'Hubble Tension' and the Nobel Prize Winner Who Wants to Replace Cosmology's Standard Model (msn.com)
- Reference: 0177897441
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/02/049212/hubble-tension-and-the-nobel-prize-winner-who-wants-to-replace-cosmologys-standard-model
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-nobel-prize-winner-who-thinks-we-have-the-universe-all-wrong/ar-AA1FM3zI
Riess thinks instead we should just replace the standard model:
> When I visited Riess, back in January, he mentioned he was looking forward to a data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a new observatory on Kitt Peak, in Arizona's portion of the Sonoran Desert. DESI has 5,000 robotically controlled optic fibers. Every 20 minutes, each of them locks onto a different galaxy in the deep sky. This process is scheduled to continue for a total of five years, until millions of galaxies have been observed, enough to map cosmic expansion across time... DESI's first release, last year, gave some preliminary hints that dark energy was stronger in the early universe, and that its power then began to fade ever so slightly. On March 19, the team followed up with the larger set of data that Riess was awaiting. It was based on three years of observations, and the signal that it gave was stronger: [2]Dark energy appeared to lose its kick several billion years ago .
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> This finding is not settled science, not even close. But if it holds up, a "wholesale revision" of the standard model would be required [says Colin Hill, a cosmologist at Columbia University. "The textbooks that I use in my class would need to be rewritten." And not only the textbooks — the idea that our universe will end in heat death has escaped the dull, technical world of academic textbooks. It has become one of our dominant secular eschatologies, and perhaps the best-known end-times story for the cosmos. And yet it could be badly wrong. If dark energy weakens all the way to zero, the universe may, at some point, stop expanding. It could come to rest in some static configuration of galaxies. Life, especially intelligent life, could go on for a much longer time than previously expected.
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> If dark energy continues to fade, as the DESI results suggest is happening, it may indeed go all the way to zero, and then turn negative. Instead of repelling galaxies, a negative dark energy would bring them together into a hot, dense singularity, much like the one that existed during the Big Bang. This could perhaps be part of some larger eternal cycle of creation and re-creation. Or maybe not. The point is that the deep future of the universe is wide open...
"Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new [3]Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model's champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes..." And Riess tells The Atlantic he's disappointed when complacent theorists just tell him " Yeah, that's a really hard problem ."
He adds, "Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-nobel-prize-winner-who-thinks-we-have-the-universe-all-wrong/ar-AA1FM3zI
[2] https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/20/1431243/is-dark-energy-getting-weaker-new-evidence-strengthens-the-case
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rubin-telescope-spy-satellite/680814/
A new model needed? (Score:3)
It's worth remembering just how complacent the late 19th century physicists were despite the obvious gaps in their models which Einstein and others use to build a radically different model. This time round the flaws are getting more obvious, but we lack a new hypothesis. Only when it comes along will we look back and say: 'How did anyone think "the standard model" was viable?'
The reality is that the scientific establishment has always settled in and enjoyed the perks of being the establishment. Admitting that your model is moth eaten is hard; pretending otherwise is much more comfortable.
Re: (Score:3)
Nice story, and wrong. Scientists are never complacent. The vast majority do not have what it takes to upend existing theory with something better because existing theory has many interlocking parts. That was true in the 19th century and is true now. We cannot all be Einsteins. So we do what we can. If that means building on existing models and theories, that's what we do. By doing that, we may be able to push them towards a more obvious revision that the next Einstein, or more likely a group because that's
Hopeless article is hopeless, here's a better one: (Score:3)
This, ideally, would deal with a current subject of debate called "Hubble Tension" going on in astrophysics. A few decades ago we discovered the universe keeps flying away from us so fast it looks like it's going to tear itself apart, everything keeps getting further away from everything else in what one could imagine as an "anti gravity" like effect as galaxies keep getting further and further apart, despite gravity drawing them together.
To describe, in math, why this might be so we can use a simple addition to Einstein's General Relativity, one he considered adding himself for a time, that just "adds" energy out of nowhere continuously, dark energy, and that dark energy is just a constant everywhere. Which sounds weird, energy everywhere from nothing, that ends up acting like anti gravity over the whole universe? But this would cause the Universe to tear itself apart (over billions and billions of years) exactly like we see. So weird as it is, it seems like it's right.
Now after peering at the sky with enough telescopes it appears there might be, maybe, possibly, at the edge of all our abilities to see and calculate what we are seeing, a discrepancy. It seems as if maybe the universe isn't tearing itself apart at a constant rate. It seems like maybe, this "anti gravity" like dark energy thing, is slowing down over time. Maybe the energy doesn't come from nothing everywhere all the time, hooray? But we just needed to add one number to General Relativity to describe the previous dark energy using math, so how would we describe this new dark energy, how does it behave? And does it even exist, or are we messing up observations and how we calculate them somewhere along the way, and the old dark energy is just fine? We don't know, and astrophysicists are arguing over it and looking at the sky more to figure it out.
There, that's my best, coherent summary of what's going on. Nothing to do with "the standard model" which is a very important and completely different thing in physics, so it's a terrible phrase to use at all.
Yes yes (Score:2)
Yes I get it. The standard model sucks. It's dumb etc. etc. Except, none of the proposals to replace it make any sense and are worse than the standard model on multiple metrics.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, I get it. The Ptolemaic system sucks. It's dumb etc. etc. Except, none of the proposals to replace it make any sense and are worse than the Ptolemaic system on multiple metrics.
Re: (Score:2)
You are more right than you might believe. It took about 200(!) years for the heliocentric worldview to better fit the data available than its predecessors. A big part of the resistance against the Copernican model of the universe was the very bad fit to observation. Yes, it was more elegant, but if you wanted to navigate, Ptolemy ruled the waves, despite being cumbersome and complicated and not intuitive at all.
Only when Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica, astronomers finally got a model th
Re: (Score:2)
Dark energy decreasing over time is not something in the models, it is (ostensibly) something that is being measured. All Riess said is that, if true, the standard model needs to be corrected.