Be Suspicious of Speculating Scientists Trying to Explain Away Observations That Seem to Bust Their Theories

 Launched on Christmas of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (or JWST for short) is a big fancy space telescope that is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope can see farther into distant space than any other telescope. Scientists believe that when a telescope like this looks at the farthest reaches of its limits, it is actually looking far back in time. That's because light travels at a speed of one light-year per year. So if a telescope such as the James Webb Space Telescope observes a very distant galaxy about 13 billion light-years away, that light should be the light the galaxy emitted 13 billion years ago. 

A news  story is entitled "SCIENTISTS PUZZLED BECAUSE JAMES WEBB IS SEEING STUFF THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE." We read this:

"For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. 'The models just don't predict this,' Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told WaPo. 'How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?' "

In the Washington Post article (which a paywall may prevent you from reading), we read this comment about observations of galaxies at very high redshifts, believed to be observations of galaxies appearing soon after the Big Bang:

"What has surprised astronomer Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute are the number of nicely shaped, disclike galaxies. 'We thought the early universe was this chaotic place where there's all these clumps of star formation, and things are all a jumble,' Coe said." 

A galaxy as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (credit:NASA)

You can find the latest papers on this topic by going to the Cornell physics paper server, and using a search phrase of "JWST+high-redshift" or "JWST+earliest galaxies" or "little red dots." Among the papers are these:

• The paper "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ~ 14 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS Imaging" by dozens of different authors tells us this: "Should followup spectroscopy validate this redshift, our Universe was already aglow with fairly massive galaxies less than 300 Myr [million years] after the Big Bang." This contradicts what scientists have long told us, that such galaxies would take a billion years or longer to form. 
• Another paper tells us, "Neither the high number of such objects found nor the high redshifts they reside at are expected from the previously favored predictions."
• Another paper reports the observation of "remarkably luminous" galaxies that already had a billion stars by the time the universe was only about 300 to 400 million years old. 
• A paper is entitled "On the stunning abundance of super-early, massive galaxies revealed by JWST." We read of the detection of "of two very bright" galaxies at "super-early epochs," with masses of at least a billion solar masses.  We are told "this detection poses a serious challenge to essentially all models," and that what is observed deviates by some ten times from what is predicted.  The authors resort to a "conspiracy theory" to explain these findings, telling us, "The weak evolution from z = 7 to z ≈ 14 of the LF bright end arises from the conspiracy between a decreasing dust attenuation, making galaxies brighter, that almost exactly compensates for the increasing shortage of their host halos." 
• A paper tells us, "The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a surprising abundance of bright galaxy candidates in the very early Universe (<500Myrs after the Big Bang), calling into question current galaxy formation models." 
• Another paper is entitled "Schrodinger's Galaxy Candidate: Puzzlingly Luminous at z≈17, or Dusty/Quenched at z≈5?" The paper mentions a galaxy that seems to have about 5 billion stars, observed at a time when the universe was only about 200 million years old, noting that this "challenges virtually every early galaxy evolution model." The authors also resort to a "conspiracy theory" to try to explain this embarrassing finding, using the word "conspire" in their abstract. 
• Another paper notes that "early observations with JWST have led to the discovery of an unexpected large density...of massive galaxies... at extremely high redshifts z ≈ 10, " and finds in its Section 7 that the most-popular model of cosmology (called lambda cold dark matter or LCDM) is "excluded" (in other words, ruled out) at a moderately strong two-sigma level by the latest observations. 
• Another paper entitled "A very early onset of massive galaxy formation" refers to high redshift galaxies (believed to be the earliest galaxies formed), and notes that "the mass density in the most massive galaxies exceeds the total previously-estimated mass density... by a factor of ∼ 2 at z ∼ 8 and by two orders of magnitude at z ∼ 10." This being wrong by two orders of magnitude refers to predictions being wrong by a factor of about 100 times. 

You can tell how inconsistent these observations are with predictions by going to a NASA page dated January 19, 2021. On that page a scientist says, "Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the big bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years." 

