it is November 18, 2025, as I begin this post. But now, as I continue, time has passed during which I’ve been trying to make sense out of the confusion which inevitably accompanies the early stages of a scientific revolution. It is now past Thanksgiving. That’s how it goes these days: Writing this blog is easily displaced by the many activities of my life and that is OK because occasions do arise when the busyness subsides and I can write and rewrite until what’s written feels right and can be posted.

In considering this revolution in our understanding of the cosmos one realization that I’ve had is the fact that this has been the only major scientific revolution in my lifetime, so it is a new experience for me and, in fact, for anyone who is concerned with it. The major revolution of our times, the quantum revolution, began to be resolved in 1925 and by the time I was born in 1929 the revolution was well on the way to completion. At that time the neutron hadn’t been discovered nor the positron (both discovered in 1932), but by the time I took chemistry in high school during the 1945-46 academic year the existence of these was well established, the neutron discovery leading to the atomic bomb, which had ended World War II just before that school term had begun. By the time I was trying to do physics during the early 1970’s, its cutting edge had moved on to understanding the elementary particles and “resonances” as they were experimentally discovered by increasingly energetic particle accelerators. I had a fairly good idea of what was going on as I understood how various representations of group SU3 made patterns which fit the new discoveries. In the early 70’s there were many puzzles, but nothing that called fundamental scientific realities into question. By the early 2020’s it had been 40 years or so since the “standard model” of particle physics came into being, and during those 40 years, its predictions were confirmed time and again with little hint of revolution on the horizon. In cosmology and astrophysics there were the puzzles of dark matter and dark energy, but no discoveries that were helpful in solving these puzzles. The physics and astronomy community was awaiting and hoping for a scientific revolution. Now, finally and suddenly, it is happening.

Since I have no access to any scientific journals (and likely wouldn’t understand their contents even if I did) my information about the new revolution comes from winnowing through writings on YouTube searching for gems among all the vague sensationalism. In addition, I can search the internet in the hopes of finding reliable sources and learning about subjects which are relevant for understanding what is happening.

Let me begin to make sense of this revolution by considering the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). This radiation has been well studied and it is difficult to find any weak links in its story. The radiation begins as high temperature black body radiation and as the universe expands, the radiation keeps the characteristic spectrum of black body radiation at an ever lowering temperature which stands today at 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. A beginning temperature for the radiation can be calculated by considering a typical ionization energy of atoms. A piece of well known background knowledge in atomic physics is that the ionization energy needed to free hydrogen’s single electron from its nucleus is 13.6 electron volts. If protons and electrons are in an environment where the average kinetic energy of particle motion is above this value, they are constantly bombarded by particles having more energy than needed to keep them apart: hydrogen atoms cannot exist.

In the latter part of the 19th century Ludwig Boltzmann discovered the remarkable connection between the average kinetic energy E of molecular motion and temperature T as measured by thermometers. A crude statement of his law is E = kT, the constant k being Boltzmann’s constant. Expressed in electron volts per degree Kelvin it has a value of 8.617 x 10¯⁵. To find the temperature below which hydrogen atoms can exist, you merely need to reach for your cell phone and its calculator. Enter 13.6, the divide symbol, and then 8.62. Pressing “=” gives 1.58 after rounding. Now move the decimal point 5 places to the right and get 158,000 degrees Kelvin or Celsius. (At this temperature the 273 degrees between the two is inconsequential.)

Above this temperature of around 160,000 degrees only the constituents of atoms exist in a plasma which bounces light around and is opaque. After the expansion of the universe lowers the temperature below this value, atoms form (mostly hydrogen) and space becomes transparent to the black body radiation of the former plasma and to any other radiating bodies which might be present. I’ve mentioned already in the first post about this revolution what astronomers expected; namely the very beginnings of galaxy formation, rather than well developed galaxies and primordial black holes. The latter are truly interesting because they suggest that the black holes in the center of galaxies, came about before the galaxies actually formed. The presence of black holes would speed up galaxy formation, but certainly not to the extent that JWST observed.

There are two obvious ways to avoid the dilemma posed by the impossible existence of mature galaxies and primeval black holes in an era when they shouldn’t exist. The first, and seemingly the less radical, is to push back the big bang by several billion years and assume that the early rapid inflation expansion didn’t occur, allowing time for developments before the cooling to energies allowing atom formation with its resulting transparency. If a tremendous amount of dark matter particles were created in the primeval explosion, these could cluster and form black holes. If energies remained in the mev range over a billions of years, there would be time for complex nuclei to form, much in the way we believe they form in stars. For this scenario to occur, the expansion rate of the universe would need to be slow enough to delay cooling. Since the recent conclusion that the Hubble constant for the universe expansion rate, isn’t a constant at all, but a field with different values throughout the universe, the idea of an expansion at a slow rate in the early days of the universe isn’t impossible. Let us call this scenario (with apologies to Texas) the Lone Star Universe.

A second way our of the dilemma is to assume that our universe didn’t arise our of nothingness, but issued instead, from the collapse of a predecessor universe into a “big crunch” with rebound. This scenario postpones the account of how a universe could arise out of nothingness to a day when we have a deeper understanding of physics. With this idea we avoid the idea of a singularity, always a troubling notion in physics, imagining instead a condensation of the prior universe only to the extent that its matter would be raised above a temperature where atomic nuclei would disintegrate into elementary particles including many we have not found yet. As this proto universe rebounds and expands, its elementary particles would decay into stable ones, including perhaps axions of dark matter. An interesting question concerns the fate of the massive black holes that formerly existed in the center of the old universe’s galaxies. Assuming that black holes are already compressed as much as possible, there could be no force which could disrupt them. A problem arises because if the volume of our universe in its early days is limited, billions of black holes from the previous universe would likely collide and coalesce forming galaxy centers larger that those we observe. If we can sweep this problem under a rug, we have a ready explanation of the primeval black holes and well formed galaxies that JWST has observed.

Of course, both scenarios outlined above are quite speculative. These days as the fact of a revolution is becoming more and more accepted, it is the hay day of the experimentalist making astronomical observations, finding the hard evidence that will ultimately lead to a new picture of reality for our universe. Much of this work now revolves around the expansion rate of the universe, the Hubble “no longer constant”. Since much of of our current picture assumes that this rate of expansion is everywhere the same, the shattering of this assumption is finally making it clear that we really are in the midst of a scientific revolution quite apart from the findings of the James Webb Space Telescope. I’ll mow bring this post to a conclusion and continue to search for interesting findings which will occur in the future. Back to Top