Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

skyandtelescope.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 547 posts

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#291

Post by Taniwha »

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #250
User23 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a joke that calling Computer Science Computer Science is like calling Astronomy Telescope Science, but part of what makes it funny is the ring of truth to it. Our instruments really do limit our observations. The advantage Computer Scientists have is that we can glimpse a world of Platonic Forms[1], where Functions, and Sets, and Information exist, or something close enough for government work, merely through…

Computer Science doesn’t get the pass, unfortunately. First of all because it’s a branch of maths, so in reality it doesn’t have any instruments to worry about. Secondly, applied CS relies on an incredibly simple instrument: binary logic gates. The computers we have today are just a mesh of stuff that flips on and off with no intermediate states. That’s pretty primitive as a means of expression and computation compar…

Oh, let me introduce you to metastability ....

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#292

Post by dylan604 »

vaidhy wrote: post #199
jpttsn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point why not call it “witchcraft;” a sciencey word for something is not an explanation.

We do not call it witchcraft, because that is the end of the discussion and the answer. We call it unknown because it is knowable and is the beginning of the experiments.

>We do not call it witchcraft, because that is the end of the discussion and the answer.

Also, we'd have to eliminate the practitioners for clearly being witches. We've had that period and history, but it seems some modern day people are content to bring that very time period back.

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#293

Post by rsj_hn »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #284
rsj_hn wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which researchers (as opposed to pop-sci pundits) think MOND is a better explanation than Dark matter? That is a very, very fringe alt-science view that so far exists in various pop-sci blogs and informal youtube discussions, rather than in mainstream conferences, journals, and research centers. I'm not saying it's bad to speculate or write whimsical blog articles about these topics, there's lots of room for creative…

He's passed, but jacob bekenstein?

Bekenstein wrote an interesting paper on MOND in 2010 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3876

But again, the 2017 experimental data [cited previously] in support of Lorentz invariance and the 2016 bullet cluster data in support of dark matter basically killed MOND in the eyes of most researchers.

As I said before, nothing wrong with writing papers exploring the consequences of MOND or trying to come up with alternatives, science does not work by consensus, but the bar for dropping Lorentz invariance is really high given the experimental support for it.

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#294

Post by moloch-hai »

jackmott42 wrote: post #105
college_physics wrote: post #59

I 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.

Nobody says cosmology is not making progress.

People dunk on cosmology because cosmologists have consistently, over decades, insisted, in public, that they knew more than they did, and are continually obliged to abandon what they insisted they knew. If they were more forthright about how much they don't know, they would get less criticism. They have much to learn from the biologists, who know they know practically nothing (even though massively more than you), and are happy to say so.

The health of a branch of science may be read from how eager its researchers are for you to know about what they have no clue about.

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#295

Post by dylan604 »

sho_hn wrote: post #150
teawrecks wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost had the same reaction, but technically they didn't say anything about cosmology not making progress. It's entirely reasonable to assume a scientifically minded person describing a field as "piling up question marks" means they think it's making a LOT of progress. Imagine a field that answers questions more often than it finds new ones; that'd be a pretty stagnant field to be in.

This is how I understood OP, too. Last time we had a "crisis in physics", it was the early transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, when some good new ideas had been coinceived of, but trying to reconcile them with the classical way of thinking and with experimental evidence required increasingly convoluted hacks in the models to make it all work - until folks like Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac fo…

Sometimes the questions keep piling up until someone happens up on just the right question. That question itself wouldn't have been thought of except for the thinking of all of the previous unanswered questions. Then the big Eureka!! moment and someone gets a Nobel prize 20 years later.

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#297

Post by dylan604 »

peatmoss wrote: post #220
suetoniusp91 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simulation gets less cohesive the farther from earth you look.

I was just thinking about video games where vegetation, animals, and hills spring into existence when you get close enough. Far away, and they don't bother to render the little things. Depending what generation tech we're running on in the parent reality, JWST may be causing a noticeable jump in system load.

And now you have come to the reason GPU prices have been so high. Crypto was just a cover story.

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#298

Post by KMag »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #197
KMag wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to accelerating cosmic inflation, some galaxies are receding from us at faster than the speed of light, so their light will never reach us. The majority of galaxies (everything outside of our local cluster, IIRC) will eventually be receding faster than the speed of light and be beyond our vision forever. Yes, this means most galaxies will appear to actually pass through/into the cosmic background, from our point…

I thought the logic of inflation had no limit, and eventually, everywhere, even atoms themselves would come apart.

I don't think we understand enough about the dark energy driving inflation to say that. If the force is constant for a given pair of particles at a constant distance, and the atoms are currently stable, that would seem to imply that the force from dark energy pushing the atoms apart will be the same as they are now.

However, as I said, I don't think we know enough about dark energy to say anything about its effects on the atomic scale either now or eons hence.

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#299

Post by tommoor »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #290
WXLCKNO wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know which idea is harder for me to conceptualize. That something has always existed or that it came to exist out of nowhere-ish.

I suspect this is why simulation theory is popular.

Much like god, that just pushes the question up one level

Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies

#300

Post by dylan604 »

mmusson wrote: post #132
college_physics wrote: post #59

I 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 may be more a question of a new generation of physicists, willing to consider that particle dark matter is not the explanation for the acceleration discrepancy.

Sadly, I'm to the point that unless we call it the Kardashian Space Telescope, the draw to new generations will not be there. We're closer to Idiocracy future than Interstellar future.
Post reply on HN