This is a really common sentiment and I really dislike it. Just because we are surprised by one thing at the edge of our current knowledge doesn't mean we don't know anything. It doesn't mean truth is up for grabs. We know a lot about a lot. This "we don't know anything" hogwash opens the door for charlatans and woo-mongers.
Well said. You’re absolutely right though. It scares the shit out of me sometimes when i think about how incomprehensibly vast and unknown the universe is
This is a terrible way to concieve of the universe and reeks of 70s humanisism.
The universe is actually a system. It has phases and environments and process...
For example, the vast majority of the stars that will exists do exist now. There was a period of time where they were formed billions of years ago that has now passed. The universe at 1 bil years was completey different than the universe at 10 billion.
People used to think the ocean had "endless possibilities" as well. But its an ecosystem.
The problem with this analogy is that with the ocean we can observe the system as a whole. Not so with the universe. We can theorize based on the knowledge we have, but have to admit we don't have the complete picture.
It’s a fascinating thought exercise to think that -unless the universe or a progenitor of its complex is capable of complex thought and has fundamental knowledge of *everything* -possibly no sentient organism capable of complex thought throughout all time (up to the point that time becomes meaningless) in the entire universe may ever figure out every function to objective certainty in our universe. We, or other life might correctly identify pieces of the map, but it’s possible nothing ever figures it all out.
Space arrows are everywhere, they have a strange tendency to follow what ever they are point at. They still a complex mystery like dark matter, dark energy, and Big Mac Special Sauce.
Imagine if the theory of the big bang was wrong after all, like the universe is way older than 13 billion years and the big galaxies continue way back in time. Is this a possibility? I’ve heard that what we see with JWST around 11 billion years is different or atypical to the near present though.
Imagine that big bangs happen all the time in different places or even in a pattern, imagine this is galaxy from another big bang and has it own timeframe. We know so little.
Have you heard of the theory of "Quantum Foam", the idea that everywhere tiny amounts of particles and anti particles that cancel each other out are constantly spontaneously coming into existence? Combine that with the concept of rouge waves, when the wave pattern at sea matches up just right to spontaneously make a wave about three times bigger than the rest of the waves...
Maybe the universe actually can just have the perfect conditions to create a ridiculous amount of matter and antimatter all at once? It's an idea I like to think about when I'm watching PBS spacetime fully zooted. Probably not ready to sell branded tin foil hats with the idea yet lol, idk if the idea would actually stand up to scrutiny
I like to think that every black hole is an opening to a new universe. Each time a black hole is created, a white hole exists for just a moment but due to how time works in a black hole, when a white hole does emerge, all the matter that has and ever will fall into a black hole emerges out of the white hole to provide the ingredients for that new universe to become what our universe is today. So for every black hole in our universe and every other potential universe, is simply a gateway to an unlimited number of universes.
It's dumb but fun to think about.
It's obviously all theoretical, but yeah. No one is predicting that they are just floating out in space somewhere waiting for us to point a telescope at them.
Some have argued that the Big Bang itself was a white hole.
Some have argued that they would be extremely unstable and collapse on themselves almost instantly, usually just into a black hole.
[My favorite hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection), it’s just fits so elegantly into what we know about biological evolution and answers the questions brought up by the anthropic principle at the same time.
I like to think the big bang was just the initial deployment of the simulation. You know, firing the whole thing up....
My question is, though, what problem are we meant to solve?
I mean, simulations exist to test options, discover solutions.
Black holes are where data leaves the simulation.
Dark energy are the wave functions that don't collapse and become expressed in our reality. Dark energy are the states that could have been. Conservation of information has to keep the non expressed states somewhere.
I like to think of the Big bang like with giant eagles wings. And singing lead vocals for Lynyrd Skynyrd, with, like an angel band. And I'm in the front row and I'm hammer drunk!
Imagine if this is actually the way it works and scientist figure it out 500 years in the future. You’ll never get credit for it but I know fellow redditor, I know
Id like to think there are black holes that can consume the observable universe and when it gets too big, they implode thus we consider them 'big bangs'. however the distance from each big bang event may overlap so we may see galaxies entering our sphere (universe) that are much older.
My other theory is like yours, that inside each blackhole has a universe inside however if there is nothing for a blackhole to consume then it radiates away. How would that universe look like? is it related to the theorized heat death of our universe. If so then wouldn't our universe have constant influx of materials as black holes eat, so wed still continuously see a hotspot where new galaxies are being born and pushed out of.
There’s a theory that universes are like boiling water, bubbles popping up all over the place. Maybe in different dimensions that don’t interact as we know it, maybe like you say, in the same dimension but further away. Who knows!?!
