How did the universe come to be? The prevailing theory is everything that is
began with the Big Bang. In a nutshell, the theory suggests everything,
everywhere, all at once suddenly burst to life. The caveat being everything
and everywhere prior to the Big Bang is fairly hard to conceptualize.
The Big Bang theory is currently the best model we have for the birth of our
universe. Astrophysicists have shown the theory explains, fairly
comprehensively, phenomena we've observed in space over decades, like
lingering background radiation and elemental abundances. It's a robust
framework that gives us a pretty good idea of how the cosmos came into being
some 13.8 billion years ago.
But with the flurry of preprint papers and popular science articles about
the James Webb Space Telescope's first images, old, erroneous claims that
the Big Bang never happened at all have been circulating on social media and
in the press in recent weeks. One scientist has claimed that the JWST images
are inspiring "panic among cosmologists" -- that is, the scientists who
study the origins of the universe.
This is simply not true. The JWST has not provided evidence disproving the
Big Bang theory, and cosmologists aren't panicking. Why, then, are we seeing
viral social media posts and funky headlines that suggest the Big Bang
didn't happen at all?
To answer that question, and show why we should be skeptical of claims like
this, we need to understand where the idea came from.
Where did "the Big Bang didn't happen" come from?
It all
started with an article
at The Institute of Art and Ideas, a British philosophical organization, on
Aug. 11. The piece was written by Eric Lerner, who has long argued against
the Big Big theory. He even wrote a book titled The Big Bang Never Happened
in 1991.
This provocatively headlined article at IAI is also related to an upcoming
debate Lerner is participating in, run by the IAI, dubbed "Cosmology and the
Big Bust."
Lerner's article gathered steam across social media, being shared widely on
Twitter and across Facebook, over the last week. It makes sense why it's
caught fire: It's a controversial idea that upends what we think we know
about the cosmos. In addition, it's tied to a new piece of technology in the
James Webb telescope, which is seeing parts of the universe we've never been
able to see before. Including Webb as the news hook here suggests there's
new data which overturns a long-standing theory.
Don't get me wrong -- there is new and intriguing data emerging from the
JWST. Just not the kind that would undo the Big Bang theory. Most of this
new data trickles down to the public in the form of scientific preprints,
articles that are yet to undergo peer review and land on repositories like
arXiv, or popular press articles.
Lerner's piece uses some of the early JWST studies to attempt to dismiss the
Big Bang theory. What's concerning is how it misconstrues early JWST data to
suggest that astronomers and cosmologists are worried the well-established
theory is incorrect. There are two points early in Lerner's article which
show this:
He points to a preprint with the word "Panic!" in its title,
calling it a "candid exclamation."
He misuses a quote from Allison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at
the University of Kansas.
The first point is just a case of Lerner missing the pun. The full
title of the paper is "Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy
Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field." The first author of
that preprint, astronomer Leonardo Ferreira, is clearly riffing on popular
2000s emo band Panic! at the Disco with his title. It's a tongue-in-cheek
reference, not a cosmological crisis.
As for the second point, Lerner takes this quote from Allison Kirkpatrick,
which comes from a Nature
news article
published on July 27:
"Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning
and wondering if everything I've done is wrong."
This cherrypicked quote isn't in direct reference to the Big Bang theory.
Rather, Kirkpatrick is reckoning with the first data coming back from the
JWST about the early evolution of the universe. It's true there are some
puzzles for astronomers to solve here, but, so far, they aren't rewriting
the beginning of the universe to do so. Kirkpatrick has stated her quotes
were misused and even changed her Twitter name to "Allison the Big Bang
happened Kirkpatrick."
"We as scientists have a responsibility to educate the public, and I take
that responsibility very seriously," Kirkpatrick told CNET. "Deliberately
misleading the public makes it difficult for them to trust real scientists
and to know fact from fiction."
In addition, Lerner's article claims that his ideas are being censored by
the scientific establishment, and later he also points to his theory being
important to develop fusion energy on Earth. It's no coincidence the same
paragraph links to LPPFusion, a company run by Lerner aimed at developing
clean energy technologies.
Why does this matter?
One of the chief reasons the Big Bang theory stands up is because of the
cosmic microwave background. This was discovered in 1964. In short, the CMB
is the radiation leftover from the Big Bang, right when the universe began
and scientists have been able to "see" it with satellites that can detect
that lingering radiation.
So to bolster evidence the Big Bang theory is incorrect, you'd need to
explain the CMB another way. Lerner's dismissive of the CMB, and his
proposal for the observation has been
disproven
in the past. If you're interested in further arguments against Lerner's
hypotheses and why the claims don't add up, I recommend checking out Brian
Keating's
recent YouTube video. Keating is a cosmologist at the University of California, San Diego, and
dives into a bit more detail about the limits of Lerner's arguments.
It's also important to note
Webb is not built to see and undertake new analyses of the CMB itself. The telescope can't "see" that far back in time. However, it will look at
an epoch a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. What it finds there
will almost certainly reshape our views on the early universe, galaxies and
the evolution of the cosmos. But it's disingenuous to claim the early images
and study results have contradicted the Big Bang theory.
Kirkpatrick notes JWST's images actually do the opposite. She said they
"support the Big Bang model because they show us that early galaxies were
different than the galaxies we see today -- they were much smaller!"
Science is about making incremental progress in our understanding, coming to
increasingly stronger conclusions based on observations. The observations
astrophysicists and cosmologists have made over decades line up with the Big
Bang theory. They don't line up anywhere near as neatly if we use Lerner's
alternative theory. That's doesn't mean scientists won't find evidence
overturning the Big Bang theory. They just might! But, for now, it remains
our best theory for explaining what we see.
Scientific theories can -- and should -- be challenged by well-reasoned
scientists presenting highly detailed and thoughtful arguments. This is not
one of those times. And that means, despite the headlines, the Big Bang did
happen.
Source: Link
Tags:
Space & Astrophysics