How Science Works
Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete
Looking For Evidence That the Current Consensus May be Wrong or Incomplete
The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.
James Webb Space Telescope Images Challenge Theories of How Universe Evolved | College of Natural Sciences
Science is reasonable uncertainty
Religion is unreasonable certainty.
Religion is unreasonable certainty.
Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang.
These are more massive that the theory predicts.
These are more massive that the theory predicts.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/I. Labbe
Religion, by contrast, sells certainty and theists value certainty over truth, more so at the fundamentalist extreme, where intellectual dishonesty and sleights of hand to gain followers are rewarded and admired (as the many extremely wealthy televangelists in the USA, to whom lying is second nature, attest). Intellectually bankrupt creationists prefer a comforting lie to an uncomfortable truth. Scientists, on the other hand, can make their name and gain kudos and scientific respect by successfully challenging the consensus view with convincing evidence and exposed frauds are cast into academic oblivion.
To see this in action, try to get a creationist to accept that a glaring contradiction in the Bible means that one or other verse must be wrong because both mutually exclusive contradictory statements can't both be right.
For example, the contradictory accounts of what Judas did with the 30 pieces of silver, how he died, who bought the 'field of blood' and why was it so-called?
Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.Clearly, those two accounts can't both be right, so at least one of them must be wrong, but try to get a creationist to admit that is like trying to wring blood from a stone. The most likely fallback response is that their faith tells them they must both be right and the contradictions are not really contradictions, just different ways of saying the same thing. Certainty is preferred to truth and facts must not be allowed to threaten that certainty, which must be defended at all costs, even at the cost of intellectual integrity.
And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day.
Matthew 27:3-8
Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem; insomuch as that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood.
Acts 1: 18-19
Contrast that to the piece of scientific news that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing images of massive young galaxies that throw considerable doubt on the standard model of cosmology.
These galaxies are seen by JWST between 500 and 700 million years after the Big Bang. This comes about because the further a telescope looks into space the younger are the objects it sees because of the time it takes the light to travel from them to the JWST. This also means that the objects it sees were close together than they are now because the Universe has been expanding in the intervening hundreds of millions of years.
Taken to its logical conclusion that means the further we look into space the closer what we see gets to us because, at the moment of the Big Bang, all space occupied a single point and that point is inside the space we now occupy, only a long time ago. Bear in mind that, since the Big Bang, space itself has been expanding so every point in the Universe was once inside the singularity that inflated in the Big Bang (if a singularity can be said to have an inside).
In theory, though not in practice, if a telescope could see far enough, it would see the Big Bang. Except that for the first 380 million years the Universe was opaque because it had not cooled enough to allow stable (electrically neutral) atoms to form, so the Universe only consisted of high-energy electromagnetic radiation through which photons (light) could not pass. When atoms formed the Universe became transparent and light from celestial bodies could begin its journey through space.
The problem for the standard model of the cosmos is that these galaxies the JWST is seeing are so massive. There should not have been enough time for such massive objects to accumulate that amount of mass so soon after the Big Bang.
So, do scientists deny this and wave it aside as a test of faith, claiming this isn't a contradiction?
Nope! They make a name for themselves by publishing it in an open access paper in Nature Astronomy and their research establishment, in this case, the College of Natural Science in The University of Texas at Austin, issues a press release announcing it to the world, especially to other cosmologists.
Here is how the University of Texas at Austin press release explains it:
Technical detail is given in Professor Boylan-Kolchin's open access paper in Nature Astronomy:The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appears to be finding multiple galaxies that grew too massive too soon after the Big Bang, if the standard model of cosmology is to be believed.If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory. We’ll require something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology. One of the most extreme possibilities is that the universe was expanding faster shortly after the Big Bang than we predict, which might require new forces and particles.
We typically see a maximum of 10% of gas converted into stars. So while 100% conversion of gas into stars is technically right at the edge of what is theoretically possible, it’s really the case that this would require something to be very different from what we expect.
Professor Michael Boylan-Kolchin, author.
Associate professor of astronomy
Department of Astronomy
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
In a study published in Nature Astronomy, Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an associate professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, finds that six of the earliest and most massive galaxy candidates observed by JWST so far stand to contradict the prevailing thinking in cosmology. That’s because other researchers estimate that each galaxy is seen from between 500 and 700 million years after the Big Bang, yet measures more than 10 billion times as massive as our sun. One of the galaxies even appears to be more massive than the Milky Way, despite that our own galaxy had billions of more years to form and grow.
For galaxies to form so fast at such a size, they also would need to be converting nearly 100% of their available gas into stars.
