One day?

 

The universe’s puzzlingly fast expansion 

may defy explanation, cosmologists fret

The controversial “Hubble tension” promises deep insight but, 

like dark matter and dark energy, could remain just another mystery

Before it's to late?

I hope they come to understand:

Isaiah 55:8-9

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

    neither are your ways my ways,”

declares the Lord.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

    so are my ways higher than your ways

    and my thoughts than your thoughts.

You're not going to understand infinite wisdom.

Your mind simply can not do it.

It's incomprehensible.

Some background:

Discovered less than a century ago, the expansion of the universe causes galaxies to rush away from Earth, stretching their light to longer, redder wavelengths. That observation spawned the idea of the big bang—and decades of bickering over the rate at which the universe is expanding, the Hubble constant. After a brief rapprochement, cosmologists are arguing again. Working from our cosmic neighborhood outward to more distant galaxies, one group has measured a rate significantly higher than the one derived by colleagues studying the cosmos’ farthest fringe and the afterglow of the big bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

“There’s no guarantee that there’s one effect that is causing all of this,” says Adam Riess, a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University. Some question whether the Hubble tension will ever be explained. “I wouldn’t bet my house on it,” says Sunny Vagnozzi, a cosmologist at the University of Trento.

:According to cosmologists’ prevailing theory, the universe contains 5% ordinary matter; 27% invisible dark matter, whose gravity holds galaxies together; and 68% dark energy, which stretches space like a pressure. Just after the big bang, the universe grew exponentially, hugely magnifying tiny quantum fluctuations in a dense soup of fundamental particles. Dark matter gathered in the dense spots, and hundreds of millions of years later ordinary matter settled in the clumps of dark matter to form galaxies. As the universe thinned, dark energy’s push overcame the pull of gravity, 

so that after slowing, 

the universe’s expansion 

is now accelerating.

(Theism:

belief in the existence of a god or gods, 

especially belief in one god 

as creator of the universe, 

intervening in it 

and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.

Theres ya some evidence as to why Theism is head and shoulders above all the others 

as the best metaphysical explanation for the universe to have been brought into existence.)

"The temperature of the CMB varies ever so slightly across the sky, providing a blotchy snapshot of the universe at the moment neutral atoms formed, 380,000 years after the big bang. A theory with just six parameters—including the Hubble constant—Lambda-CDM precisely fits the distribution of fluctuation sizes measured by Europe’s Planck spacecraft, says Tanvi Karwal, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago.

 “It’s insane that it works.”

I reiterate:

Isaiah 55:8-9

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

    neither are your ways my ways,”

declares the Lord.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,

    so are my ways higher than your ways

    and my thoughts than your thoughts.")

"However, the fit yields a value of the Hubble constant that clashes with the one measured directly. Since 2009, Riess and his colleagues have used various telescopes to create an elaborate “distance ladder” of the distances and red shifts of nearby galaxies. A key rung relies on observations of variable stars called Cepheids. Each pulses at a rate that reveals its intrinsic brightness, allowing observers to deduce its distance from its apparent brightness in the sky. JWST can tease out individual Cepheids in other galaxies, and its observations confirm the Hubble constant is 8% higher than Lambda-CDM predicts, Riess and colleagues reported in September."

"Some researchers say 

they’re still not 100% convinced 

the discrepancy is real."

(Yeah...

The fine tuned universe 

is an illusion 

they try and tell ya 

But this discrepancy?

100% on the money buddy.

Dont you dare doubt it.

Dont you dare question our faith 

in our own rigid orthodoxly!

How dare you!)

 “The field really needs a sensitive third way of measuring this,” says Johannes Eskilt, a cosmologist at the University of Oslo.

(Agreed) 

Others have proposed myriad models to explain it.

One solution assumes dark energy isn’t a cosmological constant, but is due to 

some kind of new physics."

(Oh its not new lol.

Its been around 

since before time :-)

"If so, its concentration could have fallen or even grown as the cosmos evolved, resulting in an expansion history that could start as the Lambda- CDM predicts but end at the higher directly measured value. In fact, Riess says he started his project in hopes of finding just such an effect."

(But how did it get there to start with is the real question)

"Other data nix that idea. Sound waves called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) rippled through the infant universe, and the CMB records how far they spread before atoms formed. That length is also imprinted in the distribution of galaxies. Comparing the two lengths reveals the expansion history halfway between the big bang and now. The result is a curve whose shape matches Lambda-CDM’s prediction, says Ryan Keeley, a cosmologist the University of California, Merced. That constraint makes it impossible to change the expansion history enough to resolve the Hubble tension, he and a colleague argued on 15 September in Physical Review Letters (PRL). “These most recent BAO data sets put the final nail in the coffin” of that solution, Keeley says."

It's what they are trying to resolve and cant.

