It's gonna be awesome. I'm betting it destroys the Big Bang Theory, already under assault and somewhat precarious. And much, much more changed, undercut, confirmed, radicalized. The standard picture is going down it says here.

1.5 million mile orbit - wish they'd built two just in case.

Hope they have saved the blueprints!

Predicting the age of the "universe" will be massively adjusted based on its observations and our interpretation of them. Or perhaps this snippet that we experience will be understood as 13.7 billion, but that that is almost irrelevant to the whole shebang story, which is not the Big Bang, once knee-jerk proposed as a joke almost, then adopted way to simply. It's a million-to-one that it is even close right. Taking bets. Almost nothing in the standard picture will hold up. Evidence will come in that none of it is real; it's all virtual. One explanation: universe is a quantum computer, quantum flux is a virtual show to which our senses are attuned but in no way is real other than in mind. I'd take 100/1 on that, conventional line is probably more like a million-to-one.

I think most of what we think is right will be confirmed. But certainly some interesting stuff will emerge.

If the density of information increases the further back in time you look then the universe could virtually be infinitely old while finitely old only in terms of a strict time measurement.


PairTheBoard

Yes, what was the minimum entropy?

Subbed

Very unlikely that Webb will observe anything that revolutionary. It's only seeing near and mid infrared, while the strongest evidence for the Big Bang comes from other parts of the spectrum. We will get pretty pictures, and we will learn some new things. Maybe even things that force scientists to tweak the standard picture. But probably not much more than a tweak.

The Big Bang theory was adopted as a result of consistency with over a century of theoretical and observational evidence, and none contradicting it. At the time the name Big Bang was coined, a lot of that evidence was already in place for decades.

You are probably right, but you never know. The history of science is littered with situations where we thought we had it all figured out and all we had to do was hammer out the fine details. Late 19th-early 20th century physicists thought everything was worked out, except for a couple of small anomalies like figuring out the spectrum of black body radiation and figuring out why the planet Mercury’s orbit wasn’t quite what it was predicted to be. Well, of course further investigation into those “small” anomalies led to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, completely revolutionizing physics.

Today our cosmological model has everything worked out except on “small” anomaly — how fast is the universe actually expanding? When we look at the redshift of cosmologically distant bodies we get one answer. When we look at the features of the cosmological background radiation, we get a different answer. The two aren’t too far off, but the uncertainties in both measurements is small enough that it’s very unlikely that the two are actually the same and that the difference comes from measurement uncertainty.

Obviously the JW telescope may not (and likely will not) provide the answer to this anomaly, but this anomaly at least indicates that there is likely something missing from our current model. Whether the solution turns out to be a completely revolutionary idea or merely just a tweak to our current paradigm remains to be seen.

Thanks, I had heard of this before (my youtube history contained the first video below). But I thought there was still likely a mundane solution. But these videos and others with Adam Riess show that it's a persistent problem.

Except the bb model wrongly predicted the CMB temp whereas non bb models were in fact closer. And a bunch of other probems to the degree science media such as it is speak of a crisis in cosmology. As Brian Cox says, the bb is "science's own creation story" invented by a priest no less.

Ah ok I think we are talking about two different things. I have no problem with proposed modifications to the big bang that are still consistent with the evidence of expansion, CMB, element abundance, etc. And I would still call those big bang theories, even if they don't purport to explain the entire universe, but only what we can observe in our portion of it. This would include what Brian Cox proposes, as well as some of the multiverse ideas.

The Hunt for Planet B

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13848014/

Something tells me this Event Horizon Telescope announcement today is going to be totally meh ... befitting the drama mentality of such build ups in the past.

Well we hear the drama of an astronomer falling in love with a black hole. Halting self-interruptions, messed up power point slides, looks like 4 astronomical dumbasses that couldn't hold my jock strap ... now a bunch of drama about numbers and sizes that means nothing to the supposedly wowed audience, three reporters fell asleep, a bunch of claims about how difficult it all is, utterly amateurish public speaking, Sag A Star yada yada yada, "black holes are complicated and it took 300 of us to do this, applause please," awkward throat clearing, something about a hay stack, "Did we say this project was very challenging?" ... good gawd this sucks, that totally shallow emotional affect thing, "it only takes a few minutes for the gas to stream around this black hole" (who gives a flying flick?), "all our data is consistent," the damn powerpoint is on tilt, 50 micro arc seconds some claptrap (you can't make this stuff up), clap clap clap, last joker unless he says they found some smart ET's the whole thing is utter fail. Nope: Einstein holds up is all he has. General Relativity confirmed. It burgles and gurgles (6 times they say this). We looked at the black hole from the edge and face on. Jeezus. "We used a supercomputer to simulate the thing and here it is." Well that's not bad. It's good that it's in our galaxy. We are continuing toward the boundary of the unknown. They got one who is supposed to be the "hottie astronomer" looks kind of like Patty Hearst with too much shiny makeup, kind freaking me out. We are hoping to get a movie of this thing someday but not yet. Spin rate we don't know, temperature we don't know, gravity strength we don't know. Any questions? Meh. "How does the black hole make you feel." Really. OMG. This is like the Super Bowl of science.