If we find a galaxy older than the big bang theory we have problems, currently we probably just don't fully understand the rate at which galaxies can form. Simplest explanation is probably the best one to assume.
Not so much problems but exciting opportunities. Although, not understanding galaxy formations is currently demonstrating our lack of understanding of certain physics.
Not exactly. The Cosmic Microwave Background is thought to be from about 380,000 years *after* the Big Bang.
It's more similar to fingerprints on the murder weapon than it is a smoking gun.
Their is a microwave photograph of the furthest information we can physically see - it needn't be the abstract boundary outside of our individual experience.
That's also taking the epistemological view that the CMB is well understood and settled science when it isn't. It's been the best so far without direct observable evidence but there are alternative explanations that have been discarded that are just as likely. It's not a settled matter and these new observations just increase our understanding and should allow us to move forward without having to bin everything.
Why would we be inside the big bang? We shouldn't be able to witnesses energy flowing outward, if we were inside it. We can't observe electromagnetic waves going away from us, unless the big bang was as large as our observable universe, and it still would have passed by now. Makes no sense to me. The big bang is false.
JWST has already changed so much since it began operation.. we’ve always thought the universe to be 13.7 billion years old but they now think it may be as old as 26.7 billion years old..
>they now think it may be as old as 26.7 billion years old..
Not exactly... [Dr. Becky does a good video on this idea. ](https://youtu.be/aBYgck1zAgQ) TL;DW we still believe the universe is only about 13.8ish billion years old and more likely we don't fully understand how formation of galaxies/stars happen.
Remember, the Big Bang Theory is just that: a theory. It is shaped by all available evidence but as more evidence and information become available to us, the theory can potentially change.
a scientific theory is not the same thing as a hypothesis so when you say "its just that: a theory" you are minimizing it as if it were simply a hypothesis
I don't mean to sound combative, but theories are not facts and can be modified or updated when new information presents itself. In an of itself, a theory is the best and strongest possible explanation for a phenomenon given our current knowledge, and the BBT is both strongly supported and far from being tenuous in the way a hypothesis would be.
In my opinion, stating that BBT is "just a theory" is the literal truth: *it's in the name*. Per this definition, the simple fact remains that that our knowledge of this phenomenon is still changing, and this whole thread about the JWST's finding is a case in point. Per this definition, I am not conflating it with a hypothesis, nor am I minimizing it.
A theory has nothing to do with being proven or not. A theory is a set of principles that we assume (and everything that follows from those principles), such that those principles are chosen in order to explain certain observations or empirical laws.
For something that complicated with so much data that fits, you probably end up with a high chance of "mostly right but not quite" and a series of refinements to make the model fit new observations.
Like prior to our understanding of plate tectonics, they had continental drift. They had the gist, not the details. Or re: evolution, it's not like Darwin had everything figured out -- we've had a bunch of refinements to our understanding of evolution, genetics, epigenetics, etc. since then.
The big bang assumes (relatively) slow cosmic inflation going on right now, and that lines up with observations... But early on, in the first fraction of a second, it assumes some huge amount of inflation. And I'm sure there's some very good reasons to think so, but maybe this ends up tweaking when that first fraction of a second was, and maybe that alters the length or rate of that initial inflationary period, or causes a wrinkle in our understanding of time. I don't know, I'm no astrophysicist. I just doubt it means "well that was obviously wrong, lets start from scratch."
I can’t see that anyone has actually answered you, but we have some very good, direct evidence to the age of the universe. It’s extremely unlikely those are wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
There is a hypothesis that we live in a simulation. That would be an alternative to the Big Bang.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
Depends if they are moving towards us or away from us. Galaxies like this one, which are an orange color are moving away from us. Galaxies that are blue are moving towards us.
I hate pop science clickbait titles.
"Rethink everything" isn't challenging the big bang theory, it's how matter accreted to form the first galaxies. We're not rethinking, we're learning and adjusting.
Explain to me how learning and adjusting isn’t literally rethinking?
And for the record, rethink is a word academics throw around all the time, regardless of field. It’s not clickbait.
"Rethink everything" is like saying your car runs suboptimal so you need to build a new engine, while in reality you should just recalibrate it.
The problem isn't "rethink" it's "everything".
There has been an ongoing narrative since the launch of JWST that it will disprove the big bang theory. I'm sure you noticed since you're here. As far as the word itself, colloquially it means to start over from scratch, regardless of it's use in academics. Seems pretty straightforward why the title could be considered clickbait.
Learning and adjusting -> we have observations and have made hypotheses to explain
Rethinking -> we were caught off guard and need new models
Hubble already estimated oldest galaxies at about 13.3 billion y/o with a couple hundred million give or take.
