By Rafi Letzter
We’re getting something wrong about the universe.
By Rafi Letzter 6 Science & Astronomy
We’re getting something wrong about the universe.
It might be something small: a measurement issue that makes certain stars looks closer or farther away than they are, something astrophysicists could fix with a few tweaks to how they measure distances across space. It might be something big: an error — or series of errors — in cosmology, or our understanding of the universe’s origin and evolution. If that’s the case, our entire history of space and time may be messed up. But whatever the issue is, it’s making key observations of the universe disagree with each other: Measured one way, the universe appears to be expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.
“We think that if our understanding of cosmology is correct, then all of these different measurements should be giving us the same answer,” said Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and co-author of the new paper.
The two most famous measurements work very differently from one another. The first relies on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): the microwave radiation leftover from the first moments after the Big Bang. Cosmologists have built theoretical models of the entire history of the universe on a CMB foundation — models they’re very confident in, and that would require an all-new physics to break. And taken together, Mack said, they produce a reasonably precise number for the Hubble constant, or H0, which governs how fast the universe is currently expanding.
The second measurement uses supernovas and flashing stars in nearby galaxies, known as Cepheids. By gauging how far those galaxies are from our own, and how fast they’re moving away from us, astronomers have gotten what they believe is a very precise measurement of the Hubble constant. And that method offers a different H0.
“If we’re getting different answers that means that there’s something that we don’t know,” Mack told Live Science. “So this is really about not just understanding the current expansion rate of the universe — which is something we’re interested in — but understanding how the universe has evolved, how the expansion has evolved, and what space-time has been doing all this time.”
Weikang Lin, also a cosmologist at NCSU and lead author of the paper, said that to develop a full picture of the problem, the team decided to round up all the different ways of “constraining” H0 in one place. The paper has not yet been formally peer reviewed or published, and is available on the preprint server arXiv.
Here’s what “constraining” means: Measurements in physics rarely turn up exact answers. Instead, they put limits on the range of possible answers. And by looking at these constraints together, you can learn a lot about something you’re studying. Looking through one telescope, for example, you might learn that a point of light in space is either red, yellow or orange. Another might tell you it’s brighter than most other lights in space but less bright than the sun. Another might tell you it’s moving across the sky as fast a planet. None of those constraints would tell you much on their own, but taken together they suggest you’re looking at Mars.
HT/KcTaz
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Meanwhile climate scientists have 72 different values for climate sensitivity to CO2 and they are not bothered with that.
Correction, The universe was created by a 97% consensus of Mann…. : )
Rafi, you might want to look into Randell Mills – The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics (GUT-CP) https://brilliantlightpower.com/book/ . He predicted the increase in universal expansion prior to it being observed.
Are Universal constants universal and / or constant? Perhaps space / time fluctuates on a macro level and has different properties in different areas of the universe.
Maybe space / time / gravity is an ocean. Objects can move withing this medium at different rates, based on some unknown reason – and in different directions. What if dimension 5 – 11 are not microscopically folded?
gmak October 18, 2019 at 9:31 am
Maybe space / time / gravity is an ocean.
Everything is swimming or floating in a sea of electrons.
The Universe selected the Individual as the PRIME entity. The US Constitution as Self Evident codified the Individual as the fundamental legal unit….See below:
Many studies in Evolution point out that Creating a new species by random changes in DNA has huge problems.
https://youtu.be/noj4phMT9OE
One of these studies looked at the probability of a random DNA change producing an actual functional protein (not even THE Specific REQUIRED PROTEIN).
The answer was 1 in 10^70 ish…or 10^30 times the number of protons in the universe…which even at “molecular recombination rate frequencies” in the microsecond range would happen only once in 10^25 times the age of the Universe.
So basically impossible.
A species only 1/4 million years separated from its closest ancestor requires thousands of NEW FUNCTIONAL proteins…in very many specific co-working protein groups…with staggeringly complex working morphologies (protein shapes).
But Evolution sure seems to have happened. We clearly see a “path” of species development in the paleo record.
To my mind, just about the only theory that can reconcile this impossible “PROTEIN PROBLEM” (and all the other problems) is the Many Universes Quantum Theory…In which every possible quantum state arising from an initial state evolving in time (A big bang, for instance) “Spins off” a POTENTIAL new universe.
An actual Universe only “COLLAPSES” out of the evolving quantum waveform INTO REALITY when a MEASUREMENT is made by a conscious Von Neuman entity (i.e. An Individual) that simultaneously arises within the evolving quantum waveform. (John Von Neuman defined the requirements of a Quantum Observer…look it up…long story).
Socialists please note that the INDIVIDUAL is the fundamental “conscious” unit of the universe…not some defined group.
It doesn’t matter how improbable a quantum event is…if the quantum event state CAN exist while that same quantum state includes an INDIVIDUAL that can observe it…it will Collapse into Reality (whatever the hell reality is).
