Futurism‘s Maggie Harrison recently interviewed UC Santa Cruz astronomer Garth Illingworth, one of the developers of the James Webb Space Telescope. His observations stunned astronomers with unexpected new discoveries in very old and developed galaxies.

And when I sat there looking at the first images, I was just blown away by their beauty and the characters and information they had. But one of my later thoughts was that in that hour he looked at six sets of data. This is more data than we’ve seen in any reasonable time in our lives. They contain so much information that scientists have spent years working on them alone. It was just Pathfinder — I mean, it was dozens of hours, so we multiply it by 100, 1,000 each year.

One of the most common questions I get asked is, “Why is that important?” that’s a lot of money. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think humanity has a deep interest in our origins. We are interested in how it was born, how life was born. And you really go, well, we’re sitting on this little planet, how do planets form? That is the real purpose of astronomy. Webb, Hubble, these are just machines of origin. And what I really love about this is that in so many ways we live in a very divisive environment. This interest traverses beautifully across many of these political and other areas.

Maggie Harrison“The JWST data are so incredible that even those who created them question previous science.” Futurism (September 21, 2022)

Harrison also points to the August 30th article.

The surprises we encounter help explain the mixed reactions in recent weeks.

The images are “surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small, and surprisingly old” and do not support conventional current cosmology. Is “revolutionary change” considered a rebuttal of the Big Bang? Scientific American Webb even said he could “break cosmology.”

Otherwise, obscure researcher and science writer Eric Lerner, who has always favored the plasma universe over the Big Bang, could probably vent his frustration by blaming him, so he routinely denounces it. It was done (“negative theory” “pseudoscience”).

Some of us take the view that, whatever the particular confident assumptions of various doctoral dissertations, assuming that the universe had a beginning avoids absurd “infinite” mathematics. increase. So the basic idea of ​​the big bang survives.

What really rocks me is the idea that science is the cosmic answering machine that will tell us with certainty what we already believed to be true anyway.

You may also want to read: At Scientific American: Webb is breaking the big bang paradigm. That cosmic explosion is as much a cultural and philosophical concept as it is a scientific concept, which raises the anxiety of challenging discovery. The Big Bang as a basic concept will definitely survive. However, much of the “established science” seems to be undergoing a much needed revolution.