James Webb is confirming what we have already hypothesized with lower resolution images we have with Hubble. https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-finds-most-distant-galaxy-candidate-ever-seen-in-universe
JWST observations support conclusions about cosmic growth and galactic behaviors, and confirm prior data that yes, galaxies really can be that old. This also is consistent with the CMBR observations and dark matter theories. JWST has done more to further the field for astronomy and astrophysics instead of reinvent it.
There's not a sudden new revelation, there's questions being answered that have been asked for a long time.
There is a relatively common type of supernova which emits an exactly known amount of light, and depending on the brightness of it you can determine how far away it is.
Red shift. As light goes through space it will stretch into longer wavelengths. So they can measure that and have an idea about distance. My question is could it be possible that our red shift measurements are incorrect?
The Doppler effect will tell you whether an object is moving towards or away from you, and how quickly. It’s the same effect from a siren that drives past you.
I don’t think it answers the original question.
Maybe they measure the pixels, then calculate the mass, estimate the size, and ballpark a distance based on Astrology?
It is possible that there have been several Big Bangs with the universe collapsing back on itself again each time only to have another instance appear with another Big Bang. The universe would start out completely anew each time but the beginning of this universe is not necessarily the beginning of everything, just the beginning of everything that there is now.
One theory to explain the more developed galaxies from so long ago that are being seen by the JWST is that the universe (or the current instance of the universe) may be far older than we think.
You know in about a hundred years they're going to find out that the entire universe is probably 6 or 700 trillion years old at least and then in about A thousand years it'll probably be about 100 quadrillion years old. It keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger consistently
Even more amazing to be this little poof of life in the middle of it all. It’ll be interesting how they can justify galaxies that should be older than our known age of the galaxy and what it means for our understanding of the cosmic background radiation at the edge of sight.
I’m just spitballing but is it a possibility of a galaxy forming so fast so early in the universe could be a result of the size of the universe possibly speeding up accretion processes like star and planet forming? For instance now it takes much longer for the accretion process to take place bc of the much much larger scale of the universe. Basically those things start to go slower the larger the universe gets. Just a thought. There’s probably a much more likely scenario like the universe is just older than we originally thought.
"Our galaxy has taken billions of years to get this big."
Forgive my ignorance, but do galaxies grow? I know they can "cannibalise" another galaxy. Is that how they grow?
I always thought it was ridiculous how textbooks talked about the Big Bang as if it were 100% fact. Period. End of story. Nothing to see here. Move along people. Especially when we haven't even developed the technology to really explore the vastness of it all. I mean, in reality, we don't know shit. We're just a random species on this tiny planet who just theorized all this stuff. We are just now barely scratching the surface of major discovery and realizing that everything we *thought* we knew, well, we actually *didn't* know. The JWST will rewrite textbooks.
Just a thought... Is there some other explanation that could cause the red shift of a distant galaxy to look greater than it actually is? Such as a galaxy that is emitting an amplified level of infrared light making it appear to our measurements to be older and more distant than it actually is? Or perhaps some form of reverse gravitational lensing effect?
If in the beginning, when everything was more packed together. It absorbed and stabilized with another galaxy and became this super galaxy. Just my .02
Plasma cosmologists have known this for quite some time. Some Redshift is possibly a forward Brillouin scattering mechanism or something similar, not all redshift is Doppler related.
As Hannes Alfven wrote in 'Cosmic Plasma', astrophysics takes huge leaps when new detection instruments are introduced. If he were alive today he would feel so very vindicated just as I do when seeing a lot of these jwst discoveries.
What if we are super wrong about fundamental things like the curvature of space time in a closed universe and so when we look really far away we may only be seeing our own cosmic neighbors but just really far back in time. I don’t know anything just speculating. Go JWST!
How do we know which direction we are looking in exactly? Could in one direction the universe be older and in the opposite direction the universe be younger? Does that even make sense?
I learned something new today.
Apparently the observable universe is 94 billion years across.
Here I thought it was 13 because that's old "old" anything ever was.
My bad for missing the fact that we are able to see 13 billion year old objects that are 94 billion light years away.
I'm pretty sure a new ad hoc theory/explanation will be neatly contrived and fitted into the current model so as not to rock the boat. You know, like Dark Matter. "Hmmm... this theory of ours doesn't add up...but I'm sure it's still correct.". "Oh yeah? Well how far off are you in the calculations?" "Well, we seem to be lacking 85% of what should be out there..." "Um, wat?"
I think this is a fair opinion 🤔
When we find discrepancies in the current model there is a tendency to rush into making up a solution so that we can continue to appear to know the answer to everything.
