The biggest science story in decades is being swept under the carpet

I was going to post about this a couple of months ago, but the story is getting even more interesting.  The new James Webb Space Telescope is showing images of the most distant galaxies ever seen, and it is raising questions on basic, fundamental theories about the universe - most notably, the Big Bang theory.

Plasma physicist Eric Lerner (a long time questioner of the Big Bang theory) lays out the case for the prosecution:

It is not too complicated to explain why these too small, too smooth, too old and too numerous galaxies are completely incompatible with the Big Bang hypothesis. Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance.

Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.

Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, assuming that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.

Smaller and smaller is exactly what the JWST images show. Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.

This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance. Starting in 2014, we had already published results, based on HST images, that showed that galaxies with redshifts all the way up to 5 matched the expectations of non-expanding, ordinary space.

There's a lot more at the link, but this excerpt is long enough to give you the flavor.  Amusingly, Lerner links to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject: Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field

I love the first word in the title, although rather think that the authors used this with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

The wagons are being circled by the scientific establishment (which is what makes this story interesting to me).  Space.com has an article filled with the usual name calling: "pseudoscience", "disinformation", claims of "misused" and "out of context" quotes, "serial denier", "anti-science", and even "flat-earth".  The article quotes (at length) a guy who wrote a book called "How To Talk To A Science Denier".

Whew!  That's a lot of insults to pack into a single article.  I'm glad to see scientific discourse advanced!

Now I'm not an astrophysicist (although older brother is), so I don't know which is right - Big Bang or Non-expanding Universe.  Or maybe neither.  Who knows?

But the reaction to this challenge to "Scientific Orthodoxy" is fascinating.  And the science.com brings to mind that quote from Hamlet: Methink the Lady doth protest too much.  It also brings to mind two very old posts of mine.  In The Iron Law and the Bureaucratization of Science I write about the curious fact that scientific progress does not seem to be accelerating, despite hundreds (or thousands) of times more scientists and funding.  In it I posted a chart from Nigel Calder's blog (he founded and edited New Scientist magazine):

These are Calder's opinion but are a reasonable comparison.  It certainly does not seem like things are speeding up - certainly not by a factor of 100x.  There's a lot in my post of complaints by eminent scientists about suppression of views dangerous to the scientific establishment.  I encourage you to click through and read the whole post.  Remember, this is more than ten years old.  And think about the science.com article linked and all their name calling. 

This is not a one-off, a "black swan" event.  The scientific establishment has been doing this for a long, long time.  In Soviet Science, I wrote about how the head of CERN prohibited employees there from commenting on Svenmark's experiment (likely because it casts doubt on Global Warming theories).  In it, I point out the breakdown in the scientific method on display:

At this point, I must confess that I'm an old faht, getting my science education back in the 1970s, from teachers and professors who got theirs in the 1940s.  I was taught that the Scientific Method went something like this:

1. Observe something happening.
2. Formulate a testable hypothesis about what might be causing it.  
3. If your hypothesis isn't falsifiable (i.e. cannot be shown to be wrong), go back to 2.
4. Formulate a Null Hypothesis (likely alternative) for your hypothesis in 3.
5. Construct an experiment to test your hypothesis against the null hypothesis.
6. Perform the experiment, and document the results.
7. Explain which hypothesis was closer to matching the observed reality in 1, and why.

It seems that the head of CERN - one of the biggest scientific research organizations in the world - doesn't want his people to do that last step.  Everything else is OK (for now, at least), but that last one is right out.

You can read more about Svenmark's hypothesis and experiment here.  The scientific establishment seems to hate this theory, as it's so not helpful to the Global Warming position.  Unfortunately for them, it has been experimentally confirmed (see the link) - in great contrast to much of establishment climate science.

So what gives with all of this?  I mean, this is not the public image of cool, rational scientists advancing our understanding of the universe.  I wrote (again) at length about this a long time back in Science and the Cold Civil War.  The post has multiple examples of how the scientific research funding game is played.  The Climategate emails make an appearance here, as does the term "Saganized".  I know that I'm throwing a lot at you, but this is important as a description of the (dare we say it?) pettiness of the scientific establishment.  Physician, heal thyself.

Lastly (I can hear the cheers of relief) is Science as practiced today is very sick.  This seems pertinent as it lets us circle back to the both science.com article and Calder's wonderment at the slowdown of scientific advancement:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

It also has what may be (but probably isn't) my first link to RetractionWatch.

So is the Big Bang theory right?  Maybe.  But as older brother told me long ago, the Scientific Method isn't replacing a falsehood with a truth, it's replacing a falsehood with a more subtle falsehood.  But the Big Bang theory is not the point here.  Rather, it's Physicists behaving badly:

The Queen Of The World and I loved that show, and a lot of the reason is in that clip.

So the issue is not whether the Big Bang theory is right or wrong, it's why won't the establishment allow actual scientific discussion of so many issues.  There are too many sacred cows (and gravy trains) at risk.

Oh, yeah - this has been going on a long, long time.  And even NASA scientists admit it.