Did the Big Bang actually not happen? New Webb telescope images.

The latest James Webb Space Telescope deep sky images are panicing many cosmologists and astrophysicists because the images show a vast and unexpected and unpredicted number of early galaxies. This is wrong according to Big Bang theory. The problem of the new images is even causing doubts about the Big Bang.

https://mindmatters.ai/2022/08/james-web...ppen-wait/

Physicist Eric J. Lerner comes to the point:

To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory. In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”

Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The papers don’t actually say. The truth that these papers don’t report is that the hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”

Physicist Robert Sheldon:

I don’t have endurance to run down every rabbit trail cosmologists propose. Instead, I propose that the first stars were not made of Hydrogen, they were made of ice. The Big Bang synthesized abundant C and O which combined with H to form H20, CO2, CH4 etc. These gases freeze relatively early in the universe time frame, so clumping was not gravitational but physico-chemical, the same way snowflakes form. So we didn’t have to wait 500 million years for snowflakes to clump, it happen very quickly once the universe cooled below the freezing point. Hence James Webb sees lots of red-shifted galaxies from the early universe.

That’s one possible solution. We know it’s science when it’s always posing challenges.

Boy, there is a comeuppance potentially on the horizon for all the smug physicists who have been opining on all kinds of things beyond their actual, provable ground.  How do you debate someone from a spiritual tradition when your go-to "spontaneous big bang", multiverse, string theory baseline is no more?

[Ninshub]

Here's the original, longer piece published August 11 by Lerner himself.

According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur.

Just as there must be no galaxies older than the Big Bang, if the Big Bang hypothesis were valid, so theorists expected that as the JWST looked out further in space and back in time, there would be fewer and fewer galaxies and eventually none—a Dark Age in the cosmos. But a paper to be published in Nature demonstrates that galaxies as massive as the Milky Way are common even a few hundred million years after the hypothesized Bang. The authors state that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time, so again-- no Big Bang.

 
I wonder if this allows for an estimation for what sort of time scale is involved then for the "universe-formation" period.

Readers may well be wondering at this point why they have not read of this collapse of the Big Bang hypothesis in major media outlets by now and why the authors of so many recent papers have not pointed to this collapse themselves. The answer lies in what I term the “Emperor’s New Clothes Effect”—if anyone questions the Big Bang, they are labeled stupid and unfit for their jobs. Unfortunately, funding for cosmology comes from a very few government sources controlled by a handful of committees that are dominated by Big Bang theorists. These theorists have spent their lives building the Big Bang theory. Those who openly question the theory simply don’t get funded.

___

It has now become almost impossible to publish papers critical of the Big Bang in any astronomical journals.

Here's the original, longer piece published August 11 by Lerner himself.

 
I wonder if this allows for an estimation for what sort of time scale is involved then for the "universe-formation" period.

I think so. The fact is, the sky is not infrared-bright with a solid expanse of ancient galaxies with red shifts more than 10, along any line-of-sight. That would theoretically be the case if there literally were no Big Bang and the galaxy-populated Universe extended indefinitely in distance and into the past. It seems to me that this new JWST data just means that the Big Bang date is somewhat greater or radically greater than 14 billion years ago. Not that it didn't happen at all. It must have, or the solid bright sky, which doesn't exist. And some other explanation would have to found for the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR).

It would seem that the galaxy population density must still drop off precipitously at some high red-shift number, at some number of billions of years before the present, at which time the real Big Bang did occur. 

Of course, this reasoning might be wrong because the solid bright sky phenomenon is being inhibited by some other factor at high red-shift numbers and greater distances beyond even JWST's capabilities. Like clouds of dark matter obstructing and absorbing the long infrared light from these extemely distant galaxies beyond red shift 10 or so. But then these hypothesized vast clouds of dark matter would re-radiate the energy at even longer wavelengths, which might still be detected. 

But then there are still other factors to figure in, like the bandwidth limitations of the JWST. It can't see very long wavelength IR (extremely great redshifts), and light speed itself would impose a limit on the recessional velocity and wavelenth of the resulting redshift of the galaxy images. 