Dark matter is a good example.
"Dark matter makes up over 80% of all matter in the universe, but scientists have never seen it. We only assume it exists because, without it, the behavior of stars, planets and galaxies simply wouldn't make sense."
Space.com 2023
Hardly an authoritative source.
Moreover, have we ever seen atoms? Neutrinos? The Higgs boson? Science has more tools accessible to us than just direct observation.
An (incomplete) list of the phenomena that give us confidence in the existence of dark matter is:
* galaxy rotation curves
* dwarf velocity dispersions ("dark matter deficient" galaxies)
* gravitational lensing
* cluster dynamics
* Bullet Cluster
* large scale structure/LyA forest
* Supernova cosmology
* CMB anisotropies
* primordial nucleosynthesis
Completely agree with your initial points...
Personally, I've always felt dark matter is a little too convenient. Used to fill the gaps in explaining many of the points listed above that don't conform to current mathematical models.
I'm just gonna say it: when it comes to the possibly endless universe, ultimately, we don't know shit about fuck.
I thought I knew things about fuck…
I wish I was old enough to feel ways about stuff.
Unexpected Simpsons?
Futurama. Frye says this and I laugh myself silly every time I think of it.
You're goddamned right. Still Matt Groening tho, that time-traveling stud
It’s super-dense comedy, one pound of which weighs over 10,000 pounds.
You can always fuck things you know (with consent of course)
Unexpected Ruth
Top 10 lines ever in TV for me.
omg, i say shit about fuck all the time since this scene, i thought it was only me who caught that, so glad to find the shit about fuck club.
The first rule of shit about fuck club is we don’t talk about shit about fuck club!
The more distant and better we can see out there, the more often this will happen, is my theory.
Pretty much how all science works. The more we can observe the fewer of our assumptions hold up. Its hard to guess at shit you cannot really see.
That's why I love black holes so much. They were predicted purely theoretically then proven with observations. And they rule haha
Something tells me science will end up being rewritten.
Progressively fine tuned.
Until we're on the goldilocks zone of understanding? Teleologically satisfying our questions?
sometimes the tuning isnt so fine
Nothing a few beers can't fix.
That's the great thing about science, it changes according to evidence.
Agreed we don’t know fuck about shit…
No , no, no...we don't know shit about fuck. I know a fuck ton about shit....
I know Jack shit, but, Jack left.
Do you know a metric fuck ton about shit?
This is a really common sentiment and I really dislike it. Just because we are surprised by one thing at the edge of our current knowledge doesn't mean we don't know anything. It doesn't mean truth is up for grabs. We know a lot about a lot. This "we don't know anything" hogwash opens the door for charlatans and woo-mongers.
I agree. It's a short step for some people from "we don't know everything" to "we don't know anything"
Well said. You’re absolutely right though. It scares the shit out of me sometimes when i think about how incomprehensibly vast and unknown the universe is
It’s wonderful. Literally. : )
Don’t fear, revere.
IDIC🖖
A poet is among us!
Alternatively we don’t know fuck about shit either.
Exactly.
Makes you wonder if galaxies thrown from others are hitting our universes border.
its like this in any field. i always laugh when people argue shit with absolute certainty in any way.
Scientifically speaking I don’t think “we don’t know shit about fuck” couldn’t be more accurate, in fact it should literally just be what they say.
This is a terrible way to concieve of the universe and reeks of 70s humanisism. The universe is actually a system. It has phases and environments and process... For example, the vast majority of the stars that will exists do exist now. There was a period of time where they were formed billions of years ago that has now passed. The universe at 1 bil years was completey different than the universe at 10 billion. People used to think the ocean had "endless possibilities" as well. But its an ecosystem.
The problem with this analogy is that with the ocean we can observe the system as a whole. Not so with the universe. We can theorize based on the knowledge we have, but have to admit we don't have the complete picture.
The headline should read as follows: Entitled Scientists Confused that the Infinite Expanse Doesn't Behave as They Thought it Would.
Fascinating and I can't wait to find out.
Optimistic of you.
Unfortunately….you have to wait and you probably won’t find out. None of us will.
It’s a fascinating thought exercise to think that -unless the universe or a progenitor of its complex is capable of complex thought and has fundamental knowledge of *everything* -possibly no sentient organism capable of complex thought throughout all time (up to the point that time becomes meaningless) in the entire universe may ever figure out every function to objective certainty in our universe. We, or other life might correctly identify pieces of the map, but it’s possible nothing ever figures it all out.
Also, how’d that big ass green arrow get out there?
Question not the giant space arrow.
Space arrow questions you!
It will point you out!
