Creation Moment 9/28/2024 - "Redshift" Blues for Big Bangers

"William G. Tifft in 1973: “quantized redshifts.” The big bang theory

was becoming stronger at the time. Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias had detected the cosmic background radiation, the alleged “echo” of the big bang, in 1964. Alternative cosmologies were waning in popularity and the big bang was king. It was rapidly becoming the “standard model” for the origin of the universe. But quantized redshifts threw a monkey wrench into the big bang. If true, they suggested that redshifts were not a function of distance or age.

Tifft claimed to have detected 

--a periodicity to redshift values, 

--rather than a continuum. 

*The big bang predicted a continuum of redshifts due to the expansion of the universe. 

Q: How could they be periodic, like beads on a string? 

It made no sense. A few other astronomers followed up with additional estimates of periodic redshift values, either linear or logarithmic. 

Because Tifft was hanging out with mavericks like Fred Hoyle, J.V. Narlikar, Halton Arp and Geoffrey Burbidge, most cosmologists tended to dismiss the announcement as a mistake based on some flaw in measurements or an anomaly that would be explained later.

This year, more discussion appeared among cosmologists about quantized redshifts, and Phys.org picked up the buzz.

Quantized redshift and challenges to Big Bang hypothesis (23 Sept 2024, Phys.org). This article emerged as a dialog on Science X Network, a location on Phys.org’s parent company “where researchers can report findings from their published research articles.” The published article in this instance was posted August 12 on Cornell’s arXiv preprint server:

Quantized Redshift and its significance for recent observations (12 Aug 2024, arXiv). This preprint by Arindam Mal, Sarbani Palit, Christopher C. Fulton, Sisir Roy was the basis for the Phys.org article by two of the authors, Mal and Roy. The abstract of the paper claims new values of periodicity for quantized redshifts:

"We have observed a fundamental periodicity of 0.051 with a confidence interval of 95% in linear scale with the site-available Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 7 (SDSS DR7) quasar-galaxy pair data set. We have independently generated quasar-galaxy pair data sets from both 2dF and SDSS and found fundamental periodicities of 0.077 and 0.089 in log scale with a confidence interval of 95%."

Astronomers subscribing to alternative cosmologists claim that

redshifts of quasars (the most luminous objects at great distances) are not functions of expansion of the universe, but rather age effects of quasars being ejected from galactic centers.

The Phys.org article says that observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have come into the discussion:

"Recent observations by JWST and other telescopes violate the standard cosmology fundamental principle that the universe is on average homogeneous and isotropic. Also violated are standard model predictions about high redshift, high luminosity, metallicity and carbon evolution in the early universe, including the presence of large filament objects, galaxies like the Milky Way and unexpected morphology of objects at both high and low redshift."

Some specific instances are mentioned in the article:

"The recently observed GNz7q is a dusty starburst galaxy from which a luminous quasar is apparently emerging, a situation that is not consistent with the presence of a still young central black hole in a less massive phase at high redshift.

GN-z11 is estimated to be only 70 million years old but appears to be a moderately massive, metal-free, second-generation galaxy. JWST has observed a supermassive black hole at 200 million years after the Big Bang, which raises the question as to how this SMBH formed so quickly just after the birth of the universe. Many other observations raise fundamental questions about the formation and evolution of both galaxies and quasars."

Cosmology in Crisis

Apart from the question of quantized redshifts, recent articles have worried about other anomalies threatening the standard big bang model.

Cosmology is at a tipping point – we may be on the verge of discovering new physics (12 Sept 2024, The Conversation). Andreea Font of Liverpool John Moore University uses the “tipping point” motif to suggest that things could go in opposite directions. Nevertheless, she remains “excited” at the possibility of new physics emerging from the debates.

"For the past few years, a series of controversies have rocked the well-established field of cosmology. In a nutshell, the predictions of the standard model of the universe appear to be at odds with some recent observations."

Study: Early dark energy could resolve cosmology’s two biggest puzzles (12 Sept 2024, MIT News). Jennifer Chu’s use of the phrase “two biggest puzzles” indicates that some major anomalies are not yet resolved. “In the universe’s first billion years, this brief and mysterious force could have produced more bright galaxies than theory predicts.” 

If proposed “early dark energy” could resolve them, that implies it

does not at this time. Nobody knows what dark energy is anyway. Sounds like adding a fudge factor to keep a theory from collapsing. MIT astronomers were sent into scramble mode when JWST kept finding big, bright galaxies too early for comfort. Solution: turn up the perhapsimaybecouldness knob.

"The bright galaxies that JWST saw would be like seeing a clustering of lights around big cities, whereas theory predicts something like the light around more rural settings like Yellowstone National Park,” Shen says. “And we don’t expect that clustering of light so early on.

For physicists, the observations imply that there is either something fundamentally wrong with the physics underlying the models or a missing ingredient in the early universe that scientists have not accounted for. The MIT team explored the possibility of the latter, and whether the missing ingredient might be early dark energy."

Q: So what is early dark energy but a fudge factor? 

A: It’s “a sort of antigravitational force that is turned on only at very early times.” Sounds like the Guth Goof, concocting inflation out of whole cloth to solve one problem by creating others.

Q: After cosmic dark ages, what burned away ubiquitous clouds of gas? 

A: NASA telescope finds surprises (10 Sept 2024, Science Magazine). One must read claims about the big bang with scrutiny. This article, while treating the big bang like established fact, exchanges one problem for its opposite problem.

"During the first billion years after the Big Bang, as the first stars and galaxies switched on and filled the darkness with new light, they also caused another transformation: ionizing the neutral hydrogen gas filling the universe. Until recently, astronomers struggled to explain how it could happen. Ionizing hydrogen requires high-energy ultraviolet (UV) light, and the sparse, fledgling galaxies did not seem up to the task. Now, JWST, NASA’s orbiting infrared observatory, has turned that on its head. It is finding so many bright young galaxies and luminous black holes that there may be an oversupply of UV light."

Combination and summary of ATLAS dark matter searches within 2HDM+a framework (12 Sept 2024, Science China Press via Phys.org). They keep looking but just cannot find the stuff.

"Despite extensive astronomical observations confirming the existence of dark matter, we have limited knowledge about the properties of dark matter particles. From a microscopic perspective, the Standard Model of particle physics, established in the mid-20th century, has been hugely successful and confirmed by numerous experiments.

However, the Standard Model cannot explain the existence of dark matter in the universe, indicating the need for new physics beyond the Standard Model to account for dark matter candidate particles, and the urgent need to find experimental evidence of these candidates."

The crisis in big bang cosmology should be a reminder to Bible believers to trust the Word of God and not build their models on the shifting sands of materialist ideas. Details are hard to resolve sometimes, but we have the big picture from the Eyewitness: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1.” 

CEH