The term "little red dots" is now being used in the cosmology literature for these surprisingly large galaxies found very early in the history of the universe. The term refers to galaxies seen at the observation limits of the James Webb Space Telescope, which appear in photos as mere little red dots, despite their massive size. A search for the term "little red dots" on the Cornell physics paper server now gives 36 matches, such as the August 2024 paper "Sizes and Stellar Masses of the Little Red Dots Imply Immense Stellar Densities."

Gravity working to form galaxies would act very slowly. Galaxies seemed to have formed far more quickly after the Big Bang than scientists can account for, even when scientists are allowed to plug in to their scenarios some imaginary unproven things such as dark energy and dark matter. Sticking to known discovered particles, scientists cannot even explain how spiral galaxies retain their structure over many billions of years, despite galaxy rotations that should cause the spiral arms of galaxies to get broken up within a billion years. The problem becomes ten times worse when you consider "super spiral galaxies" much bigger than our galaxy.

But in late August 2024 we had an example of scientists doing what they so often do:  engaging in desperate, far-fetched speculations to try to patch up some giant hole in their failing theories.  What happened was that scientists made some weird, unverifiable speculation that mysterious black holes were causing the "little red dot" galaxies to look like they have much more stars than they do.  Showing another of endless examples of its tendency to swallow "hook, line and sinker" the most far-fetched speculations, a bunch of science news sites  reported this speculation as if it somehow managed to remove the explanatory problem caused by the "little red dot" galaxies. 

An example of the bad coverage was this headline at www.space.com:

"Early galaxies weren't mystifyingly massive after all, James Webb Space Telescope finds

The bottom line is, there is no crisis in terms of the standard model of cosmology."

It wasn't the James Webb Space Telescope that found such a thing, but some speculating scientists trying to do do an analgesic analysis, one that would reduce the pain of cosmologists caused by how bad they are failing.  The credulity of the writer of this article is striking. He writes "The scientists discovered that black holes made nine of these early galaxies appear much brighter — and thus bigger — than they really are" when he should be writing "scientists are now speculating  that  black holes made nine of these early galaxies appear much brighter — and thus bigger — than they really are." I guess he didn't read the part of the paper that states, "With only photometric colors available, it is extremely difficult to accurately determine the light contributed by the AGN component of these galaxies, making photometric stellar mass estimates for these sources extremely uncertain (Barro et al. 2024; Kocevski et al. 2023)."  An examination of the paper shows that it is filled with all kinds of dubious arbitrary analysis. 

A press release about the paper gives us more reasons for doubting the study. For one thing, we are told that the person in charge of the analysis was not a PhD scientist, but a mere graduate student. We are told that the study was "led by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Katherine Chworowsky." When it comes to the very hard job of properly analyzing the significance of "little red dots" at the faintest limits of telescopic observations,  maybe 13 billion light-years away, would it not be better to have so very hard a task be led by someone who has a science PhD?

The press release tells how Chworowsky got her comforting "our theories still work" results: by speculation and throwing away the troubling observations. We read this (the italicized boldface part is pure speculation, and the underlined part refers to discarding important observations):

"According to this latest study, the galaxies that appeared overly massive likely host black holes rapidly consuming gas. Friction in the fast-moving gas emits heat and light, making these galaxies much brighter than they would be if that light emanated just from stars. This extra light can make it appear that the galaxies contain many more stars, and hence are more massive, than we would otherwise estimate. When scientists remove these galaxies, dubbed 'little red dots' (based on their red color and small size), from the analysis, the remaining early galaxies are not too massive to fit within predictions of the standard model."

Ah, we have yet another example of what scientists do so very often when observations defy their theories: they just throw away the offending observations, perhaps giving some little speculation to try to justify their discarding. So, for example, innumerable mentally normal witnesses have testified that they saw apparitions of the dead, as I am showing in my 60+  posts on this blog with a tag of "apparition."  And the observational evidence for ESP and clairvoyance is overwhelming, consisting of 200 years of written evidence, much of it many times better than the evidence for many theories scientists cherish. But our mainstream scientists just throw away such observations that offend them,  muttering the speculation of "hallucinations" or "coincidence" to try to justify their discarding of abundant important observations. 