And of course there always is the heretical idea (completely taboo in astroscientific circles) that the redshift and apparent increasing distance is not due to recession velocity Doppler shift and actual increasing distance, but some other phenomenon. There is so much data accumulated that contradicts such heresy, starting with the seemingly solidly established CMBR, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

So might go all the theorizing by the cosmologists. They certainly are under pressure now. It's both amusing and sad to observe the silence from the astrophysical community in the face of this crisis of paradigms, due to a sort of peer pressure corruption of science as it should be conducted.

[Ninshub]

A lot of this is over head my head admittedly.

That being said, does this article make any potential sense in relation what's discussed in this thread?

Ethan Siegel at BigThink.com, Oct. 13, 2021

Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

We used to think the Big Bang meant the universe began from a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we're not so sure.

This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity — and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since — is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

Second, observations have well established the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation. Before the hot Big Bang, the early universe underwent a phase of exponential growth, where any preexisting components to the universe were literally “inflated away.” When inflation ended, the universe reheated to a high, but not arbitrarily high, temperature, giving us the hot, dense, and expanding universe that grew into what we inhabit today.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.

Or is this article's conclusions potentially faulty because it assumes inflation (the universe expanding)?

A lot of this is over head my head admittedly.

That being said, does this article make any potential sense in relation what's discussed in this thread?

Ethan Siegel at BigThink.com, Oct. 13, 2021

Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

We used to think the Big Bang meant the universe began from a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we're not so sure.

...we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.

Or is this article's conclusions potentially faulty because it assumes inflation (the universe expanding)?

I think the article's conclusions are faulty because it assumes that prior to the Big Bang there absolutely had to have been an indefinitely long span of existence of a previous physical reality, perhaps an eternal inflation. This shows the inherent materialist reductionist bias of scientism against even considering teleology in such questions. There are a lot of fundamental problems in claiming that there never was a beginning. The existence of the Big Bang clearly points to there having been a supreme creative act of some sort of extreme intelligence and power, but this is dogmatically rejected since it is taboo to the present materialist fundamentalism. 

A very large amount of evidence and data has accumulated in favor of there in truth being a beginning to our physical reality, in the Big Bang, a creative origination by a supreme Intelligence. One of the biggest areas is the extremely evident presence in our physical reality of a monumental number of built-in signs of intelligence and design, starting with the fine tuning of the laws of physics for the existence of life as we know it, and consequently ourselves. 

Materialist attempts to get around this by invoking an eternal multiverse inherently ignore and avoid, but don't answer, the point that eternal inflation and a multiverse only reinvoke fine tuning to an even greater degree, since such systems have to be even more complicated, and still have to be very cleverly contrived to come up with our actual finely tuned Universe. To say nothing of the absurdities that are invoked by notions of an infinitude of different realities.

I think the article's conclusions are faulty because it assumes that prior to the Big Bang there absolutely had to have been an indefinitely long span of existence of a previous physical reality, perhaps an eternal inflation.

I thought that the traditional view was that there was a singularity at the big bang and before then time and space did not exist - i.e. there was no 'before'.

Anyway, one of the big themes at Skeptiko - at least years ago - was that a lot of science is wrong. This is something I believe in strongly. Science is not really policed, and university administrators hate bad publicity. The idea that referees can really assess complex papers is also silly - think of a paper that reports results from a computer program/simulation - how do you assess its accuracy other than by writing a similar program? Science has extrapolated from what it really knows in a most reckless way - while slamming all non-materialist data and theories  - and now at last it might be getting its comeuppance.

Remember that this may be a symptom of a much larger confusion. Halton Arp produced evidence that some of the most distant objects in the sky (based on their redshifts) are actually much closer - so he was sidelined.  There is also all the evidence that at galactic distances the inverse square law of gravity (NG or GR) goes badly wrong. Traditionally this has been 'explained' in terms of 'dark matter' that has never been observed.

David

I thought that the traditional view was that there was a singularity at the big bang and before then time and space did not exist - i.e. there was no 'before'.