If this was the way that life evolved on Earth BY A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE evolution of quantum states that collapsed into reality …the likelihood that there are other places in the universe where life evolved is essentially 0.
To add to the “Protein Problem” see Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis. This Wiki article chronicles how improbable it is that life started on earth.
So who “collapsed” the quantum event (Big Bang) and when. Who was our Adam and where and when did zhe “happen”.
Note that there would be no new Species forming in reality AFTER the Collapse Event because of the “Protein Problem”. Genetic variations are allowed…but no new organisms requiring new proteins are allowed.
None of the three characters in your link has even an undergraduate degree in biology, so no surprise that they have no inkling as to how evolution works. They can’t use spurious, utterly inappropriate math to “disprove” what is a fact observed in the wild and created or recreated in labs every day, ie that mutations in genes (DNA sequences coding for proteins) and in the amino acid sequences of proteins produce new functional proteins. The DNA mutations are of course heritable if in the germ cells of multicellular organisms or anywhere in the genomes of unicells.
While humans and chimps share 99% of our DNA, the differences are greater in our genes, ie the 33% of our genomes which code for proteins. In six or seven million years of separate evolution, the two African ape lines have accumulated quite a few differences in our proteomes. Also in the sequences which control gene expression.
Thus, for instance, both species have the same number of hair follicles per square inch, but over most of human bodies, the hair grows short rather than long.
At least one gross chromosomal mutation has influenced human evolution. Our large chromosome #2 resulted from the fusion of two small standard great ape chromosomes. It’s associated with our development of upright walking.
Three protein-coding, ie gene, mutations allowed the human brain to triple in size:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trio-genes-supercharged-human-brain-evolution
An unstated assumption in measuring expansion is that the universe is isotropic. That is, one should get the same answer in whatever direction one looks, and at all time scales (distances.)
My take on the situation is as follows:
If our universe started from a singularity (Big Bang point), then everything should have radiated outward from that singularity, albeit possibly with different velocities, depending on mass and random variations. Thus, the particles would be something like the expanding membrane of a balloon, with nothing left at the origin point. However, Einstein’s work says that since light is bent by mass, all photons will be constrained to the mass of visible matter (and Dark Matter?). That is, light can’t escape from the universe. Under those circumstances, we can no longer observe the position of the singularity, only light from where it used to be at the edge of our observations and along the circumference of the constraining shell.
Now, assuming an instantaneous constant radial expansion (R) from the point of the singularity, the mass of the universe at right angles (circumference) to the radial direction would be expanding at 2pi*R. That is, there should be a more than 6-fold difference in apparent expansion rates, depending on the direction of view for the nearest bodies. For, bodies very far away, we are looking at expansion rates billions of years ago, which may have been faster or slower, depending on if the universe’s expansion is slowing down or increasing, respectively.
Any thoughts?
Acceleration is the rate of change of speed in a given direction. If the speed of light is constant but the direction changes, light is being accelerated. In a universe curved by mass, light travelling from a distant source is under a constant curvature/ acceleration, and so should be red/blue shifted depending on the curvature. The further away the observer is from the originating source, the greater the apparent acceleration and the greater the red shift. Light shifting shows the extent of curvature of intervening space/time, rather than the distance to the source. That’s how I’ve always thought of it.
Eesh, this actually makes sense. If a photon is travelling a longer distance at a constant speed the wavelength would be stretched over that curvature…
I need to do some space curvature research now…
Roland
If Julian Barbour’s thesis is correct (I.e., MATTER establishes time and without MATTER there is NO TIME..the condensed form!) Then all sorts of things might be very wrong cosmology wise. For example, the speed of light..with a different time metric, say in the pure/empty space between galaxies, may not be constant. Well,
actually the “clock” being influenced by “matter” and it’s density, would be different.
If it ain’t falsifiable then it ain’t science: the demarcation boundary criterion. Much of what passes for cosmology, particularly pop-cosmology (you know the pap sold by Tyson, Cacu, Suzuki) is just virtue signaling.
Apart from the standard model, there are two other views of the Universe that I know of.
https://www.plasma-universe.com/
and
https://www.electricuniverse.info/
Spatial curvature is a candidate because more curvey (“hyperbolic”) and less curvey (“spherical”) space are mathematically consistent just as our own “flat” space is. If space was more curvey in the past, then we are unknowingly looking into a different kind of space when we view faraway objects, in which objects are naturally fainter because their light dissipates more efficiently in higher-curvature space. The key objection to this would be that therefore we are coincidently living in a time when the universe just happens to be flat, which is too coincidental, but that overlooks the intimate connection of life & physical law which quantum physics reveals. The key is simply that whatever space curvature we inhabit, we natively see to be flat. Given that, the universe can be remapped with a migrating curvature (seen locally as a migrating speed of light) and the distant observations make sense because you expect them to come out fainter, as the supernovae do. A further consequence is that there is no spatial expansion at all, it’s just an illusion of the migrating spatial curvature. If this idea is in fact the solution, it’ll take a long time to catch on.