In such cases, it does not matter how thin or far-fetched the speculation is; it merely matters that it serves as an excuse (no matter how thin) for throwing away the data the scientist wishes to ignore. So in the study led by graduate student Chworowsky mentioned above, we have only a single sentence using the phrase ""black hole" or "black holes," the mere skimpy claim that " early JWST observations seem to indicate that accreting supermassive black holes are relatively common at z > 5." The press release quoted above has told us that "according to this latest study, the galaxies that appeared overly massive likely host black holes rapidly consuming gas." But that study had only a single sentence  using the phrase "black hole " or "black holes."  

This is typical. When scientists wish to throw away important observations that offend them and conflict with their cherished theories, they think all they need is the tiniest soundbite to justify their ignoring of important observations.  To say that Chworowsky's  paper has given us a half-baked speculation would seem to be too charitable. It might be better to say that she merely gave us the tiniest crumb to try to justify discarding the "tiny red dot" galaxy observations that so many cosmologists are worried about. 

And so it is, again and again in the world of science: scientists throwing in their trash cans so many types of the most important observations, observations that offend them and conflict with their belief dogmas, while giving us only the tiniest crumb of a justification for such ignoring of important evidence.  

The AI art visual above is a "pulled punch" affair. There are so very many cases of scientists ignoring, sweeping under the rug and trying to knee-cap so many different types of important observational evidence that a better visual might depict a large library building of observational evidence conflicting with the cherished beliefs of scientists, with scientists trying to nail up a sign on the front door saying, "Closed."  It would be like the AI art visual below:

James Webb Telescope Finds a Universe Getting Orderly Too Fast

Launched on Christmas last year, the James Webb Space Telescope (or JWST for short) is a big fancy new space telescope that is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope can see farther into distant space than any other telescope. Scientists believe that when a telescope like this looks at the farthest reaches of its limits, it is actually looking far back in time. That's because light travels at a speed of one light-year per year. So if a telescope such as the James Webb Space Telescope observes a very distant galaxy about 13 billion light-years away, that light should be the light the galaxy emitted 13 billion years ago. 

A recent news story is entitled "SCIENTISTS PUZZLED BECAUSE JAMES WEBB IS SEEING STUFF THAT SHOULDN'T BE THERE." We read this:

"For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe's earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe. 'The models just don't predict this,' Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told WaPo. 'How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?' "

In the Washington Post article (which a paywall may prevent you from reading), we read this comment about observations of galaxies at very high redshifts, believed to be observations of galaxies appearing soon after the Big Bang:

"What has surprised astronomer Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute are the number of nicely shaped, disclike galaxies. 'We thought the early universe was this chaotic place where there's all these clumps of star formation, and things are all a jumble,' Coe said." 

A galaxy as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (credit:NASA)

You can find the latest papers on this topic by going to the Cornell physics paper server, and using a search phrase of "JWST+high-redshift" or "JWST+earliest galaxies." Among the recent papers are these:

