Credit: Thanapol Sisrang Getty
What do we really know about our universe?
Born out of a cosmic explosion 13.8 billion years ago, the universe rapidly inflated and then cooled, it is still expanding at an increasing rate and mostly made up of unknown dark matter and dark energy … right?
This well-known story is usually taken as a self-evident scientific fact, despite the relative lack of empirical evidence—and despite a steady crop of discrepancies arising with observations of the distant universe.
In recent months, new measurements of the Hubble constant, the rate of universal expansion, suggested major differences between two independent methods of calculation. Discrepancies on the expansion rate have huge implications not simply for calculation but for the validity of cosmology’s current standard model at the extreme scales of the cosmos.
Another recent probe found galaxies inconsistent with the theory of dark matter, which posits this hypothetical substance to be everywhere. But according to the latest measurements, it is not, suggesting the theory needs to be reexamined.
It’s perhaps worth stopping to ask […]
Such an interesting article and confirms what I have thought for sometime. Scientific data too often does not pass cleanly through our too human filters. We don’t know what we don’t know so even highly trained scientists may make assumptions when the data gets a little fuzzy. We have a need to know, to have the story fit, to have it have a beginning and an end. Of course often times it is good enough and works well enough to launch space probes, fight cancer and manufacture iphones.
I did a search on scientific misconceptions from the past and many are fall into the category of “how could they be so dumb”. Many of other discoveries have become “common sense”‘: fat is bad for you, eggs are bad, evolution is proven or not, only 10% of the brain is used, all humans came from Africa, ulcers mostly caused by stress, or we know how dinosaurs looked and behaved…..
Cosmology seems to indicate that we humans are a microbial lifeform on a small planet circling a medium sized star. On the other hand we are an aspect of the creative expression of a vast multiverse beyond the ability of our small brains to fully comprehend. But then I’m no scientist…
If one reads Eric J. Lerner’s book “The Big Bang Never Happened” and Wallace Thornhill’s book “The Electric Universe” one can find better, more scientific theories which can be proven in a laboratory and scaled up to the any size. They show that plasma fills the entire Universe, not unknown “dark matter” and “dark energy”. The currently accepted theories taught in schools have no basis in any reproduceable facts or “real” data, and are not scientific, and are not produced by people with open minds.
Special Relativity and quantum physics have given us a little slice of the truth. But to me we are like an ant walking around a globe. It thinks it’s on an endless 2D path, when we look at the ant and go “stupid ant”. The universe is a very strange place and these are our first attempts of making sense of the universe. We’ll get better once we understand quantum and what role consciousness plays. Although sometimes I think we may not be able to ever understand the last remaining details. For example, how can we possibly understand what happens at the black hole singularity when we can never get the data, or parts of quantum where mother nature refuses to cooperate with any of our experiments.
I know next to nothing about academic cosmology, but I feel I do experience the cosmos, just like anyone else. In that capacity I’ve always thought the Big Bang theory was a phoney construct invented by a male-dominated scientific establishment to conform to a male psychology embedded in the shadows of past male-dominated paradigms centered upon a male God. My own instinct suggests that there is no physical beginning or end to the cosmos, which encompasses the infinite variety of imagination operating through consciousness–a state of perpetual awareness. So on some level the Universe as consciousness knows what It’s doing as It imagines–and so creates–the model or blueprint for everything that exists (including the possibility of non-existence). Change, then, must be the constant, and all the rest–adaptation. If there ever was a Big Bang, it would have been on a continuum, and perhaps not the first of its kind–perhaps no more than the reflection of Western Man’s hubris translated to infinity. It may express no more than the particular consciousness of a single age of creative endeavor which Consciousness itself may eventually discard as unsustainable. In any case, I doubt we’ll ever understand the cosmos using thought constructs tailored to our linear views of cause and effect, which require Time to exist in the first place. All that being said . . . I really have no idea.