Is Cosmology Unraveling? And What Would that Mean?

So far the most intriguing discovery made by the Webb Space Telescope is the six red dots shown in the images above. They seem to be galaxies. They are very far away, and therefore very old, and they seem to be full of mature red stars. If the calculations are correct, they date to 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, which our theories say is nowhere near enough time for such a galaxy to form.

Cosmology has a lot of problems. To create a sensible model of our universe we have to imagine that it is full of Dark Matter that we can't see and infused with Dark Energy that baffles us. General Relativity posits that it is full of Black Holes, and some may have been discovered, but other theories –e.g., about the conservation of information – still show that Black Holes are impossible. The models require that the universe once underwent a period of extraordinarily rapid growth that we call Cosmic Inflation, which is theoretically possible but has certainly never been observed. There are basic issues in how we calculate relatively mundane numbers:

Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.

When this discrepancy was discovered people thought it would resolve as the data got better, but the data has gotten a lot better and the discrepancy remains.

I have long thought that the litany of special concepts needed to build this model resembles the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy, the wheels within wheels needed to fit the observed motions of the planets within an earth-centered universe. It is inelegant and bizarre, ripe for a Copernicus to come along and turn the system on its head.

Of course that isn't really an argument; maybe the universe just is inelegant and bizarre. But many scientists these days feel as I do, that something about our science is off, and that it needs to be rethought in a fundamental way. Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in the NY Times:

Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.

In both cosmology and quantum physics, the cutting edges of our quest to understand the universe, physicists feel baffled and stymied. Frustration is growing with existing methods and people are turning to radical models that others say are not really science at all:

There is, however, another possibility. We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

Cosmology is not like other sciences. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.

These rarefied issues don’t come up in most “regular” science (though one encounters similarly shadowy issues in the science of consciousness and in quantum physics). Working so close to the boundary between science and philosophy, cosmologists are continually haunted by the ghosts of basic assumptions hiding unseen in the tools we use — such as the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.

We are seeing Nobel Prize caliber scientists throwing out bizarre ideas, such as that the universe is a hologram, or a simulation, or that there are rival systems of laws in the universe that compete against each other and evolve over time.

I am not optimistic that any of this will be resolved in my lifetime. Although I have occasionally fantasized about a Copernican breakthrough, I doubt we will see one. The enormous amount of human and computer brainpower we have thrown at these problems over the past fifty years dwarfs the effort needed to create heliocentrism, or quantum physics and relativity. The problems we face now seem to be orders of magnitude more difficult.

In a sense this is ridiculously arcane; what difference could models of the universe's formation possibly make to our lives? But maybe, just maybe, the unraveling of scientific certainty is already having consequences in our society. 

I am willing to bet that if you looked into the smarter purveyors of conspiracy theories you would find that many of them are interested in bizarre physical theories like the simulation universe or the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Was the elite faith that rationality could make human life better tied, at some deep level, to the constant progress on the frontiers of science? One of the words I see used over and over to describe the elites of the Modern period is confidence: confidence that we could model the whole universe, that we could design cities better than any that grew up by chance, that we could all have flying cars and home nuclear reactors and drugs to cure our woes. The post-modern era has been defined as much as anything by the loss of that confidence. That has had some effects that I think are good, like an end to bulldozing old neighborhoods for concrete high-rises. Unable to defeat depression medically, we are trying ancient spiritual techniques like the guided drug trip. But is the turn away from a hard-edged rationality gnawing at the foundations of our politics, of our social peace?

Is the collapse of certainty in physics helping to drive vaccine denialism or fantasies about trucks full of stolen ballots?

If smart people were convinced that the universe is, in basic ways, simply beyond our understanding, what would change?

I don't know. But I have a deep sense, as I have tried to convey here many times, that societies are wholes. The pieces fit together. Not in any simple sense, and one of the regularities is that in every society there are people who reject its propositions and long for some other path. But I do think things are tied together, and that major changes in one important area of life are quite likely to have echoes in others. I have a sense that one of the foundations of the whole modern era – say, 1770 to 1970 – was faith in science, faith in our ability to learn about and understand the world. When I read about the morass in physics I feel that faith slipping away, and I wonder where that will lead.