Contrabang # 9 Peering Past the Past

This week we'll be looking at Big Bang cosmology, primarily using a number of Starts With a Bang! articles. After that is short review of another article from this week on parallel universes.

Peering Past the Past

To understand Big Bang cosmology, there are only a couple of concepts needed to get started. 

1. The universe started from a single point of pure energy. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a nearly uniform hot, dense soup, with slight irregularities caused by quantum effects. As the universe expanded and cooled, the soup condensed into normal matter, and clumped into galactic clusters with large voids in between.
2. Because the speed of light is finite, looking at distant objects means looking back in time. If we look at a start a million light years distant, we are seeing it as it appeared a million years ago.

It's more complicated than that. (The regulars here will understand why the theories grow increasingly complex as additional evidence is gathered.) But, this is enough to get us started.

According to their theory, looking at more distant objects means looking at a more primitive universe. Nearby we should see modern galaxies and galactic superstructures, but, as we get more distant, galaxies should get more primitive and more tightly packed. Even further back we should see the time before galaxies, with just individual stars in a hot, primordial soup, and further we should see a time before stars had even condensed. In practice there is a limit, because if we go all the way back before galaxies formed, it is too distant to actually resolve individual stars.

There should still be evidence to support the theory. In general, Redshift Theory plus the Big Bang Theory predict that there should be a high correlation between red shift and "primitiveness" of observed objects. Conversely, we skeptics would expect that evidence would routinely contradict the predictions, that scientists would have to shift goalposts to downplay the contradictions, and we should see them adding complexity to the models so they can say that the observations were, in fact, predicted by the theories.

I was curious about the evidence. Do we really see a more primitive universe as we look further back? I had no idea, so I did a quick DuckDuckGo search. The first hit was from Smithsonian, and lo, the second was an article by our good friend Ethan. Let's start with the Smithsonian article, titled Hubble Spotted the Oldest Galaxy It Has Ever Seen.

The “new” galaxy is called GN-z11, and it’s located 13.4 billion light years away. To put that in context, that means that the galaxy existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

The major takeaway from the short article is this:

GN-z11 is astonishingly old, but it’s exciting for another reason: its brightness. Scientists didn’t realize that such large, starry galaxies existed so far in the past.

The Big Bang Theory did not predict such early galaxies. If you look at older depictions of galactic evolution, they do not show galactic formation until billions of years after the big bang. They've had to revisit the theory to add "nascent" galaxies forming at the same time that stars were just beginning to light up. For instance, two sources (here and here) dating to 2001 and 2002, depict galaxy formation as not beginning until at least a billion years after the big bang.

It is amusing that Redshift Theory is causing problems with Big Bang Theory, but keep in mind that Big Bang Theory is downstream from Redshift Theory. If redshifts are ever explained by a mechanism other than relative velocities, then Big Bang Theory, cosmic expansion, and dark energy all must go away.

The Starts With a Bang! article is Ask Ethan: What Does The Edge Of The Universe Look Like? and doesn't include a review of the evidence, but a recital of the Big Bang Theory. One of these days, I'd like to count how many time he has explained the Big Bang Theory on his website. It seems to be about once per week or so.

After scientists observed the very, very old elliptical galaxies, they modified the timeline so that the proto-galaxies were present within the first billion years, when stars were just forming. Did that fix the problem? Consider this Starts With a Bang! article from early last year: The Earliest Galaxies Spin Just Like Our Milky Way, Defying Expectations. Here are a few select snippets.

• these internal motions look puzzlingly familiar
• unexpectedly, these galaxies don't exhibit chaotic internal motions, as instead, the gas swirls and rotates in a whirlpool motion, which is something we don't normally see until the Universe is about three times the age of these galaxies
• This flies in the face of what we would have expected!
• spectacularly puzzling
• We expected that young galaxies would be dynamically ‘messy,’ due to the havoc caused by exploding young stars, but these mini-galaxies show the ability to retain order and appear well regulated.
• a quite unexpected result

Suffice it to say, the Big Bang Theory does not predict that so-called modern galaxies would be detected with red shifts placing them within the first billion years.