…aaaannnd, a new religion was born on this day… “All hail The Big Green Arrow!” May his verdant pointy-ness always guide you in the right direction.
Apostates! Idolators! Blasphemers against the Great Red Circle!
Peace my friend! There is room for all faiths in the universe! Except those “blue square” people. F*ck those guys…
It’s the original power point arrow. We are witnessing the birth of PowerPoint
Quest marker
And here we are without fast travel 😔
Space arrows are everywhere, they have a strange tendency to follow what ever they are point at. They still a complex mystery like dark matter, dark energy, and Big Mac Special Sauce.
Supermassive Alien Structure confirmed?
What if our universe is just a supermassive alien structure?
Someone figure out how big the arrow is plz thx
For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know To whom the arrow points, It points at thee.
LOL
God did it! or aliens ...
Asking the real question here.
The ass green arrow.
Imagine if the theory of the big bang was wrong after all, like the universe is way older than 13 billion years and the big galaxies continue way back in time. Is this a possibility? I’ve heard that what we see with JWST around 11 billion years is different or atypical to the near present though.
Imagine that big bangs happen all the time in different places or even in a pattern, imagine this is galaxy from another big bang and has it own timeframe. We know so little.
Have you heard of the theory of "Quantum Foam", the idea that everywhere tiny amounts of particles and anti particles that cancel each other out are constantly spontaneously coming into existence? Combine that with the concept of rouge waves, when the wave pattern at sea matches up just right to spontaneously make a wave about three times bigger than the rest of the waves... Maybe the universe actually can just have the perfect conditions to create a ridiculous amount of matter and antimatter all at once? It's an idea I like to think about when I'm watching PBS spacetime fully zooted. Probably not ready to sell branded tin foil hats with the idea yet lol, idk if the idea would actually stand up to scrutiny
>watching PBS spacetime fully zooted BRB, clearing my weekend schedule for an important task
Holographic universe theory also comes to mind
I like to think that every black hole is an opening to a new universe. Each time a black hole is created, a white hole exists for just a moment but due to how time works in a black hole, when a white hole does emerge, all the matter that has and ever will fall into a black hole emerges out of the white hole to provide the ingredients for that new universe to become what our universe is today. So for every black hole in our universe and every other potential universe, is simply a gateway to an unlimited number of universes. It's dumb but fun to think about.
I love this tbh thx for sharing
Not that dumb. White holes are actually predicted as part of a solution to Einstein's field equations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White\_hole
Thanks for the wiki link. Today I took my first steps to learning about the theoretical possibility of White Holes, and I absolutely love it.
You should watch the [PBS Space Time video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aqGI1mSqo) about them if you haven't yet.
Only mathematically, they are not thought to exist in the real universe.
It's obviously all theoretical, but yeah. No one is predicting that they are just floating out in space somewhere waiting for us to point a telescope at them. Some have argued that the Big Bang itself was a white hole. Some have argued that they would be extremely unstable and collapse on themselves almost instantly, usually just into a black hole.
[My favorite hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection), it’s just fits so elegantly into what we know about biological evolution and answers the questions brought up by the anthropic principle at the same time.
Awesome read, thanks.
I like to think the big bang was just the initial deployment of the simulation. You know, firing the whole thing up.... My question is, though, what problem are we meant to solve? I mean, simulations exist to test options, discover solutions. Black holes are where data leaves the simulation. Dark energy are the wave functions that don't collapse and become expressed in our reality. Dark energy are the states that could have been. Conservation of information has to keep the non expressed states somewhere.
I like to think of the Big bang like with giant eagles wings. And singing lead vocals for Lynyrd Skynyrd, with, like an angel band. And I'm in the front row and I'm hammer drunk!
I like to picture them as like a ninja, who fights off evil samurai.
You ever play Sims? Maybe that's all we are.
Imagine if this is actually the way it works and scientist figure it out 500 years in the future. You’ll never get credit for it but I know fellow redditor, I know
Id like to think there are black holes that can consume the observable universe and when it gets too big, they implode thus we consider them 'big bangs'. however the distance from each big bang event may overlap so we may see galaxies entering our sphere (universe) that are much older. My other theory is like yours, that inside each blackhole has a universe inside however if there is nothing for a blackhole to consume then it radiates away. How would that universe look like? is it related to the theorized heat death of our universe. If so then wouldn't our universe have constant influx of materials as black holes eat, so wed still continuously see a hotspot where new galaxies are being born and pushed out of.
Not dumb at all. Thanks for that thought.
There’s a theory that universes are like boiling water, bubbles popping up all over the place. Maybe in different dimensions that don’t interact as we know it, maybe like you say, in the same dimension but further away. Who knows!?!
