Big Bang Trouble: Old, Distant Galaxies Are Huge Monsters

Big Bang theory was predicting the most ancient galaxies to be tiny… But the new space telescope can see them, and some are huge…  

The Big Bang theory in its modern incarnation, LCDM, Lambda Cold Dark Matter, consists of a chain of nested hypotheses with attending “tooth fairies” to make it work [1]. Now there is precision cosmology, and many results, say of the CBR (Cosmic Background Radiation) fit the data exquisitely… Maybe all too well: That reminds me of Ptolemaic astronomy, when all was perfect (astronomer and count Tycho found the cheating only 15 centuries later…) I am of the opinion that there is a possible different mechanism to produce CBR (so not just redshift from expansion but also from a tired light effect coming from cosmically sized Quantum Interactions; Zwicky, the discoverer of Dark Matter also suggested “tired light”, that’s generally considered to be wrong, but Zwicky suggested no mechanism; SQPR does). 

Some of these hypotheses of the Big Bang are quite out of this world. For example, the Big Bang, even without LCDM, has to grow space at one hundred billion trillion times the speed of light (10^23 c). 

The LCDM model makes very specific predictions. So early galaxies are supposed to be small and disorganized… However, in truth… Instead we are seeing instead large, well-organized galaxies, which should not be there so early after the BB. The haggard majority of astronomers has to admit that some important ingredient in LCDM is missing, or something is wrong entirely. I propose the latter, on a truly cosmic scale.

“Lambda” comes from Einstein. It was a cheat factor Einstein introduced to explain that the universe was static: it neither collapsed nor expanded. However, within a few years the universe was found to be expanding. Einstein called Lambda “it’s biggest mistake”… because otherwise he would have “predicted” the expansion (silly boy). So “Lambda” was viewed with horror and consternation, as the poster boy of ad hoc hypotheses, for seventy years, until around 2000 CE when it was found, by studying super novas as distant candles, that the cosmic expansion accelerated, so “Lambda” had to be plugged back into the General Relativity equation, which now basically reads as follows: 

Curvature + Lambda = Energy-Momentum  

So then Eistein’s biggest error became another Einstein insight…. (My view of Einstein’s biggest error is that it is much  bigger than that: his assumption of point-like “particles”… which is increasingly disproven by the most recent experiment, not just my opinion. The field is moving so fast, I didn’t write about these yet.)

The Dark Matter problem is that gravity as the inverse square law doesn’t seem to work in view of the apparent repartition of matter around galaxies and galactic clusters…

The inverse square law for gravitation was proposed in 1645 by the French astronomer Ismaël Boulliau (aka Bullialdus). The law was demonstrate by Newton when he deduced from it Kepler’s laws. The 1/dd behavior of gravity is also the first approximation of General Relativity, GR, the modern (1916) theory of gravitation of Einstein and his colleagues (Hilbert, Besso, etc.). So if 1/dd falls, so does GR.

However, confronted to this Dark Matter problem all over, some then tried the oldest and most basic method of science: if it doesn’t fit, you must that quit! When confronted with a mystery, one tends to go to the simplest explanation. In the case of “Dark Matter” that would be neutrinos or a similar new type of particle, say from supersymmetry, interacting very little with ordinary matter. But particle physicists found no such particles. They are still searching.

Periodically some scientists, typically Italian, located below Gran Sasso (the great stone.), proclaim they have solved the problem… But they are found to be wrong. Gran Sasso experiments should be funded, but Italian science has a funding crisis, so is prone to enthusiastic claims to justify said funding… Most recently Italians claim they found (again) all the Dark Matter, and it was all ions, and there were too many of them… (I would be naturally very disappointed if they were right…)

Neglecting this Italian distraction, the next logical possibility is to modify gravity to fit the apparent rotation curves of galaxies. This sort of method is curve fitting, it has a glorious past: Kepler did it…within a generation or so Kepler laws were (more or less) deducted from the inverse square law and the basic laws of mechanics by Newton and company. So modifying gravity should not be taken lightly. Our GPS works with GR…

Modifying gravity ad hoc is called MOND: MOdified Newtonian Dynamics.  A first problem here is that Ismael Boulliau (Bullialdus) has a little reasoning for the 1/dd law, namely that would be the natural decrease over a distance d, of the density of particles. Boulliau made the explicit analogy of graviation with light (if it consisted of particles). Some may object that Boulliau’s work is rather trivial. Maybe, but it’s way better than no fundamental reason at all, as in MOND.

