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Originally Posted by TimM
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.