Sunday, September 03, 2023

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving...

One of the most interesting findings from the Webb telescope has been the existence of very large, well organized galaxies at unimaginably vast distances from Earth.

Now, thanks to the laws of relativity, remember that the farther away from Earth you look, the farther back in time you're looking. The light from those galaxies left them a long long time ago...so long ago that, uh, according to the current cosmological models of the universe, it was farther back in time than large, well-organized galaxies should theoretically even exist.
"Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. 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."
This feels like one of those scientific moments where they're either going to have to add ever more epicycles, or decide that maybe the Earth really does move.

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