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The telescopes are always amazing
The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
321–330 of 547 posts
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favourite example of the intractabilities of some theories is that magnetohydronamics apparently can't predict the formation of streamer jets when you put your finger on a kid's plasma ball – i.e. the main point of the toy is beyond the most advanced theory that lies behind NIF, JET, ITER, etc...
At this point in the thread, I'm wondering if we do a disservice to physics students by making it appear we have it all figured out.
I don't think I've ever, out of all my physics classes up to grad seminars, been given the impression we have everything figured out. In fact, it was hammered into us that all we have are "effective" theories, at least when it comes to high energy physics, and that's not even talking about grand unification (electroweak + strong force unification), let alone Theory of Everything (electroweak + strong + gravity).
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#323I'm going to be very amused if the Steady State Model - an unpopular relic from the 1940s - turns out to be correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model
My favorite theory is that the universe is finite, some sort of (hyper)sphere or -torus. If we could just look far enough out there we would see our own galaxy What would be even cooler is if it was warped like a moebius strip in a higher dimension, so that when we look out there, everything is mirrored from "our" reality :-D
You should read the short story The Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang who also wrote Stories of Your Life, the inspiration for the movie Arrival.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#324I 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 always wondered if we could somehow get a James webb telescope revolving around all planets of our solar system in the next 1000 years. That should give us pretty awesome visuals.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#325This was predicted by astronomer Stacy McGaugh on his super interesting blog as a natural consequence of modified Newtonian dynamics (https://tritonstation.com/2022/01/03/what-jwst-will-see/).
McGaugh came to support MOND over dark matter reluctantly for just such reasons—MOND routinely predicts things in advance that dark matter struggles to justify ex post facto, usually by adding additional moving parts to the model.
Whether or not you find the evidence persuasive, McGaugh's blog is worth a deep dive just to appreciate the subtleties and complexities of this kind of observational astronomy.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not, because ice has a smooth surface and that probably the surface layer melts a bit because your shoes are warm? That would be my reasoning, but it likely seems to be wrong, well why?
If that were the case, then cold things wouldn't slip on ice, but they do (for a demonstration, pick up a rock that's been sitting out in the cold and note that it still slides on ice)
Wouldn't that just be due to the low coefficient of friction?
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#327Earlier 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.
I had the same idea about magic. Back in the day people could do things that we can’t because nobody looked into details and the universe had enough “possibility space” to allow it. Once you turn your gaze into atomic or galactic workings, this space shrinks tremendously and further research becomes much harder because you glued the puzzle from its sides in a particular way and there’s not much left to hope for, except for solving it to the center in a bizarrely complex way. We may have painted ourselves into a horrible corner.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
That entire site reads like "what if Elizabeth Holmes set up a power generation company?" Reading up on the company on Wikipedia, it seems to be pretty much exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Light_Power
Yikes, it's BlackLight! I had no idea this joker was still around. For reference: this was popular snakeoil on USENET back in the 90's when I was in college. This is some really crufty nonsense, and I'm kinda shocked it's still being recycled.
The theory has not changed much since the original work by Mills in the 1990s but the experiments and engineering have overcome a lot of hurdles and there are now many experiments that match the predictions of the underlying theory and prove the existence of hydrinos.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point in the thread, I'm wondering if we do a disservice to physics students by making it appear we have it all figured out.
It is easy for children to come up with questions for biologists that none can answer, and that none has even tried to answer. Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know about their subject. Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
> Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know [...]
Citation needed.
> Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all.
The novel finding was a critter that lives / can live solely on viruses.
Re: The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree that simulation theory pushes the question up a level, that is not the case for the God of classical theism.
Ok, I'm curious. How does the explanation for everything's existence being "God did it" not simply push the question up a level to wondering how to explain God's existence?
The general idea is that the set of all contingent things can only be explained by something non-contingent (ie necessary).
A necessary thing, by definition, is its own explanation. "I am what I am" etc.
From there, classical theists attempt to connect that necessary thing to what you'd commonly understand as God.