[The Webb telescope data reveal that some very large galaxies
formed really fast. This is no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin
to parents and their children appearing in a story when the
grandparents are still children themselves.]
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THE STORY OF OUR UNIVERSE MAY BE STARTING TO UNRAVEL  
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Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser
September 2, 2023
New York Times
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_ The Webb telescope data reveal that some very large galaxies formed
really fast. This is no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to
parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents
are still children themselves. _

Galaxy, by MrDevlar (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

 

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from
outer space its stunning images
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planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to
admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on
what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may
need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the
universe.

Launched at the end of 2021 as a joint project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the Webb, a tool with
unmatched powers of observation, is on an exciting mission to look
back in time, in effect, at the first stars and galaxies. But one of
the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable
sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies
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earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called
standard model of cosmology.

According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially
all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of
events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled
together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to
become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled
together the stars into galaxies.

The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed
really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard
model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents
and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are
still children themselves.

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It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other
recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic
understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly
inconsistent.

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a
foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble
constant — yet scientists have not been able to
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on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves
measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is
providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the
modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue
to yield different answers.

At first, scientists expected this discrepancy to resolve as the data
got better. But the problem has stubbornly persisted even as the data
have gotten far more precise. And now new data
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the Webb have exacerbated the problem. This trend suggests a flaw in
the model, not in the data.

Two serious issues with the standard model of cosmology would be
concerning enough. But the model has already been patched up numerous
times over the past half century to better conform with the best
available data — alterations that may well be necessary and correct,
but which, in light of the problems we are now confronting, could
strike a skeptic as a bit too convenient.

Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that
something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe
we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might
also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic
features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have
implications far beyond the world of science.

A potent mix of hard-won data and rarefied abstract mathematical
physics, the standard model of cosmology is rightfully understood as a
triumph of human ingenuity. It has its origins in Edwin Hubble’s
discovery [[link removed]] in
the 1920s that the universe was expanding — the first piece of
evidence for the Big Bang. Then, in 1964, radio astronomers discovered
the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background, the “fossil” radiation
reaching us from shortly after the universe began expanding. That
finding told us that the early universe was a hot, dense soup of
subatomic particles that has been continually cooling and becoming
less dense ever since.

Over the past 60 years, cosmology has become ever more precise in its
ability to account for the best available data about the universe. But
along the way, to gain such a high degree of precision,
astrophysicists have had to postulate the existence of components of
the universe for which we have no direct evidence. The standard model
today holds that “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up
people and planets and everything else we can see —
constitutes only about 4 percent
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the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark
energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).

Cosmic inflation
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an example of yet another exotic adjustment made to the standard
model. Devised in 1981 to resolve paradoxes arising from an older
version of the Big Bang, the theory holds that the early universe
expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big
Bang. This theory solves certain problems but creates others. Notably,
according to most versions of the theory, rather than there being one
universe, ours is just one universe in a multiverse — an infinite
number of universes, the others of which may be forever unobservable
to us not just in practice but also in principle.

There is nothing inherently fishy about these features of the standard
model. Scientists often discover good indirect evidence for things
that we cannot see, such as the hyperdense singularities
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a black hole. But in the wake of the Webb’s confounding data about
galaxy formation, and the worsening problem
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the Hubble constant, you can’t be blamed for starting to wonder if
the model is out of joint.

A familiar narrative about how science works is often trotted out at
this point to assuage anxieties. It goes like this: Researchers think
they have a successful theory, but new data show it is flawed.
Courageously rolling up their sleeves, the scientists go back to their
blackboards and come up with new ideas that allow them to improve
their theory by better matching the evidence.

It’s a story of both humility and triumph, and we scientists love to
tell it. And it may be what happens in this case, too. Perhaps the
solution to the problems the Webb is forcing us to confront will
require only that cosmologists come up with a new “dark” something
or other that will allow our picture of the universe to continue to
match the best cosmological data.

There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we
need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even
require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the
universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in
a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe
is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it
from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run
controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing,
cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very
environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature
of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers
doing the observations.

These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science
(though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of
consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the
boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually
haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools
we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change
over time.

But that’s precisely the sort of assumption we might have to start
questioning in order to figure out what’s wrong with the standard
model. One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the
philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is that the laws of physics 
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change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness.
An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John
Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences
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future and even the past history of the universe. (Dr. Wheeler,
working to understand the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, conceived of
a “participatory universe
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in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of
creation.)

It is not obvious, to say the least, how such revolutionary
reconsiderations of our science might help us better understand the
cosmological data that is flummoxing us. (Part of the difficulty is
that the data themselves are shaped by the theoretical assumptions of
those who collect them.) It would necessarily be a leap of faith to
step back and rethink such fundamentals about our science.

But a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has
certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like
Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and
Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up
having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our
special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were
fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in
common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution
of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable
reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.

The philosopher Robert Crease has written
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philosophy is what’s required when doing more science may not answer
a scientific question. It’s not clear yet if that’s what’s
needed to overcome the crisis in cosmology. But if more tweaks and
adjustments don’t do the trick, we may need not just a new story of
the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it.

_Dr. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Dr.
Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College._

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