Moreover, Bouillau may well have been right, in light of Planck’s Quantum hypothesis, which makes light into particles (or at least packets of energy, an idea reinforced by Einstein in 1905)… So Bouillau contradicts MOND with a reason all the better, that it is very simple…

If there are no Dark Matter particles, and modifying gravity doesn’t work the next and only step is to modify Quantum Physics, and that is what Sub Quantum Physical Reality (SQPR) does. It turns out that SQPR changes cosmology on a vast scale. No more “tooth fairies” and a cascade of ad hoc hypotheses… Patrice Ayme The universe is lyrical in the most gigantic way:

Distant galaxies as seen by the JWST in 2022…

[1] As astrophysicist and cosmologist Stacy McGaugh, a MOND partisan, puts it: “Bear in mind that there are many forms of feedback. That one word [feedback] upon which our entire cosmology has become dependent is not a single auxiliary hypothesis. It is more like a Russian nesting doll of multiple tooth fairies, one inside another. Imagining that these different, complicated effects must necessarily add up to just the right outcome is dangerous: anything we get wrong we can just blame on some unknown imperfection in the feedback prescription. .. This is like putting a bandage on an amputation and pretending like the treatment is complete.

The universe is weirder than we know, and perhaps weirder than we can know. This provides boundless opportunity for self-delusion.

Evolution Is A Voyage Through The Cosmos

Advancing science is not just fostering understanding, and power, it is also a teacher for our logical acumen, the lessons of whom can be carried all over human common sense and sensibilities. 

The classic movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” pretends that extraterrestrials made apes into proto-humans. Once proto-humans have reached the Moon, extraterrestrials tinker again with evolution. It was beautiful when written, but now it sounds rather silly and contrived: if evolution had reached the ape level, it would surely get to the human level, given a few million years… As it did: no need to intervene at this late stage; getting to apes was hard and took hundreds of millions of animal evolution, but once there, the mix of cultural and physiological evolution would reach a singularity of progress. 

Another flaw of “2001” was the assumption of extraterrestrial civilization: not only it is to be helpful, it is also unlikely to exist. Habitable planets are clearly in the millions, if not billions, in the galaxy. But conditions stable enough to enable a star traveling civilization are probably exceedingly rare.

***

By the preceding I do not mean that it is boring out there, and that life on Earth was not influenced by the cosmos. Quite the opposite: it’s not boring, and the cosmic influences are not just great, but primordial.

Not only that, but the cosmic environment has an influence on evolutionary smarts. Yes, there is such a thing.

Official evolution theory in recent generations held that evolution was the fruit of chance (haphazard mutations) and necessity (a better adapted organism will reproduce better). This standard “Darwinism”, also known as “Selection of the Fittest”. It is unlikely that Darwin believed just in that evolution mechanism, since, after all, he went to Scotland to study Lamarck, the discoverer of biological evolution in its full many-million years’ glory (evolution itself was known and exploited by the Ancient Greek breeders…). 

Lamarck, after spending decades behind his microscopes, believed that there was a mysterious force for complexification, and that usage created evolution. Although the details are not in, we can guess how that happens.

DNA has weak hydrogen bonds at its core. Submitted to a changed cellular environment, those bonds will loosen and reform, enabling mutation. The changed cellular environment can arise from a changed ecology (something the animal consciously controls)… But it can also arise from other changes, such as a change of radiation levels.

***

Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977 and flew by Jupiter and Saturn, targeting Titan. Voyager 2 was launched previously, in August 1977, but on a slower trajectory, and flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Thanks to gravity slingshot effects using the giant planets, both spacecrafts are now headed out of the solar system into interstellar space on hyperbolic trajectories (they are not coming back).

Nuclear powered, the Voyagers’ instrument suites have proven hardy. Few failed, and now five scientific teams, 45 years later, serve the VIM, the Voyager Interstellar Mission, an extension of the Voyager primary mission that was completed in 1989 with the close flyby of Neptune by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

Humanity is heading for the stars. For real.

***

Here is Science Magazine pondering in a long article why it would be a good thing to launch an Interstellar Probe (IP) going at the speed of the Earth-Moon distance every three hours: THE LONG SHOT

The Voyager probes raised perplexing questions as they exited the Solar System. Now, scientists have conceived new missions to interstellar space. (28 JUL 2022; by Richard Stone.)