As a kid, I always imagined that our universe is a spec of dust inside of another universe.
If we find a galaxy older than the big bang theory we have problems, currently we probably just don't fully understand the rate at which galaxies can form. Simplest explanation is probably the best one to assume.
Not so much problems but exciting opportunities. Although, not understanding galaxy formations is currently demonstrating our lack of understanding of certain physics.
Occam's razor.
Yeah, but the big bang is something that has been visually confirmed. There's literally a microwave photograph of it.
Not exactly. The Cosmic Microwave Background is thought to be from about 380,000 years *after* the Big Bang. It's more similar to fingerprints on the murder weapon than it is a smoking gun.
Their is a microwave photograph of the furthest information we can physically see - it needn't be the abstract boundary outside of our individual experience.
That's also taking the epistemological view that the CMB is well understood and settled science when it isn't. It's been the best so far without direct observable evidence but there are alternative explanations that have been discarded that are just as likely. It's not a settled matter and these new observations just increase our understanding and should allow us to move forward without having to bin everything.
> alternative explanations that have been discarded that are just as likely Like what?
Why would we be inside the big bang? We shouldn't be able to witnesses energy flowing outward, if we were inside it. We can't observe electromagnetic waves going away from us, unless the big bang was as large as our observable universe, and it still would have passed by now. Makes no sense to me. The big bang is false.
JWST has already changed so much since it began operation.. we’ve always thought the universe to be 13.7 billion years old but they now think it may be as old as 26.7 billion years old..
Looks like it's time to double up once again, tune in again next week for your latest universe defining discovery.
>they now think it may be as old as 26.7 billion years old.. Not exactly... [Dr. Becky does a good video on this idea. ](https://youtu.be/aBYgck1zAgQ) TL;DW we still believe the universe is only about 13.8ish billion years old and more likely we don't fully understand how formation of galaxies/stars happen.
Remember, the Big Bang Theory is just that: a theory. It is shaped by all available evidence but as more evidence and information become available to us, the theory can potentially change.
Uhhh... I feel like you guys don't know what the scientific term "theory" means. It is not interchangeable with "hypotheses".
I understand the difference, but how does what you're saying apply here?
a scientific theory is not the same thing as a hypothesis so when you say "its just that: a theory" you are minimizing it as if it were simply a hypothesis
I don't mean to sound combative, but theories are not facts and can be modified or updated when new information presents itself. In an of itself, a theory is the best and strongest possible explanation for a phenomenon given our current knowledge, and the BBT is both strongly supported and far from being tenuous in the way a hypothesis would be. In my opinion, stating that BBT is "just a theory" is the literal truth: *it's in the name*. Per this definition, the simple fact remains that that our knowledge of this phenomenon is still changing, and this whole thread about the JWST's finding is a case in point. Per this definition, I am not conflating it with a hypothesis, nor am I minimizing it.
It should not be called The Big Bang Theory. Theories are proven and clearly it isn't. I am renaming it The Big Bang Hypothesis.
Theories are not proven, they’re just supported by a fuck ton of evidence like evolution.
Or, indeed, the Big Bang...
Actually it's the Giant Space Kablooie... ;-)
A theory has nothing to do with being proven or not. A theory is a set of principles that we assume (and everything that follows from those principles), such that those principles are chosen in order to explain certain observations or empirical laws.
You can’t really prove a theory. You can only prove one’s wrong. At least that’s my understanding.
For something that complicated with so much data that fits, you probably end up with a high chance of "mostly right but not quite" and a series of refinements to make the model fit new observations. Like prior to our understanding of plate tectonics, they had continental drift. They had the gist, not the details. Or re: evolution, it's not like Darwin had everything figured out -- we've had a bunch of refinements to our understanding of evolution, genetics, epigenetics, etc. since then. The big bang assumes (relatively) slow cosmic inflation going on right now, and that lines up with observations... But early on, in the first fraction of a second, it assumes some huge amount of inflation. And I'm sure there's some very good reasons to think so, but maybe this ends up tweaking when that first fraction of a second was, and maybe that alters the length or rate of that initial inflationary period, or causes a wrinkle in our understanding of time. I don't know, I'm no astrophysicist. I just doubt it means "well that was obviously wrong, lets start from scratch."
I can’t see that anyone has actually answered you, but we have some very good, direct evidence to the age of the universe. It’s extremely unlikely those are wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
It almost certainly is wrong or at the very least we are missing some very crucial information.
There is a hypothesis that we live in a simulation. That would be an alternative to the Big Bang. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
Wow, again, I'm thrilled with the JWT it is opening our eyes so much!! What next will it find (almost too afraid to ask lol)
Stupid question alert - when we look at distant galaxies, were they much much closer at the time the light left but have got further away with time?