A great deal of comment. But the topic was really why do we see the universe expanding at different rates in different directions. Possibly the reason why it is a question at all is because of the assumptions that underlie the question. The Big Bang Theory has been dead for a long time. But since it is a religious viewpoint, it will not lie down to be buried. (Just like the Anthropogenic Climate Change Theory).
The assumption is that the universe expanded from a single point. What if instead it were stretched by an outside force? You could easily get asymmetrical expansion rates. This is actually what the Bible describes; that God stretched out the universe. And because of General Relativity Theory, the expanded universe would display an age that would appear ancient, but could actually be as young as only a few thousand years.
ian C
Hint: Maybe red shift ISN’T due to Doppler. And NO, I don’t know what it is due to if not Doppler, but it IS an assumption
Until science adopts metaphyics and the fractal holographic universe it will never understand anything
Mr. Letzer is not a cosmologist:
“Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.”
Therefore, I’d urge commenters to read the original article rather than, or, time permitting, in addition to, his take on it at Space.com.
Personally, I’ve thought there was something wrong with the universe ever since I learned about i, and the fact that one can actually do useful work with it.
I mean come on — you’re taught through your whole math experience that multiplying two numbers of the same sign give a positive number, and that square roots always have the same sign, then suddenly second-year algebra comes along and bam— they throw the square root of -1 in your face and act like it’s no big deal.
I think they know it’s a sign of the Apocalypse, but don’t want to admit to it.
I would wncourage all interested parties to take a look at the work of Dr PM Robitaille on Vixra
http://vixra.org/author/pierre-marie_robitaille.
He has some imteresting insights on the nature of the “CMB”, black body radiation, and its (mis)applications in physics.
http://vixra.org/pdf/1310.0116v1.pdf concerns thermal emission if the oceans and its implications regarding the earth’s “energy budget” and implications to “global warming”
Sorry to be late to the party, but there was a mistake and it was made in 1929. Prior to that time there were 3 competing models of the universe under consideration – Expanding, Contracting and Steady State. Hubble’s discovery in 1929 that the light from most galaxies visible from Earth was Doppler shifted to the red (meaning that the distance between the Earth and those galaxies was increasing) led to the conclusion that the Universe was expanding. Though intuitive, that conclusion was a mistake. Like the action around a massive black hole, gravity from the Cosmic Singularity in the center of a Big Crunch Contracting Universe would be pulling all of the galaxies to it with those closer to the singularity moving faster than those farther away resulting in a red shift in any light passing between them. As between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and any other galaxy visible from Earth, one would typically be closer to the singularity and moving faster towards the singularity than the one farther away causing the distance between them to be increasing and a red shift in any light passing between them – exactly as Hubble observed – even though they will both end up in the singularity. The Big Crunch contracting model also has simple explanations for Dark Energy and Dark Matter based on simple gravity.
See http://www.bigcrunchuniverse.com for a complete explanation. No math required.
Einstein’s General Relativity relies on the application of differential and integral calculus to the metric of space-time, which both require the theory to be built on an assumption about space-time being differentiable, maybe it’s particulate in a way that local GR effects like Mercury Perihelion is a good approximation but predictions ove much larger distances breaks down. That would mean we have no tool to make good predictions and conclusions from certain observations are themselves impossible because of a lack of suitable mathematical framework.
“It might be something small: a measurement issue that makes certain stars looks closer or farther away than they are, something astrophysicists could fix with a few tweaks to how they measure distances across space.
It might be something big: an error — or series of errors — in cosmology, or our understanding of the universe’s origin and evolution. If that’s the case, our entire history of space and time may be messed up.
But whatever the issue is, it’s making key observations of the universe disagree with each other: Measured one way, the universe appears to be expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate.
And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.”
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&authuser=1&sxsrf=ACYBGNQBSncC_hQ2LotD1yqgXPlnbQvcSw%3A1572278258564&ei=8g-3XdKJIuqKmwWw-6TIBw&q=what+are+cepheid+variable+stars&oq=What+are+Cepheide&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
Song by Talking Heads
And you may find yourself
Living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world
And you may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!
Water dissolving and water removing
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again into silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
You may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say yourself
“My God! What have I done?”
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Look where my hand was
Time isn’t holding up
Time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Letting the days go by
Same as it ever was
And here the twister comes
Here comes the twister
Letting the days go by (same as it ever was)
Same as it ever was (same as it ever was)
Letting the days go by (same as it ever was)
Same as it ever was
Once in a lifetime
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Brian Eno / Christopher Frantz / David Byrne / Jerry Harrison / Tina Weymouth
Once In A Lifetime (Remastered) lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc, Universal Music Publishing Group