotes because it somehow is supposed to have a finite radius, but no edge, in "flat space"). That might lead to some other unanswered questions, but the BBT is already full of those, such as where did all the antimatter go and why aren't we seeing magnetic monopoles.

I doubt it's that flexible since the theory must present a confluence of all that is observed. But your point isn't that far off considering the bobbing and weaving over the last 8 decades.

I ran across a statement quoted by Peeble (CC book) from Allan Sandage (1968):
"It is remarkable that the theory gives all properties of the Friedmann models when only two numbers are known -- numbers which can be found from observations at the telescope. These are (1) the present value of... Ho..., and (2) the deceleration parameter, q0, related to the change of the expansion rate with time."

"deceleration"

Of course, it was the telescope that eventually gave us acceleration of the universe. So your point, again, isn't off the mark that much, IMO. Nevertheless, the simple model from day one does allow an incredible amount of different elements of objective evidence to form a confluence. But I think, nevertheless, making them all fit together restricts the model's flexibility.

The Inflation model, for instance, seems to have forced an Omega value close to 1, which, at the time, was indeterminate.

I don't see any reason to expect light to get to us with sources in space regions that are expanding faster than the speed of light away from us. With taking some of the liberties in assumption that we allow in the BBT, I don't see any reason why somebody could not construct a theory that produces something like the CMBR with a similar time-dependent tuning of the expansion rate within approximately the range of rates already "accepted" for the BBT.

Perhaps, but so many paramaters are dependent variables to form that confluence.

What would explain the fact that the more distant galaxies are receeding from us at faster and faster speed with distance? Such a model suggests the origins of the universe were here or nearby, I assume.

I doubt that we will be able to measure isotope distributions out to "20 billion light years", at least during my lifetime, since that requires using electromagnetic radiation, and we are having trouble seeing much in the CMBR, specifically no alpha lines for hydrogen.

The anisotropy, observed in the CMBR, seems to have allowed a lot of scattering (smearing) of all lines. It took some amount of time for Recombination to start and end.

Also, there is the point about the additional time to allow H2 to form, which is the "transparent hydrogen", which was a recent topic here. I've yet to stumble across other sources addressing this, not that I looked hard enough.

But, perhaps we will get some interesting measurements from gravity waves that upset the BBT story a bit more.

Let's hope so! I think the Nobel folks have yet to go broke.