The Webb is Cast

Seeing Infinity

This is an essay I posted to Medium about a year ago. Given the evidence that has come back from the James Webb space Telescope in the interim, I thought I’d post it to Substack;

When the James Webb Space Telescope is fully operational, it will begin resolving the details of ever further galaxies out of the haze of the cosmic background radiation and those on the edge, currently described as young galaxies, because only the highest, bluest frequencies are visible to current observations, will present more of the spectrum and appear as mature galaxies.

What this means and how it will be interpreted are two different things.

What we will hear is a re-juggling of all the various ideas already taken for granted; Inflation, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc. and possibly some new patches, to explain the fact that observation failed to support theory. Again.

Is there some way to arrange all the pieces, so they come together as a coherent whole, or are some seriously flawed premises being taken for granted?

For those of us who have followed the evolution of cosmology over the decades, there are many details that haven’t been given the attention they deserve and for those following the field today, there are far more open questions and conflicting observations and theories than should allow the level of confidence currently expressed by the leading experts.

As someone with a lot of respect for expertise, I will give a fair amount of credence to even the more extreme ideas, such as multiverses, if there are no serious and obvious holes in the foundations on which they rest.

There is one gapping hole in the foundation that stands out like a sore thumb, to my elementary respect for basic logic.

When galactic redshift was first observed and measured, it was a logical assumption that it was Doppler Shift. That as the source moves away and the energy has to travel an ever increasing distance, the frequency of the waves would be stretched and thus shifted to a lower frequency.

Yet as this redshift was ever more carefully calibrated, it became obvious that galaxies were not all just moving about, but that overall redshift increased proportional to distance in all directions. Which either means that redshift is an optical effect, or that we happen to be at the exact center of the universe.

Given this light was otherwise uninterrupted and clear over very long distances, there didn’t seem to be any lensing effect, so it didn’t seem to be optical.

As it seems doubtful that we happen to be at the exact center of the universe, somehow the idea took hold that space itself must be expanding, because “Spacetime!”

If it sounds like I’m not taking this concept seriously, it’s because I’m not and cannot.

The idea, if you happen to read the literature, is that light is like some wavy line, stuck on the surface of this expanding space and as the space is stretched out, the line gets less wavy. They are not just marks on the space that expand as it’s stretched. The form of waves is emergent from energy propagating. The description generally given is basic Doppler effect, the waves are redshifted by the recession of the source, though the underlaying idea is the math can be tweeked enough to say it’s the waves being stretched and ignore the actual motion of the light.

If this seems disrespectful of the experts, consider the entire premise of General Relativity and its physical basis as spacetime, is that the speed of light is always measured as a Constant.

In the actual theory, in a moving frame, both measures of distance and duration are dilated equally, because the combined motion of the frame and any activity within it can’t exceed the speed of light in the vacuum.

While there are some deeper conceptual, “map versus territory,” issues here, between the math and the physics, it still doesn’t work to explain redshift, because if relativistic space is expanding, then the speed of light should increase, in order to remain Constant to it.

Yet that is not what is proposed. What is assumed is that light takes longer to cross this expanding space, in order to be redshifted, so it’s specifically not constant. Two metrics of space are being derived from the same light. One based on the spectrum and one based on the speed and the speed is still being treated as the denominator!

Think of the articles being written on this subject and all of them refer to the expansion in terms of how much longer light takes to cross the universe, than it did earlier. As Einstein said, “Space is what you measure with a ruler.” The ruler being used is still the speed of light.

In which case, the expansion is increasing distance, measured in lightyears, not “expanding” space and we are back to the problem of appearing to be at the center of the universe.

No one in the field I’ve raised this point with will acknowledge it is a basic logical flaw, but they also don’t have a reason why it is not. About the closest to a rebuttal I’ve received is that the speed of light is only measured locally, while the expansion is a universal phenomena. To which I point out, it still has to expand locally, where the light is crossing, in order to explain redshift.

If the expansion were being treated as the denominator, then the speed of light would be the numerator and it would be a”tired light” theory.

Consider that epicycles really were brilliant math, as description, laying a lot of the foundations of geometry, while the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation. Then consider the degree to which modern physics theory similarly assumes math to be foundational, rather than emergent with the patterns it describes. Map versus territory.

I would add that while single spectrum light will only redshift due to recession, multispectrum light “packets” do redshift over distance, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster, but that would mean we are sampling a wave front, not observing individual photons traveling billions of lightyears.

Which would open an even larger theoretical Pandora’s Box, as to whether the quantization of light is fundamental to the light, or more a factor of its absorption and measurement.

This effect compounding on itself would explain the parabolic curve in the rate far more economically than proposing much of the energy of the universe is otherwise invisible, aka, “dark energy.”

It used to be that when observation didn’t match prediction, the theoretical foundations of the prediction were possibly considered falsified, not just that there was some enormous new force of nature.

What if your accountant could just write in a figure and call it, “dark money,” whenever he found a gap in the books, rather than having to go back and tear them apart?

So, when the James Webb Space Telescope is finally operational, it will send earthquakes through the physics community. They will be papered over at first, possibly for years, but eventually younger theorists will realize there is no future to post-empirical theorizing and start pulling at those patches, no matter how much the sociology of large movements requires them to adhere to accepted ideas, in order to advance.

The future is a continuation of the past, until it becomes a reaction to it.