Let's give a similar treatment to a spacetelescope.org article from 2016 regarding the oldest galaxy yet detected at the time.

• the galaxy is unusually bright considering its distance from Earth
• it’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed
• a great surprise to us
• showed us that our knowledge about the early Universe is still very restricted
• remains somewhat of a mystery for now
• tantalising

The pattern of cosmological observations is consistent. Surprise, followed by re-ordering of the theories (and additions of the complexity), followed later by re-assurances that the observations were, in fact, predicted all along. When they claim that the theories have predicted observations, we certainly have plenty of evidence to contradict that claim.

Could Parallel Universes Be Physically Real? (link)

This one is supposedly about parallel universes, but he spends most of it describing - what else? - the Big Bang Theory. I didn't really follow along with what the major premise of the article is, but include it here anyway to poke at a few of the individual statements.

You’ve likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events and chances that brought about our reality exactly as it is played out just the same.

Nope, can't say that I have. It's important to remember that this guy is kind of weird... it's not just an act. But that's okay, because he lives in Portland. At least he knows where he belongs.

Perhaps our Universe, with the version of events we’re familiar with, isn’t the only one out there. Perhaps there are other Universes, perhaps even with different versions of ourselves, different histories and alternate outcomes from what we’ve experienced.

As a rule of thumb, when Ethan starts leading off his sentences with "perhaps", brace yourself for a bunch of crazy talk. The issue at stake is the concept of falsifiability. If a theory cannot conceivably be proven false, then it is not a valid scientific theory. It's why scientists reject the theory of "God did it." How do you prove He didn't? It's more a matter of theology than science. Similarly, questions of parallel universes are more properly in the realm of science fiction than actual hard science. There is no imaginable test to disprove parallel universes. Ethan is perfectly free to talk about science fiction on his personal blog, so long as he distinguishes that it is science fiction and not actual, serious scientific inquiry.

This isn’t just fiction, but one of the most exciting possibilities brought up by theoretical physics. Here’s what the science says about whether parallel Universes might actually be real.

Well then... nevermind all that.

Our entire cosmic history is theoretically well-understood, but only qualitatively. It’s by observationally confirming and revealing various stages in our Universe’s past that must have occurred, like when the first stars and galaxies formed, and how the Universe expanded over time, that we can truly come to understand our cosmos.

That's an amazing non-admission of guilt. My taxes are theoretically well-filed, but only qualitatively. This car I'm selling you is theoretically well-maintained, but only qualitatively. Astrophysics has become a sect of mathematics more than a physical science. The theories are marvelous. It's too bad that the darned evidence gets in the way.

If the Universe were finite, we would see a specific set of properties inherent to the patterns that the Big Bang’s leftover temperature fluctuations displayed. But what we see instead are a different set of patterns, teaching us the exact opposite: the Universe is indistinguishable from being perfectly flat and infinitely large.

By the same patterns, the Universe is indistinguishable from one where spacetime and cosmological expansion are works of fiction.

But theoretically, the implications of our observations paint a picture that’s even more tantalizing.

Yes, the theory describes all kinds of awesome physics that can't be detected through observations. So tantalizing.

In the last episode of Contrabang!, I indicated that the exercise was starting to feel a bit like a psychological case study. What in the human psyche might drive someone to want to believe in parallel universes, and even call it valid science? Do they fantasize about a parallel version of themselves, one where they weren't bullied in school for being dorks, or where they had success with women?

Is it possible that there’s a Universe out there where everything happened exactly as it did in this one, except you did one tiny thing different, and hence had your life turn out incredibly different as a result?

• Where you chose the job overseas instead of the one that kept you in your country?

• Where you stood up to the bully instead of letting yourself be taken advantage of?

• Where you kissed the one-who-got-away at the end of the night, instead of letting them go? 

It looks like the evidence weighs in favor of our psychological hypothesis (unlike the Big Bang Theory).