The James Webb Space Telescope opens a most-fundamental question:

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CENTER FOR PERFECTION STUDIES: CONTINUITY•SYMMETRY•HARMONY. GOALS.August 2023
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What is the status of the Big Bang Theory?

By Bruce E. Camber

Dr. Michael Boylan-Kolchin: “Even if you took everything that was available to form stars and snapped your fingers instantaneously, you still wouldn’t be able to get that big that early. It would be a real revolution.”*
Dr. Charlotte Mason: “Now the question is, if we can truly believe what we are seeing, ‘Is it time to reappraise our understanding of the dawn of time?'” “We’re peering into the unknown. We really weren’t expecting this.”†
Dr. Mark McCaughrean: “You build these machines (JWST) not to confirm the paradigm, but to break it. You just don’t know how it will break.”‡

Introduction. With just two months of results, Scientific American published a landmark update about the work of the scholar-scientists on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project [1]. The author, a freelance journalist Jonathan O’Callaghan [2], interviewed key players, including one who has been working on the project since its inception. The results have astounded the world; and, our astrophysics community has come alive like never before. They know they are on the edge of redefining our universe (and perhaps who we are and why).

Scholar-Scientists: There are scholar-scientists who work at the command center for the JWST located on the John Hopkins University campus. Then there are hundreds of others who work at universities around the world.

Michael Boylan-Kolchin [*] is a JWST cosmologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Charlotte Mason [†] is an JWST astrophysicist with the University of Copenhagen. And, Mark McCaughrean [‡] is a JWST scientist and senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. These three are among hundreds of thousands of scholar-scientists who now know that this world is in the midst of fundamental, unprecedented change.

Garth Illingworth [3], an astrophysicist now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was one of the people charged with designing the JWST project. Justifiably proud, he knew at the outset that they would be looking for the earliest galaxies. Tommaso Treu [4], an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the lead on GLASS-JWST program measuring just 300 million years “after the big bang”), sums it up, “This was beyond our most optimistic expectations.”

Optimistic, yes, but there is major angst. They know deep within their hearts and minds they should no longer say “after the big bang.”

The Big Bang has had a good run. It’s probably history now. Scholars know it’s too hot to cool. Scholars know there is no tweaking that bang enough to fit it into 300 million years with newly-observed galaxies. They know we’ve got to move on, but there is no where to go. Unless, of course, we start at the very beginning.

I believe, eventually, we all will.

The first clue is given within Lemaître’s primeval atom.[5] Reintroduce it as a Planck Sphere defined by the latest updates of Max Planck’s 1899 natural units, and those dimensionless constants that define those units, and the continuity-symmetry-harmony of pi(π). That would be a very simple start indeed.

In this model the big bang’s epochs become processes. This is a key; nothing changes except how we understand “after the big bang.” If all epochs are processes, all active equations, we will need to begin to grasp an even deeper nature of time. There are many scholar-scientists in groups like Loop Quantum Gravity who have already introduced this somewhat-new and difficult concept of time; yet, a second will still be a second.

We recognize the infinitesimal. To give it depth and texture, we multiply it by 2 over and over and over again. If PlanckTime is the first moment of time, there are 202 notations to the current time. That chart includes everything, everywhere for all time (TOE). Each notation is always active. There are no less than 64 notations below the CERN scale. That domain is for mathematics, geometry, logic and no less than eight other disciplines that are defining the grid that begins to build bridges between the Standard Model for Particle Physics and the Standard Model for Cosmology.

Background conclusions. In 2011 we backed into those 202 base-2 exponential notations; and, though encouraged by Freeman Dyson and Frank Wilczek, they knew that it would not sit well with the big bang theory. John Baez and others told us that it was idiosyncratic. But, we’ve persevered. Recent homepages tell more of that story: A Perfect Start, Simple Logical Concepts, and Facts & Guesses about “Planck Scale Physics”. There are many more.

One thing we know for sure, more and more of our universe is coming into view. Thank you. -BEC

P.S. Many scholars are saying rather remarkable things and I find myself asking questions of several. Here’s Prof. Dr. Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA).

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Endnotes & Footnotes
There may not be many because all these points already have pages within this website.

[*] It is a real revolution: The JWST is returning data that challenges the big bang theory, our understanding of the redshift, time, inflation and the inflaton. Michael Boylan-Kolchin is a scholars’ scholar regarding the redshift. He knows what he”ll be doing for the rest of their life. As an expert among experts, deep within the University of Texas-Austin, his group will be refining the redshift data. Very-fine-tuning is our future. For more…

[†] Cosmic Dawn: Anchored within the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and at the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space), Charlotte Mason‘s group, Cosmic Dawn looks throughout the entire universe for insight. She is the lead author on several articles and we focus on “The brightest galaxies at Cosmic Dawn” (6 January 2023) and another about the 21-cm signal from neutral hydrogen in the early universe (17 July 2023). Neutral hydrogen is believed to be the dominant feature of the cosmic dark ages. Her global group of five scholars believes that their research will provide unprecedented information about the first stars and galaxies, perhaps even a new physics regarding this period from 200 to 500 million years from the start. For more…

[‡] Be open to all possibilities. That’s scientific: Mark McCaughrean’s pivotal comment should be everyone’s pivotal comment. “Be scientific.” This link goes to more of his references, a bit more analysis, emails and instant messages. Mark McCaughrean has the entire European Union and their European Space Agency to keep informed. In summary, he’s encouraging all of us to stay open and flexible. I would add, “The days of the big bang haughtiness should be coming to a close.”

