Would you believe the universe started 13.8 billion years ago? No? Well, would you believe 26.7 billion? 39.7 billion?...
Headline (July 13) in the mass-circulation UK newspaper the Daily Mail: “The Universe is TWICE as old as we thought: The Big Bang happened 26.7 BILLION years ago, expert claims”.
As followers of these updates know, LPPFusion’s understanding of our dense plasma focus fusion device rests on knowledge gained by studying plasma in nature, especially in space on all scales. This knowledge makes sense only in the context of an evolving universe without a Big Bang, without an origin in time. LPPFusion’s Chief Scientist Eric Lerner has been prominent in research that shows that the Big Bang never happened, research greatly strengthened by recent observations by the James Webb Space Telescope(JWST).
This Daily Mail article , one of several high-profile articles such as in USA Today, refers to an important new paper in the prominent journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). The author, Dr. Rajendra Gupta of the University of Ottawa, admits that JWST observations show that galaxies at high redshift are seemingly older than the Big Bang and are far smaller in radius than predicted by the Big Bang hypothesis. This contradicts the current version of the Big Bang, called “LCDM”, the inflation/dark energy/dark matter version that people have heard about in the media. Dr. Gupta also stated that the predictions of a non-expanding universe hypothesis, with the redshift due to some process that affects light over long distances (“tired light hypothesis”) does fit the new data.
But instead of abandoning the Big Bang/expanding universe hypothesis for the non-expanding hypothesis, Dr. Gupta attempts in this paper to merge the two theories, hypothesizing a universe that expands, but also has a redshift due to a tired-light process. By adding in the tired-light redshift, the redshift due to expansion can be theoretically reduced, and thus the expansion be (hypothetically) slowed. This means Dr. Gupta can push back the age of the Big Bang to fit the new data. In a flash, the universe becomes twice as old—26.7 billion years instead of 13.7 billion years old. Thus the “impossibly old” JWST galaxies are now not too old for the suddenly much older Big Bang.
It's great that Dr. Gupta can change the age of the entire universe by just writing a few equations. If he could change individual humans’ ages in the opposite direction in the same way, he would certainly have quite a discovery!
Seriously, Dr. Gupta is to be congratulated for recognizing, as several other researchers have, that the expansion predictions are severely contradicted by the JWST data. The widespread publicity for this paper introduced a broader public to the idea that there is a different explanation than expansion for the redshift phenomena. This media notice also shows that the “consensus” cosmology is starting to crack apart. The possibility that the age of the universe, claimed to be “precisely 13.81 billion years old” could be uncertain by a factor of two also contributes to discrediting the theoretical claims of the Big Bang cosmologists, which are contradicted by observation—the key test in science.
However, this paper errs in trying to compromise between an expanding universe and a non-expanding one. It’s either one or the other. Historically, scientists sometimes try to “sit on two chairs” to avoid abandoning popular misconceptions. Back in the 1570’s famed astronomer Tycho Brahe tried to bridge the gap between the Ptolemaic earth-centered cosmos and the Copernican sun-center one by hypothesizing a compromise in which all the planets except the earth revolved around the sun, which in turn revolved around the earth. Such compromises are almost without exception only brief transitions to the new paradigms.
In this case, to there is no reason to compromise and a compromise won’t work. Dr Gupta writes that a non-expanding universe can’t account for the very smooth cosmic microwave background (CMB). However, as Lerner has published in leading journals, including the Astrophysical Journal, that plasma processes in the existing universe can scatter radiation produced by stars into the smooth “radio fog” that we see today. No Big Bang is needed.
A compromise won’t work because much observational data is incompatible with the predictions of any expanding hypothesis or any hypothetical hot ,dense Big Bang epoch. Papers published by Lerner and colleagues Renato Falomo and Riccardo Scarpa have shown that the surface brightness of galaxies do not change with redshift, a clear test that only predictions based on a non-expanding universe have passed. In addition, the Big Bang hypothesis gets totally wrong the abundance of lithium and helium—and these wrong predictions won’t be changed by any tweaks to the Big bang/expansion hypothesis.
With a flood of results still coming from JWST and other telescopes like the ground-based ALMA radio telescope, this and other such compromises will likely be swept away in the coming months. But Gupta’s paper and others that we expect in the near future are helping to break apart the frozen consensus behind the Big Bang, paving the way for a shift to a scientifically sounder view of the universe—evolving, but not expanding, and consisting mostly of plasma, not dark energy and dark matter.