I'm quite confused by this early paragraph. It seems to be claiming that Hubble's law was discovered in 1998 by Adam Riess, instead of in the 1920s by Edwin Hubble (and others).
Frankly, the fact that I could find that out with 2 minutes of reading Wikipedia reflects pretty poorly on the author.
Riess et al's findings showed that galaxies farther away are not just receding faster (as Hubble's Law already described), but that the rate of expansion itself is increasing over time. This discovery suggested the presence of a mysterious force, now called dark energy, driving this acceleration.
This was unexpected because most astronomers at the time thought the expansion should be slowing down due to gravitational attraction between galaxies.
>The farther away that galaxies were, the faster they were receding.
This is already the case in Hubble's law, which says that the velocity is proportional to the distance. Hubble's constant is the proportionality constant and thus the expansion rate.
Riess found that the Hubble constant is not constant. Instead, the expansion rate is increasing over time.
Take for example galaxies running from us at "c". They happen to be exactly at 13.7B light years - coincidence? I don't think it is a coincidence, and some simple logic leads to conclusion that the same galaxies will be running from us at the same "c" say 300M years later - ie. then it will be "c" at 14B light years distance from us - which means that the Hubble constant is actually decreasing.
edit: I'm just trying to say that "Having a Nobel Prize" doesn't mean they are an authority on subjects they talk about since many wen't on to promote homeopathy, aliens, believed aids wasn't caused by HIV, don't believe in climate change, etc."
That does happen, of course. Science is conservative because if we have a theory that is a good fit to the data it should take a lot of evidence to unseat that theory and the new one must also fit all the data the old one did. (Unless some data was wrong, but that also takes evidence.)
But this is also something every crank says, and loudly. The more obsessed and loud someone is with a conspiracy against them the more they sound like a crank.
Was Einstein or quantum theory instantly rejected and held down forever by a conspiracy? Not really. There were skeptics but I seem to recall these ideas taking hold pretty fast because they fit a lot of anomalous data very well.
It isn't about protection from straying from some level of orthodoxy. It's about people who are incredibly brilliant in one area of their life - and yet be incredibly dumb in another. I've always seen Linus Pauling as an interesting example of this. Brilliant in some ways, but going all in on Vitamin C is just weird.
I see the basic claim as - sometimes these prizes - well intentioned as they are - may lift critical guard rails that unintentionally let them drive off into their weeds. They go deeper and harder into the weeds because the prestige that comes with these prizes creates a halo effect that blunts or hides critical criticism that can no longer reach them.
They can put their ideas out there, and people can evaluate them on their merits just fine, with maybe a bias towards the ideas being interesting due to the source. What's wrong with that?
Like these are just 2 cases of a number of examples
1993 chemistry doesn't believe AIDS is caused by HIV, doesn't believe in Climate Chiange, believes in astrology, thinks he talked to talking alien racoon
2008 medicine founded their own journal and claimed viruses emitted radio waves to arrange water in nanostructure that let you teleport DNA though Homeopathy and also claims vaccines cause autism.
This is a decently-well documented observation. (I hesitate to call it a "phenomenon" as that would imply an actual casual mechanism.)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe#Expa...
Start with a tiny sphere. Expand it. The sphere gets bigger, but no point on the 2D-like surface is the centre.
It's like that, but the surface is a 4D spacetime.
You can't use your imagination to visualise this. But you can use math to describe it.
Whether there's some kind of ultradimensional hypercentre is a different question. Even if there was, it wouldn't be accessible from this universe.
And don't forget we don't have a clue what spacetime is. Relativity has some nice descriptions of what it does, but there's no fundamental explanation of how the universe generates the phenomena we call position, time, and distance.
The expansion that's occurring is that the space between things is growing. But it's every space between everything all at once, everywhere.
There is no physical equivalent.
Due to the laws of general relativity, extrapolating that observation into the past, the implication is that the matter in the universe was ever denser the further you go into past. Furthermore, there is a point in time where it becomes infinitely dense. This is what we call the Big Bang. Because our equations break down at that point, we don’t know what happened at that point in time, or before, or whether there was a before. However, observational evidence like the cosmic microwave background strongly support the theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Observational_evidenc...
Note that “infinitely dense” does not imply that the universe shrinks to a single point at that time. Rather, it was infinitely dense at every point. (Again, this is like zooming out from an infinite grid infinitely far. The grid always remains infinitely large.) This means that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once. It’s a point in time, not a location.
My grandmother grew up when cars were scarce, electric wires were stapled to the wall, and indoor plumbing was for city folk. She hit a certain level of technological advancement and then just stopped, probably around the 1980s. She died last year, having never used the Internet or a computer and still using a console TV (with an adapter box installed by the cable company).
Someone needs to send him an https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eierschalensollbruchstellenve...
Mark Twain
There was a centuries long debate in Germany (and Germanic lands) over this issue. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput... for info about the debate over typeface specifically. TL;DR: The Nazis resolved the dispute by fiat, in an odd twist of history settling on the Latin typeface.
(For typeface enthusiasts, I apologize for any poor use of terminology.)
https://unbloq.us/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archiv...
And everything would be much clearer.
Otherwise, the fact that "the further away from us they are, they faster they were receding" made me think of this way:
-the further away they are, the longer the light had to travel to get here
-the longer the light had to travel, the longer it took to get to us
-the longer it took to get to us, the further into the past we are looking
-the further into the past we look (further distances), the faster they are receding - doesn't that imply it was faster in the past? The further past we look, the faster it is. The closer we look to home (the closer to "now"), the slower it is.
The acceleration was really fast after Big Bang, but slowed down. It was assumed that it would flatten out and expand at constant rate.
However what if supernovae 1a are not standard candles and their luminosity varies over a much greater range? Then a lot of distance measurements from Riess et. al. are wrong. I belief that scenario to have higher probability than many of the proposed alternatives. But Riess cannot see that, because it would put into question his lifes work.
observationist•1d ago