fearout

And El Niño has barely started. I’m terrified by whatever should follow

Compulsory is a bit much, but an opt-out system would be a good solution.

It’s about this — JWST found unusually bright early galaxies that already existed at around 350 mln years after the Big Bang, which is extremely early for such structures to exist. It implies that they should have started forming at around ~100 mln years, which is wa-ay earlier than previously thought. So CCC+TL is a model that tries to fit observed data, but it’s not the only proposed solution (and it’s quite convoluted due to including Tired Light).

You can google more about that using terms like JWST + early galaxies, high redshift galaxies, population III stars (refers to metallicity and goes “backwards”, Sun is a population I star).

So it basically rasterizes it? I wonder how it affects file size

Well, I only know 22. That’s cause I don’t know SHIT.

Yeah, @IONLYpost, there should some updates to that layout soon, stay tuned :)

That looks really interesting, thanks.
Can you share how privacy-related issues are addressed, since it runs decentralized on lots of different machines? What kinds of requests are shared between users?

Hey, so I got the paper from its original author, and I shared my thoughts in a recent comment. TLDR: the universe probably isn’t that old, and the models that predict it are somewhat weird and have little chance of actually being a true representation of reality. It’s more of an observation than a workable hypothesis.

Ok, so I got the paper from its original author after emailing him about it (who even thanked me for the interest in his work, I freaking love scientists). And while there’s a lot of math, half of which I’m not even remotely qualified to understand, here’s what I got from it:

First, the paper is quite broad and compares 6 different models, plain LCDM (vacuum has energy that’s constant throughout the universe, it drives the expansion, cosmological constant is constant), CCC (“covarying coupling constants”: cosmological constant isn’t constant and may change over time and space, and dark energy might be more of a field than a property of space), their hybrids with Tired Light, and Tired Light alone. There’s some more discussion about these models below, in case you’re interested.

Btw, Tired Light hypothesis suggests that there’s no expansion, light just loses energy as it travels though space and that’s what gets interpreted as red shift. It’s not widely accepted and is not really considered viable, as far as I know.

Here’s an important to this whole discussion part: proposed age increase comes only from hybrid models (since there wouldn’t be any change in LCDM, and in TL age of the universe kinda makes no sense — no expansion and all that).

So what the author has found is that the best model to explain those weird redshift observations from JWST is the hybrid CCC+TL model, which assumes both “cosmological constant isn’t constant” and “tired light is a thing”. And that combination seems highly unlikely.

So the universe probably isn’t 26+ bn years. It’s a stepping stone towards finding a better model.

That makes a surprising amount of sense, thanks

How do you have time for that?

It makes it different and gets us closer to understanding it. Right now, we have no idea what dark energy actually is, it’s just the name of the phenomenon of ever-accelerating expansion. Like, something is driving that expansion, and we call that something dark energy.

The simplest model — ΛCDM, assumes that there’s vacuum energy that’s constant throughout the universe, and that it’s what’s causing the expansion. Check my comments below for more info. There are other models too, like a modified gravity theory where it behaves as a repulsive force instead of an attractive one when applied on massive scales.

What this paper seems to be closer to is Quintessence. It assumes that dark energy is something like a field that can change over time and across space. I’ll make us revise general relativity (since cosmological constant is, well, constant in GR), but hopefully will get us closer to understanding the inner workings as a whole.

ELI5-ish: our current best guess is the universe is expanding because it kinda just fundamentally does that. It’s a property of space itself. If the paper turns out to be right in some way, then there’s some actual thing, not a property, that fills the universe, and that thing is what’s pushing everything apart. And there can be more or less of that thing making the universe expand differently at different times or within different regions. Or something else even, we’ll have to run a lot of experiments to figure it out.

Edit: so I read the original paper, and my initial assessment was wrong. It uses a hybrid model instead of plain quintessence or CCC-type model to demonstrate a better-fitting explanation, but the model itself is most likely not viable as an actual representation of reality.

Also, to clarify the difference between Quintessence and CCC. These are somewhat similar, but focus on different things. In quintessence, dark energy is believed to be a field-type thing, so it can naturally have different concentrations across time and space. In CCC, cosmological constant is assumed to be time-varying, but the theory doesn’t really describe what dark energy is, only how it behaves. Could be a field, but also could be something else. It doesn’t specify.