[1] Scientific American. You know something is happening when this historic publication allowed such a title, “JWST’s First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology.” Break cosmology? They are saying, “Break the Big Bang theory.” Throughout the world there is an impatience with the haughtiness of science. Where is judiciousness? Where is the nervousness for possibly being wrong? Just the title alone tells us how open we have become and how impatient we are with arrogance. Thank you Scientific American.

[2] Asking no one for permission. People like Jonathan O’Callaghan are important for scientific integrity. You just know he was waiting for the first official release of data (July 12, 2022) from the JWST program. You know he scrambled to make calls and contacts with the people within this program who were making decisions. You know he was writing and editing throughout that two-9month period before being picked up by Scientific American for publication. He stirred the pot and captured the tensions and excitement of those days. Great thanks to Jonathan!

[3] Garth Illingworth: More than just an administrator, Garth Illingworth truly guided the JWST mission from get-go. He was constantly among those selling the concept to Congress and the public. He kept the vision alive. Many of his presentations are now encapsulated within YouTube. His 2023 (August 13), UCSC Galaxy Workshop, “JWST on a path towards realizing its first light goal”, is an excellent example.

[4] Tommaso Treu: There is nothing easy about capturing the historicity of a moment. It is too easy to be too emotional. With his deep Italian passions, Prof. Dr. Tommaso Treu is actually being quite measured in his assessments. The JWST is breaking paradigms. Paradigms do not break or shift easily. Here Thomas Kuhn’s 1967 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is coming alive. The JWST is changing the rules of the game.

[5] Lemaître’s primeval atom. Returning to Lemaître and his concept of a primeval atom, one might wonder why nobody thought to assume the Planck base units manifest as infinitesimal spheres. It was too speculative and the scientific community was having great success discovering new particles. Nobel prizes were abundant. It was easy to be particle centric until there were no more particles to find. Lemaître was in the early stages of those discoveries. He rubbed shoulders with Einstein and all the greats of his day. And, even Max Planck ignored his natural units. It was easy to ignore them just as most people ignored Dirac’s inordinately large numbers.

Also, geometry lost its punch. There are still most basic concepts that we have not taught our students. They do not know the difference between geometries of perfection (no gaps) and geometries of imperfection (gaps). At the most infinitesimal scales, attractors and repellers have not been assumed and the relation between gravity and electromagnetism remains a mystery. When the work of Milnor and Smale are engaged within the infinitesimal, a new paradigm for gravity will emerge. Like mass-energy, space-time, a gravity-electromagnetism formula will emerge and we will begin to understand how the universe grows from that single infinitesimal sphere to tredecillion spheres per second, to the galaxies we have now observed within 300 million years of the start.

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References & Resources
As these references are studied, key references and resources will be added.

Spatial variations of fundamental constants, John D. Barrow, Chris O’Toole, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 322, Issue 3, April 2001, Pages 585–588, https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-8711.2001.04157.x, 11 April 2001

Cosmic Star-Formation History, Piero Madau and Mark Dickinson, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 52:415-486 (August 2014) https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0007 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-astro-081811-125615 Also, engage other articles that use the words, “cosmic-star formation.”

ArXiv: The brightest galaxies at Cosmic Dawn, C.Mason,  M. Trenti, T. Treu, Jan. 2023
…fast parameter forecasts from the cosmic 21-cm signal, Charlotte A. Mason, Julian B. Muñoz, Bradley Greig, Andrei Mesinger, Jaehong Park, December 2022 (updated July 2023)

Bright, early galaxies surprise astronomers, Kelly Kizer Whitt, Earth-Sky, November 18, 2022

Georges Lemaître:

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Emails
There will be emails to many of our scholars about key points.

23 August 2023: Tommaso Treu, JWST & UCLA
23 August 2023: Laura Helmuth, Scientific American, New York, NY
23 August 2023: Charlotte Mason, JWST & Cosmic Dawn, University of Copenhagen
23 August 2023: Michael Boylan-Kolchin, JWST & University of Texas at Austin
23 August 2023: Garth Illingworth, JWST & University of California at Santa Cruz
22 August 2023: Jonathan O’Callaghan, Freelance writer for Scientific American and many others
22 August 2023: Mark McCaughrean, JWST & European Space Agency
20 August 2023 Matt Mountain, JWST & AURA (Sunday @ 11:07 AM)
19 August 2023: David Spergel, Simons Foundation, Flatiron Institute (Saturday @ 6:20 PM)

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IM
There will also be many instant messages to thought leaders about these key points.

11:59 AM · Aug 24, 2023 @conradwolfram @themathscon John Barrow is missed in these exciting times. Will the big bang be put to rest with Stephen given the JWST results? https://81018.com/jwst/ Let’s get back to the basics like π (pi) (continuity-symmetry-harmony) and Planck’s base units! -Bruce

8:57 AM · August 23, 2023: @ClaraMoskowitz, @Scientific American

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Participate

You are always invited.

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Keys to this page, jwst

• This page became a homepage on August 23, 2023.
• The last update was September 10, 2023.
• This page was initiated on August 20, 2023.
• The URL for this file is https://81018.com/jwst/.
• There is a sequel article: https://81018.com/third-way/
• The headline for this article: What is the status of the Big Bang Theory?
• First teaser* is: The James Webb Space Telescope opens most-fundamental questions…

*Or, wicket, kicker or eyebrow.

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