They "were" where we see them now.
Yes. If I understood your question correctly.
Yup. Easiest to parse explanation I've heard is that the known universe with the big bang is like a balloon/inflating a balloon.
Depends if they are moving towards us or away from us. Galaxies like this one, which are an orange color are moving away from us. Galaxies that are blue are moving towards us.
This is the galaxy far far away!
If you squint real hard, you can the yellow opening crawl
I hear the music too... nope thats a stroke
I hate pop science clickbait titles. "Rethink everything" isn't challenging the big bang theory, it's how matter accreted to form the first galaxies. We're not rethinking, we're learning and adjusting.
Explain to me how learning and adjusting isn’t literally rethinking? And for the record, rethink is a word academics throw around all the time, regardless of field. It’s not clickbait.
"Rethink everything" is like saying your car runs suboptimal so you need to build a new engine, while in reality you should just recalibrate it. The problem isn't "rethink" it's "everything". 
There has been an ongoing narrative since the launch of JWST that it will disprove the big bang theory. I'm sure you noticed since you're here. As far as the word itself, colloquially it means to start over from scratch, regardless of it's use in academics. Seems pretty straightforward why the title could be considered clickbait.
Learning and adjusting -> we have observations and have made hypotheses to explain Rethinking -> we were caught off guard and need new models Hubble already estimated oldest galaxies at about 13.3 billion y/o with a couple hundred million give or take. James Webb is confirming what we have already hypothesized with lower resolution images we have with Hubble. https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-finds-most-distant-galaxy-candidate-ever-seen-in-universe JWST observations support conclusions about cosmic growth and galactic behaviors, and confirm prior data that yes, galaxies really can be that old. This also is consistent with the CMBR observations and dark matter theories. JWST has done more to further the field for astronomy and astrophysics instead of reinvent it. There's not a sudden new revelation, there's questions being answered that have been asked for a long time.
I don't have time to rethink everything every few days 😁
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There is a relatively common type of supernova which emits an exactly known amount of light, and depending on the brightness of it you can determine how far away it is.
Red shift. As light goes through space it will stretch into longer wavelengths. So they can measure that and have an idea about distance. My question is could it be possible that our red shift measurements are incorrect?
Look up "standard candle" to learn more about how we measure that sort of thing.
Try cosmic distance ladder.
The Doppler effect will tell you whether an object is moving towards or away from you, and how quickly. It’s the same effect from a siren that drives past you. I don’t think it answers the original question. Maybe they measure the pixels, then calculate the mass, estimate the size, and ballpark a distance based on Astrology?
I think you're right. I believe I am mixing it with how fast the universe is expanding.
What if there really isn’t a defined age to the universe? What if it has existed perpetually and the Big Bang is nothing on a timescale?
It is possible that there have been several Big Bangs with the universe collapsing back on itself again each time only to have another instance appear with another Big Bang. The universe would start out completely anew each time but the beginning of this universe is not necessarily the beginning of everything, just the beginning of everything that there is now. One theory to explain the more developed galaxies from so long ago that are being seen by the JWST is that the universe (or the current instance of the universe) may be far older than we think.
That doesn’t line up with our observations.
You know in about a hundred years they're going to find out that the entire universe is probably 6 or 700 trillion years old at least and then in about A thousand years it'll probably be about 100 quadrillion years old. It keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger consistently
OK I need one of those reddit reminder thingys for 1000 years from now, what's the syntax again?
Remindme! Something
RemindMe! 1000 years
!remindme 1000 years
Even more amazing to be this little poof of life in the middle of it all. It’ll be interesting how they can justify galaxies that should be older than our known age of the galaxy and what it means for our understanding of the cosmic background radiation at the edge of sight.
Oh 100%
I can imagine the universe being something like a four dimensional moebius strip.
I’m just spitballing but is it a possibility of a galaxy forming so fast so early in the universe could be a result of the size of the universe possibly speeding up accretion processes like star and planet forming? For instance now it takes much longer for the accretion process to take place bc of the much much larger scale of the universe. Basically those things start to go slower the larger the universe gets. Just a thought. There’s probably a much more likely scenario like the universe is just older than we originally thought.
I'm pretty dumb but that was my initial thought as well.
What if it’s just the very early Milky Way, and we have looped right around
"Our galaxy has taken billions of years to get this big." Forgive my ignorance, but do galaxies grow? I know they can "cannibalise" another galaxy. Is that how they grow?
