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Sorry for an likely ignorant question, but can someone ELI5 why we are confident that evereything in universe is less than 13 billion years old or whatnot, and not just redshifted beyond recognition?
Articles like these make me want to stop doing everything and isolate in the basement for several months to study physics. Then I realize I have a family to feed and elderly parents to take care for. Sigh, so many beautiful mysteries in the world, and only one life. edit: A friend told me germans have the word "Sehnsucht" to describe such a feeling. So I guess it might be somewhat universal.
I have kind of done that for last few months. Chat GPT helped immensely with that. I recently even asked if it's worth it to go back to academia. Still exploring that. A few things that I recently understood or read about. - Fermi Paradox - with help of chatgpt https://imgur.com/a/LuVV6iK - How the age of universe was calculated. - Redshift - How age of solar system was calculated. I previously thought just like the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. That the planet is warming is incontrovertible. What this might mean for highly interdependent, chaotic systems is harder to predict. Will the Greenland ice sheet melt? Looks like yes. Will that affect the Gulf Stream? Probably. Will that make Spain colder? again, probably, but the error bars are bigger, and so on.
It just sounds like global warming is giving them good test data. A comprehensively accurate model should be able to take e.g. a Greenland ice sheet melting in stride.
Forest fires were probably in the model, but they seem to be intensifying due to (mis)management and droughts. The Amazon rainforest probably has a significant impact on weather and weather models, but under Bolsenaro a lot of it was cut down and burned. And it goes on.
Articles like these make me want to stop doing everything and isolate in the basement for several months to study physics. Then I realize I have a family to feed and elderly parents to take care for. Sigh, so many beautiful mysteries in the world, and only one life. edit: A friend told me germans have the word "Sehnsucht" to describe such a feeling. So I guess it might be somewhat universal.
I have kind of done that for last few months. Chat GPT helped immensely with that. I recently even asked if it's worth it to go back to academia. Still exploring that. A few things that I recently understood or read about. - Fermi Paradox - with help of chatgpt https://imgur.com/a/LuVV6iK - How the age of universe was calculated. - Redshift - How age of solar system was calculated. I previously thought just like the…
Great news. Finding stuff that doesn't fit into the current model and we need smart people to get to work understanding may be the surest sign that the JWST is invaluable.
Same - I really like seeing things like this. Not only because it means we're about to learn some big stuff, but also because it would be completely *preposterous* if humans at our puny stage of development had already correctly figured out every last detail about insanely complex things like the exact size, age, and origin and age of galaxy-sized things that developed tens of billions of years ago, billions of light…
How can a human at this puny stage know this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 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.
I'm reading the whole JWST project is estimated to cost $10 billion. That's about 4.4 overpriced Twitters, 77 US Department of Defense budgets (just for 2023), and 11.7 Facebook annual revenues.
We have the technology and the means, what's lacking now is the will.
Sorry for an likely ignorant question, but can someone ELI5 why we are confident that evereything in universe is less than 13 billion years old or whatnot, and not just redshifted beyond recognition?
This 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 m…
It seems to me, as a layperson, if MOND was hypothesized first, it would be the dominant theory. It’s so elegant and simple with so much explanatory power. However, because it was hypothesized much later, the fact it matches past predictions is given no weight, despite its simplicity. I think this is a bit of a mistake. I believe that simplicity itself is evidence. Dark matter theory is starting to feel like the epic…
Second, I don't know why MOND seems simpler and more elegant to you than literally something that doesn't modify the laws of physics at all but just increases the mass you use in computations.
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 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?
That said, I can imagine a chatbot can help as a rubber duck, bring up things that weren't considered yet, or be so wrong as to kickstart the human into a breakthrough.