Voyager found that 75% of the cosmic rays heading our way from interstellar space get filtered out in the heliosphere’s outer reaches. If the encounter with the next cloud squeezes the heliosphere all the way down to Earth’s orbit, life forms would be exposed to an intense radiation environment that would riddle DNA with mutations, Brandt says. (Brandt is John Hopkins APL space physicist and chief scientist on the Interstellar Probe mission concept study.)

There’s evidence of such an event around the time early hominids were just beginning to pick up stone tools, and Brandt muses on a possible connection. “Let that creep up your spine for a moment,” he says. In recent years, scientists have discovered iron-60 isotopes in ocean crust samples dating from 2 million to 3 million years ago. Iron-60 is not found naturally on Earth: It’s forged in the cores of large stars. So, either a nearby supernova blasted the heliosphere with the iron dust, or the heliosphere drifted through a dense cloud laden with iron-60 from a previous supernova. Either way, Brandt says, “The heliosphere was way in, and we had a full blast of galactic cosmic rays and interstellar matter for a long, long time.” To look for relics of other such events, IP could use plasma wave antennas to essentially take the temperature of nearby electrons. Hot regions might mark the blast paths of material from past supernovae.

***

Philosophically, that is on the grandest scale of the plausible, what does this all mean? First that cosmic radiation may have been the good fairy which accelerated human evolution. No need for extraterrestrials as in “2001”, cosmic machinery had its hand in the growth of human intelligence. A rational aura from this is that radiation shouldn’t not just be correlated to fear (as X rays, radiotherapy, and carbon free nuclear energy already show).

Second, life on Earth is much more cosmos dependent than it looks: not just sun weather (sun explosions, sun activity, up or down), but also cosmic weather are not just important for humanity, they may have played a primordial role. 

Third, the Voyager probes were intended to take the first detailed pictures of the outer planets. They became the first interstellar probes thanks to their usage of the heat of three Plutonium cartridges to keep warm and generate electricity. Plutonium is mighty, but those Plutonium batteries are still running out of power. Due to radioactive decay converted into heat, the Voyagers’ Radioactive Thermoelectric  Generators are losing about .8% of their power output each year. So the heat was dialed down on some of the instruments, which remarkably kept working (the ultraviolet detector still works at minus 80 C while it was designed for a minimum of minus 35C… Same with the Cosmic Ray System on Voyager 2). 22 systems were turned off in Voyager 1 to save power over the decades (as of 2022 CE)… However the ducts for the hydrazine propellant keeping the spacecrafts’ High Gain Antenna aiming towards Earth cannot be allowed to freeze…

In any case, after 50 years, the on-going operations of the Voyagers is not just a testimony to great nuclear and electronic technology, but keeps on bringing unexpected discoveries contradicting previous logic, that is keep on bringing great science. 

Those who argue for shrinking civilization should be reminded of the feats tech can accomplish, and the understanding it leads to. It turns out indeed that some of the unexpected results of the Voyagers were unexpected because the logic used for these predictions was not subtle enough. With more subtlety in the computations, we get some of what the Voyagers showed to be true.

In cases like that, when reality shows us that our logic is coming short, what is established is the necessity for more rigorous and clever logic, and the mistake(s) that were done… And the lessons carry everywhere, especially in complicated fields such as politics, economics, sociology, the human sciences. 

Hard science forces us to learn to think better, when time and time again, little innocuous reasonings we thought were sufficient turn out grossly mistaken because of little details we overlooked… which, after all, were not that small in the consequences they bear.

Launch more Interstellar probes (China, heavens bless, is planning two…)

Humanity is a voyage to the great beyond. Claiming it’s not, and actively blocking the voyage, especially in the interest of anti-intellectual, parsimonious or puritan ethics, is inhuman.

Patrice Ayme

 

 

It turns out the shape of the diverse features here are not as expected, or even their nature. The Termination Shock turns out to be rather spherical (it was expected to be comet-like). Also it is less of a shock than expected. The Heliosheath (confusely named heliosphere above) turns out to be flatter than expected (thus why Voyager 2 came out of it faster than expected, as V2 plunges below the (sort of) plane made by the Solar System). In retrospect, many of these characteristics should have been expected, the logic previously used was not subtle enough.