RIP Big Bang Theory
Depends what you mean by the big bang theory. The theory that the universe expanded almost from a point will probably survive forever, but ΛCDM might not survive the decade.
The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
101–110 of 547 posts
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way. Could we train a GPT3 like model with the entire corpus of astronomical research and try to answer some questions that way?
Already done. They came back with the answer: "42"
But what was really the question?
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#103I don't know if this instance qualifies as one, but I think its fair to say that cosmology is the one domain of "fundamental" physics where "discrepancies" or question marks keep piling up and not really resolving. It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" i…
> It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way. Could we train a GPT3 like model with the entire corpus of astronomical research and try to answer some questions that way?
well, you could. And it might not be a complete waste of time. I would not expect any directly useful answers(...). But producing a semi-random collation of sentences that spans the corpus of cosmological facts and models and asking scientists to review / draw "inspiration" from it might remove some of the biases of the average cosmologist (like having to follow the latest publish-or-perish fad). This would only be useful if the answer is sort of hidding in plain sight (within the published stuff) and you tweak the algorithm not to ignore weird observations or theories that are not cited a lot.
But the beauty of science (and the human mind driving it) that important progress happens with creative jumps that invent completely new things (e.g., new mathematics) and frequently bear little resemblance to the past
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#104I've often wondered if matter from another galaxy is behaving the same way it does here on the macroscopic level, but varies at the atomic level.
It's pretty clear that it's the same at the atomic level as well.
The spectra look exactly like they look here. They're red-shifted, but the gaps between the peaks are exactly the same. That comes from the atomic level, the way the electrons are arranged within the atom.
If something were different at the atomic level, it would surely change the characteristics of the light they give off. The only way to see what we see would be if there were two things different, that somehow counteracted each other in the things we can see but were nonetheless different in some other factor we can't observe.
That's not impossible, but it would be a bizarre coincidence.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#105I don't know if this instance qualifies as one, but I think its fair to say that cosmology is the one domain of "fundamental" physics where "discrepancies" or question marks keep piling up and not really resolving. It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" i…
I don't think it is fair to characterize cosmology as not making progress no. Stuff is far away and occluded and hard to measure and see. Each improvement in observation causes a need to refine previous ideas, as expected. There are of course the two big mysteries that have lingered for a long time: Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but other areas of physics have lingering mysteries as well.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" in a more economical way. Could we train a GPT3 like model with the entire corpus of astronomical research and try to answer some questions that way?
I'd say not a chance. GPT3 can regurgitate, and, in my opinion, even use knowledge, but I don't think it can synthesize knowledge.
I think it's a bit more subtle than whether it can synthesize, because clearly it can produce seemingly new work.
But what it definitely cannot do is seek new abstractions. It can't be curious about an inconsistency and probe its own knowledge for possible resolutions, or design an experiment that might shed further light in an unknown area. It can't even play a board game after ingesting the rules to it, much less identify contradictions or problems in such a ruleset. And a board game is a tiny microcosm compared with the laws of physics.
It's conceivable that one or more scientists could work in conjunction with an AI to help augment their own abilities, co-pilot style, but I don't think we have a picture yet of what exactly that kind of thing would look like.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#107Is it possible that the 'edge' of universe reflects light? Have scientists been able to conclusively rule that out somehow? Does the universe even have an edge? What is our current understanding of what the boundaries of the universe might be like?
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Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#108Is it possible that the 'edge' of universe reflects light? Have scientists been able to conclusively rule that out somehow? Does the universe even have an edge? What is our current understanding of what the boundaries of the universe might be like?
> Is it possible that the 'edge' of universe reflects light? Have scientists been able to conclusively rule that out somehow? It's not an edge the way you think. It's the edge of what we can see based on the known age of the universe and how much light has reached us. I.e no real boundaries as best as we can tell. The best way you can look at this is that early galaxies are being found earlier than expected based on…
We have a concept of the Particle Horizon, the max distance light could have traveled in the universe, and that is our boundary, our effective edge of the universe.
There's the concept of the light cone, which is the total volume of observable light which can ever reach an observer, or inversely, the total volume ever traveled by a given point source. The expansion of the universe means that there is a certain boundary, a horizon where the universe expands too much for light to ever travel the required distance.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#109I don't know if this instance qualifies as one, but I think its fair to say that cosmology is the one domain of "fundamental" physics where "discrepancies" or question marks keep piling up and not really resolving. It the pattern of previous science revolutions repeats, there could come a point where reinterpreting the large existing body of knowledge using a different paradigm would explain an number of "oddities" i…
The number of possibilities are countably infinite. Makes sense that we will keep finding things we don't understand for a long time.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The universe is 13.7b yo, but due to acceleration of expansion, if you could "teleport", it's actually currently 93b ly across. So we're already in a bubble within a greater universe that we'll never be able to escape even if you could instantly reach lightspeed right now, and due to the expansion continuing to increase, the fractional size of this bubble relative to the rest is shrinking. Faraway galaxies that are "…
> The universe is 13.7b yo, but due to acceleration of expansion, if you could "teleport", it's actually currently 93b ly across. So we're already in a bubble within a greater universe that we'll never be able to escape This number, the age of the universe, has changed a few times since I learned to read 45 some years ago. What are the chances that this isn't really "the" universe, but what we know as the observable…
It's worth pointing out that there is a minority of physicists who don't accept the Big Bang as proven beyond doubt. An alternative theory would be a 'steady-state' universe which, as you suggest, would be much older than the ~14 BYO age. If the medium of space itself dispersed light for instance, red shifts might be observed that explain the astronomical data.