Anyway, one of the big themes at Skeptiko - at least years ago - was that a lot of science is wrong. This is something I believe in strongly. Science is not really policed, and university administrators hate bad publicity. The idea that referees can really assess complex papers is also silly - think of a paper that reports results from a computer program/simulation - how do you assess its accuracy other than by writing a similar program? Science has extrapolated from what it really knows in a most reckless way - while slamming all non-materialist data and theories  - and now at last it might be getting its comeuppance.

Remember that this may be a symptom of a much larger confusion. Halton Arp produced evidence that some of the most distant objects in the sky (based on their redshifts) are actually much closer - so he was sidelined.  There is also all the evidence that at galactic distances the inverse square law of gravity (NG or GR) goes badly wrong. Traditionally this has been 'explained' in terms of 'dark matter' that has never been observed.

David

As far as I can tell, in recent years the mainstream consensus has been in favor of an eternal cyclical Universe, or eternal inflation or some other mechanism (to "scientifically" explain the Big Bang), combined with an infinite Multiverse (to try to explain Fine Tuning). This position has been driven by the strong scientistic materialist aversion from the obvious Deistic or Theistic Creator implications of the Big Bang. These clear implications have made the leading figures of scientistic fundamentalism extremely uncomfortable and have driven a resultant backlash to contain the attack on the basic paradigm fanatically maintained for many years. 

These implications of the Big Bang and Fine Tuning have figured into the ongoing "culture war" between scientistic materialist fundamentalism and Deism/Theism and have been heretically promoted by some figures, in the scientific ID movement by Dr. Stephen Meyer for example, and in Christianity by Dr. Hugh Ross for example, where it is pointed out that the obvious answer to the conundrum "why is there a supremely well organized something, not absolutely nothing" is a supreme intelligent creative event from outside of space-time. To mainstream fundamentalist materialist scientism this position is extreme and unacceptable heresy and has to be suppressed by any means possible, whether or not plausible from the physics and mathermatics standpoint.

As far as I can tell, in recent years the mainstream consensus has been in favor of an eternal cyclical Universe, or eternal inflation or some other mechanism (to "scientifically" explain the Big Bang), combined with an infinite Multiverse (to try to explain Fine Tuning). This position has been driven by the strong scientistic materialist aversion from the obvious Deistic or Theistic Creator implications of the Big Bang. These clear implications have made the leading figures of scientistic fundamentalism extremely uncomfortable and have driven a resultant backlash to contain the attack on the basic paradigm fanatically maintained for many years. 

These implications of the Big Bang and Fine Tuning have figured into the ongoing "culture war" between scientistic materialist fundamentalism and Deism/Theism and have been heretically promoted by some figures, in the scientific ID movement by Dr. Stephen Meyer for example, and in Christianity by Dr. Hugh Ross for example, where it is pointed out that the obvious answer to the conundrum "why is there a supremely well organized something, not absolutely nothing" is a supreme intelligent creative event from outside of space-time. To mainstream fundamentalist materialist scientism this position is extreme and unacceptable heresy and has to be suppressed by any means possible, whether or not plausible from the physics and mathermatics standpoint.

I thought that eternal inflation still implied a Big Bang - just that it wouldn't be contained and turn into a Big Crunch or a bounce.

I assume that the JWST could not see back to before the last bounce, so if it can see a lot of galaxies which appear old, that rules those options out together with the Big Bang. Sabine Hossenfelder also pointed out wryly that theorists will always rush in to tweak their theories to bypass any new evidence that puts them in doubt.

I know that Stephen Meyer wrote a book extending the concept of ID to cover the whole universe back to the Big Bang.

I suppose this idea didn't fire me up - partly because I know far less about that sort of physics than I know about molecular biology (because it is easier!), but also because it was (and is) my strong view that a lot/most/all of cosmology is built on extrapolating the laws of physics too far ahead of actual experimental evidence. This problem was sort of discussed in a video discussion with Sabine Hossenfelder that I came across. Basically, every layer of physics depends on the layers below, and if you have to fix something near the bottom of the heap, you have to discard a lot of papers and scientific reputations - so people are desperate to avoid that.

David

So Lerner only has a BA in physics?

That makes me wary...