BASED ON THE STANDARD MODEL OF COSMOLOGY, ASTRONOMERS PREDICT WHAT FRACTION OF THE ATOMS IN THE UNIVERSE (VERTICAL AXIS) ARE CONTAINED IN GALAXIES WITH A CERTAIN MASS OF STARS OR HIGHER (HORIZONTAL AXIS). IN THIS STUDY, THREE GALAXY CANDIDATES (INDICATED BY A SINGLE POINT SPREAD) APPEAR TO BE USING UP A MUCH LARGER FRACTION OF AVAILABLE ATOMS FOR STARS THAN EXPECTED. INSTEAD OF ABOUT 10% AS IS USUAL (BLUE ARC), THE DATA SUGGEST THESE GALAXY CANDIDATES HAVE CONVERTED 100% OF AVAILABLE ATOMS INTO STARS.
Credit: Mike Boylan-Kolchin.
For all of the breathless excitement it evokes, JWST has presented astronomers with an unsettling dilemma. If the masses and time since the Big Bang are confirmed for these galaxies, fundamental changes to the reigning model of cosmology—what’s called the dark energy + cold dark matter (ΛCDM) paradigm, which has guided cosmology since the late 1990s —could be needed. If there are other, faster ways to form galaxies than ΛCDM allows, or if more matter actually was available for forming stars and galaxies in the early universe than was previously understood, astronomers would need to shift their prevailing thinking.
The six galaxies’ times and masses are initial estimates and will need follow-up confirmation with spectroscopy — a method that splits the light into a spectrum and analyzes the brightness of different colors. Such analysis might suggest that central supermassive black holes, which could heat up the surrounding gas, may be making the galaxies brighter so that they look more massive than they really are. Or perhaps the galaxies are actually seen at a time much later than originally estimated due to dust that causes the color of the light from the galaxy to shift redder, giving the illusion of being more lightyears away and, thus, further back in time.
The galaxy data came from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), a multi-institution JWST initiative led by UT Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein.
Another ongoing collaborative JWST project, COSMOS-Web, co-led by UT Austin’s Caitlin Casey, may be involved with spectroscopy and shedding more light on the findings to help resolve the dilemma. COSMOS-Web is covering an area roughly 50 times larger than CEERS and is expected to discover thousands of galaxies.It will be ideal for discovering the rarest, most massive galaxies at early times, which will tell us how the biggest galaxies and black holes in the early universe arose so quickly.
Professor Boylan-Kolchin.
The initial discovery and estimates of the six galaxy candidates’ masses and redshifts were published in Nature in February by a team led by Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.
AbstractThese sort of papers are commonplace in the scientific literature, no less so in the field of biology than in theoretical physics, as biologists continually reassess the aetiology of diseases or the precise taxonomy of a species or genus.
Early data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed a bevy of high-redshift galaxy candidates with unexpectedly high stellar masses. An immediate concern is the consistency of these candidates with galaxy formation in the standard ΛCDM cosmological model, wherein the stellar mass (M⋆) of a galaxy is limited by the available baryonic reservoir of its host dark matter halo. The mass function of dark matter haloes therefore imposes an absolute upper limit on the number density n (>M⋆, z) and stellar mass density ρ⋆ (>M⋆, z) of galaxies more massive than M⋆ at any epoch z. Here I show that the most massive galaxy candidates in JWST observations at z ≈ 7–10 lie at the very edge of these limits, indicating an important unresolved issue with the properties of galaxies derived from the observations, how galaxies form at early times in ΛCDM or within this standard cosmology itself.
Boylan-Kolchin, M.
Stress testing ΛCDM with high-redshift galaxy candidates.
Nat Astron (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01937-7
Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Indeed a very recent paper announced that a study of skate embryology had revealed a different mechanism for evolution based not on DNA sequence but on the three-dimensional folding of DNA to pack it into a cell nucleus and how this affects the gene regulation.
These give the lie to creationist claims that the lack of mainstream biology papers challenging the neo-Darwinian consensus is due to biologists being forbidden from publishing anything that challenges the consensus. Those sorts of claims appeal to those who suffer from retained teleological thinking - the thinking defect that causes both creationism and conspiracism, i.e. almost all adult creationists.
But religion is not the only support for creationism. The fact that the associational top-down structure of perception actually pervades every level of cerebral structure inclines us all to essentialism and Platonism. No wonder, then, that it is so hard for people to realize that a species is merely a temporally variable breeding population of points in the space of genetically determined characteristics.
ReplyDeleteThere is no scientific basis for creationism. Anything that predicats an unproven supernatural entity is not science. Whether you call it religion or not is mere semntics
DeleteThe point was that it is the nature of human thought that makes it difficult to shake creationism. The bias towards essentialism needs as much wariness as all the other biases and false heuristics noted by tversky and kahneman. No one is immune.
ReplyDelete