Crisis in fundamental science is disconcerting because it shakes up and disintegrates the very foundation of what we take to be reality. In Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions while various revolutions are closely analyzed, we, as readers, know how these turned out because they were historic with a known future. Experiencing an actual revolution, not knowing what the future will bring, is similar to a Zen experience in which the foundations of everyday reality are ripped apart. We are, in a sense, left floating in space in an unknown galaxy in which there are no directions, no up-and-downs, no supports. One can learn to welcome this sort of experience because one knows that we humans, for all our factual knowledge, are ignorant of an actual fundamental reality; and experiencing this ignorance is a signpost on the way to enlightenment, assuming such exists.

In cosmology our reality until this year was that the universe had an age of around 13.8 billion years, beginning with a “big bang” which created the universe including its space and time out of nothingness. See the post Weird Stuff: Cosmology, etc. for the story of how this picture came about. As of now (Mid-2025) this picture must be abandoned and things are about to become really weird.. It is too soon to know what will replace the “big bang” theory. Fortunately, what we know about the universe has not been completely discredited: There are still stars, galaxies, neutron stars, black holes, supernovas and the rest of the amazing entities that we observe with optical telescopes on earth and the Hubble telescope in space. General Relativity still seems to predict accurately though, these days, it is far from being taken for granted. What’s new is that data is coming in from the James Webb space telescope. This miracle instrument was a huge dare which has panned out. (When a scientific project screws up, there’s a lot of publicity and adverse comment. When a daring project which has every expectation of failure works out, it gets the “ho-hum” treatment at least by the general public.)  This JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) was designed to be revolutionary and has lived up to its goal. For a complete detailed description, one should consult Wikipedia. The telescope has a mirror too large to be launched in one piece by our present rockets. Instead, over the years since its launch on Christmas day, 2021, the mirror was unfolded and then assembled to an unholy precision out in space from 18 hexagonal pieces. It sits at a distance further out than the moon, circling around what is called a Lagrange point where gravity from the sun, earth, and moon balance out. The telescope became operational in early 2024 and has now been accumulating data for over a year. The telescope is sensitive to long-wave infrared, in a range running from a visible 600 nanometer reddish-orange to a mid-infrared at 28,500 nm. This range allows the telescope to see back to a realm where objects are red-shifted beyond the limits of human vision; objects existing in what we supposed were the early times in the universe after its temperature cooled to where it became transparent. Infrared is heat radiation. The telescope must accordingly be cooled to a temperature below 50 Kelvin (-223 degrees Celsius) so its own thermal radiation won’t wipe out the signal it is detecting.

Cosmologists and astronomers were exited to see what the new JWST telescope would reveal in the eight-hundred million year gap between the time when the universe became transparent 200 million years after the “Big Bang” and the time about 1000 miillion years after the bang (a billion years) that the Hubble telescope could see back to. The prevailing picture at the time around 2023 before JWST became active was that as hydrogen, helium, and a few lithium atoms formed, they would clump under gravity’s influence and would become the first stars as the pressure and temperature at their centers became sufficient to ignite a fusion reaction. The resulting stars, in turn, would cluster into blobs which would, after a 5 or 6 billion year process, form the galaxies that Hubble had been able to detect. The expectation was that there wouldn’t be all that much to detect in the gap.

Instead, the first startling thing JWST found were many huge, fully formed and structured galaxies. By measuring their red shift their ages were found to be only 3 to 5 or 6 hundred million years after the “Big Bang”, well within the gap. That they were really galaxies was confirmed by detecting the spectral lines of hydrogen. Galaxies which would take 5 or 6 billion years to form were found within a few hundred millions years of the purported “Big Bang”. Even more startling were primeval black holes such as exist at the center of galaxies. However, the star were missing and the black holes unclothed. Something was drastically wrong with the enormous amount of work which had established modern cosmology. And this was only the beginning. The revolution was under way.

I’ll bring this piece to an end and post it. I’ll have much to write about in the future. Back to Top