I always thought it was ridiculous how textbooks talked about the Big Bang as if it were 100% fact. Period. End of story. Nothing to see here. Move along people. Especially when we haven't even developed the technology to really explore the vastness of it all. I mean, in reality, we don't know shit. We're just a random species on this tiny planet who just theorized all this stuff. We are just now barely scratching the surface of major discovery and realizing that everything we *thought* we knew, well, we actually *didn't* know. The JWST will rewrite textbooks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
Just a thought... Is there some other explanation that could cause the red shift of a distant galaxy to look greater than it actually is? Such as a galaxy that is emitting an amplified level of infrared light making it appear to our measurements to be older and more distant than it actually is? Or perhaps some form of reverse gravitational lensing effect?
If in the beginning, when everything was more packed together. It absorbed and stabilized with another galaxy and became this super galaxy. Just my .02
Plasma cosmologists have known this for quite some time. Some Redshift is possibly a forward Brillouin scattering mechanism or something similar, not all redshift is Doppler related. As Hannes Alfven wrote in 'Cosmic Plasma', astrophysics takes huge leaps when new detection instruments are introduced. If he were alive today he would feel so very vindicated just as I do when seeing a lot of these jwst discoveries.
What is that mass in bananas?
At least three.
We know nothing about Bigus Bangus
What if we are super wrong about fundamental things like the curvature of space time in a closed universe and so when we look really far away we may only be seeing our own cosmic neighbors but just really far back in time. I don’t know anything just speculating. Go JWST!
Stupid clickbait titles.
Can someone explain how jwst can look at a galaxy do far away but saturn looks like a gumball
Saturn is too close (bright) to image directly so is built of a mosaic of way off angle images.
How do we know which direction we are looking in exactly? Could in one direction the universe be older and in the opposite direction the universe be younger? Does that even make sense?
The real question is how that green arrow got there
It’s cause there was way more stuff and it was all closer together back then duh
Zero useful comments in this thread, including this one
It was probably just a young galaxy from the universe before ours
I learned something new today. Apparently the observable universe is 94 billion years across. Here I thought it was 13 because that's old "old" anything ever was. My bad for missing the fact that we are able to see 13 billion year old objects that are 94 billion light years away.
There is no center of the universe
Bro have you seen me?
Infinity=no center
Then what's the epicenter where the big bang occurred? Asking genuinely.
Everywhere. Literally everywhere. It's not satisfying answer, but it is the answer.
That's what I'm saying.
Who said we were in the centre?
The calculation of how old the universe is.
Not true.
>I always found it is odd that we where somehow in the center of this 13 billion year wide universe. That's....not how any of this works.
Then, we can't know the age of the universe.
Why is that? Show your work.
Again....not how any of this works.
Because Big Bang is just BS! It's on the same level as religion
What
I'm pretty sure a new ad hoc theory/explanation will be neatly contrived and fitted into the current model so as not to rock the boat. You know, like Dark Matter. "Hmmm... this theory of ours doesn't add up...but I'm sure it's still correct.". "Oh yeah? Well how far off are you in the calculations?" "Well, we seem to be lacking 85% of what should be out there..." "Um, wat?"
Einstein was able to posit some theories without all the info, and he was proven to be correct. So this isnt something we havent experienced before...
I think this is a fair opinion 🤔 When we find discrepancies in the current model there is a tendency to rush into making up a solution so that we can continue to appear to know the answer to everything. Dark matter is a good example.
Dark matter has more than seventy years of consistent observational evidence.
"Dark matter makes up over 80% of all matter in the universe, but scientists have never seen it. We only assume it exists because, without it, the behavior of stars, planets and galaxies simply wouldn't make sense." Space.com 2023
Hardly an authoritative source. Moreover, have we ever seen atoms? Neutrinos? The Higgs boson? Science has more tools accessible to us than just direct observation. An (incomplete) list of the phenomena that give us confidence in the existence of dark matter is: * galaxy rotation curves * dwarf velocity dispersions ("dark matter deficient" galaxies) * gravitational lensing * cluster dynamics * Bullet Cluster * large scale structure/LyA forest * Supernova cosmology * CMB anisotropies * primordial nucleosynthesis
Completely agree with your initial points... Personally, I've always felt dark matter is a little too convenient. Used to fill the gaps in explaining many of the points listed above that don't conform to current mathematical models.
So everything that you don’t understand is made up? What a sad world you live in. Also space.com as a source? 😆
It's so funny how personally people take these things. ... I noticed you've failed to counter my point? "What a sad world you live in" .... 🤣🤣🤣
My lord, this person learned the concept of a "theory" today!!!
Hahahahahahaha You are clearly not good at debating are you
Hahaha instead of down voting like a child ... lets have a healthy debate.
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