"Karwal and Kamionkowski proposed that 

a new quantum field, 

a bit like an electric field, 

kicked in briefly 

100,000 years after the big bang 

Okay

So how was it determined

that at that moment:

"100,000 years after the big bang"

a new quantum field, 

a bit like an electric field, 

kicked in briefly"

Hum?

How does that not show:

"initial conditions"?

This is an illusion?

Were seeing the universe expanding folks 

just two different measurements 

give us two different results.

But who did the designing 

or the programming?

To start with.

and acted like extra “early” dark energy. 

Others have suggested 

the extra kick could have come from:

primordial magnetic fields, 

interactions of neutrinos, o

r even changes in the electron’s mass."

One more time:

ANYTHING

but:

Theism:

belief in the existence 

of a god or gods, 

especially belief in one god 

as creator of the universe, 

intervening in it.

The one explanation 

where the 

OVERWHELMING

scientific evidence 

is pointing.

The more you know about your world?

The more you know about:

cosmology, 

astronomy, 

astrophysics, 

molecular biology 

and quantum physics?

The more you will come to the conclusion 

there not only 

IS a God?

But that

THERE HAS TO BE A GOD!)

"Although more promising, such models also have problems, Vagnozzi says. For example, the CMB is known to get slightly blue shifted as it passes through clumps of dark matter. The effect gets bigger if the youthful universe expands faster. To avoid contradicting observations, early time solutions must include more dark matter. But the extra dark matter would tend to make the mature universe clumpier than it is, Vagnozzi says.

For example, light from distant, brilliant galaxies called quasars reveals no sign of extra clumpiness, says Samuel Goldstein, a cosmologist at Columbia University. A quasar’s spectrum shows a thicket of dark absorption lines, known as the Lyman-alpha forest. Each line marks a cloud of hydrogen that lies along the line of sight and soaks up the quasar’s light. In a paper in press in PRL, Goldstein and colleagues report that the clouds clump less than early dark energy would predict. “We ended up getting ridiculously strong constraints on early dark energy.”

(Again

How did those:

"ridiculously strong constraints 

on early dark energy"

get there?)

The clumpiness issue is one reason why something like early dark energy alone won’t solve the Hubble tension, Vagnozzi argues. “Early universe physics is always going to fall short and there will have to be something else,” he says. 

(No kidding?

Thx for the heads up.

“For the scientist who has lived by 

his faith in the power of reason, 

the story ends like a bad dream. 

He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, 

he is about to conquer the highest peak; 

as he pulls himself over the final rock, 

he is greeted by a band of theologians 

who have been sitting there for centuries.”

― Robert Jastrow, 

God and the Astronomers

In an interview with Christianity Today, 

Jastrow said:

"Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner 

because they have proven, by their own methods, 

that the world began abruptly in an act of creation 

to which you can trace the seeds of every star, 

every planet, every living thing 

in this cosmos and on the earth. 

And they have found that all this happened 

as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. 

That there are what I or anyone would call 

supernatural forces at work is now, 

I think, a scientifically proven fact."

Christianity Today, August 6, 1982

Tell ya what.

When these guys fianlly do:

"scale the mountains of ignorance"?

Me and my ilk will be sitting there

enjoying a nice cup of 

fresh ground coffee

Sayin:

Where ya been?

What took you so long?

The evidence has been clear 

for a long time now.

And?

For goodness sakes:

"lived by 

his faith 

in the power 

of reason".

Wher the fuck do these people think:

"the power 

of reason"

came from?

Do you trust primates?

Then why in the world 

would you trust a brain 

that supposedly 

"Evolved"

from it?)

"Karwal is less convinced. The universe is already less clumpy than Lambda-CDM predicts, she notes, and early dark energy doesn’t make that problem much worse. “If you’re going to say that Lyman-alpha excludes early dark energy, well, then, it also excludes Lambda-CDM,” she says."

Observations that could help probe early time physics may be hard to come by. For example, the quantum field Karwal and Kamionkowski proposed might have interacted with photons and left a fingerprint in how the microwaves of the CMB are polarized, Eskilt says. He and colleagues searched for that signal in Planck’s data and didn’t find it, they reported on 7 September in PRL."

"Future CMB studies such as the Simons Observatory, under construction in Chile, and the CMB-S4 project proposed for the South Pole should have the resolution to see such details, Kamionkowski says. “Ten years from now either we’ll be seeing early dark energy or we won’t be talking about it anymore.”

(Yeah, if were still here by then.

Some of us have our doubts

and with good reason.)

“We could be in the same position 

where we know that 

there is a source 

of early dark energy, 

but we have no idea what it is.”

Some of us might argue,

YOU'RE ALREADY TO THAT POINT.

For good measure 

just in case anybody 

wants to dwell in deeper:

Astronomers See a Cosmic Antigravity Force at Work