• The paper "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ~ 14 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS Imaging" by dozens of different authors tells us this: "Should followup spectroscopy validate this redshift, our Universe was already aglow with fairly massive galaxies less than 300 Myr [million years] after the Big Bang." This contradicts what scientists have long told us, that such galaxies would take a billion years or longer to form. 
• Another recent paper tells us, "Neither the high number of such objects found nor the high redshifts they reside at are expected from the previously favored predictions."
• Another paper reports the observation of "remarkably luminous" galaxies that already had a billion stars by the time the universe was only about 300 to 400 million years old. 
• A very recent paper is entitled "On the stunning abundance of super-early, massive galaxies revealed by JWST." We read of the detection of "of two very bright" galaxies at "super-early epochs," with masses of at least a billion solar masses.  We are told "this detection poses a serious challenge to essentially all models," and that what is observed deviates by some ten times from what is predicted.  The authors resort to a "conspiracy theory" to explain these findings, telling us, "The weak evolution from z = 7 to z ≈ 14 of the LF bright end arises from the conspiracy between a decreasing dust attenuation, making galaxies brighter, that almost exactly compensates for the increasing shortage of their host halos." 
• A very recent paper tells us, "The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a surprising abundance of bright galaxy candidates in the very early Universe (<500Myrs after the Big Bang), calling into question current galaxy formation models." 
• Another recent paper is entitled "Schrodinger's Galaxy Candidate: Puzzlingly Luminous at z≈17, or Dusty/Quenched at z≈5?" The paper mentions a galaxy that seems to have about 5 billion stars, observed at a time when the universe was only about 200 million years old, noting that this "challenges virtually every early galaxy evolution model." The authors also resort to a "conspiracy theory" to try to explain this embarrassing finding, using the word "conspire" in their abstract. 
• Another recent paper notes that "early observations with JWST have led to the discovery of an unexpected large density...of massive galaxies... at extremely high redshifts z ≈ 10, " and finds in its Section 7 that the most-popular model of cosmology (called lambda cold dark matter or LCDM) is "excluded" (in other words, ruled out) at a moderately strong two-sigma level by the latest observations. 
• Another recent paper entitled "A very early onset of massive galaxy formation" refers to high redshift galaxies (believed to be the earliest galaxies formed), and notes that "the mass density in the most massive galaxies exceeds the total previously-estimated mass density... by a factor of ∼ 2 at z ∼ 8 and by two orders of magnitude at z ∼ 10." This being wrong by two orders of magnitude refers to predictions being wrong by a factor of about 100 times. 

You can tell how inconsistent these observations are with predictions by going to a NASA page dated January 19, 2021. On that page a scientist says, "Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the big bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years." 

Gravity working to form galaxies would act very slowly. Galaxies seemed to have formed far more quickly after the Big Bang than scientists can account for, even when scientists are allowed to plug in to their scenarios some imaginary unproven things such as dark energy and dark matter. Sticking to known discovered particles, scientists cannot even explain how spiral galaxies retain their structure over many billions of years, despite galaxy rotations that should cause the spiral arms of galaxies to get broken up within a billion years. The problem becomes ten times worse when you consider "super spiral galaxies" much bigger than our galaxy. But you can hear a thousand scientists talk and none of them will say something like what they should be saying, which is: "We've been pretending for so long to understand so much, but we understand so little." 

Postscript: Scientific American has a new story entitled "JWST’s First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology." We read this:

"Another team, meanwhile, found evidence for galaxies the size of our Milky Way at a redshift of 10, less than 500 million years after the big bang. Such behemoths emerging so rapidly defies expectations set by cosmologists’ standard model of the universe’s evolution. Called Lambda CDM (LCDM), this model incorporates scientists’ best estimates for the properties of dark energy and dark matter, which collectively act to dominate the emergence of large-scale cosmic structures. ('Lambda' refers to dark energy and 'CDM' refers to dark matter that is relatively sluggish, or 'cold.') '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,' says Michael Boylan-Kolchin, a cosmologist at the University of Texas at Austin...The most startling explanation is that the canonical LCDM cosmological model is wrong and requires revision. 'These results are very surprising and hard to get in our standard model of cosmology,' Boylan-Kolchin says. 'And it’s probably not a small change. We’d have to go back to the drawing board.' ”

Galaxy Expert Confesses We Don't Understand How Galaxies Form

Last Friday scientists made a surprising announcement. They announced findings about a mysterious galaxy 300 million light-years away, a galaxy named Dragonfly 44. This galaxy seems to have about roughly the mass of our galaxy, but only emits 1 percent of the light our galaxy emits. Astronomers stated that this Dragonfly 44 galaxy is 99.99% dark matter. Dark matter is believed to be a mysterious form of matter that makes up about 27% of the universe. Ordinary matter is believed to make up only about 5% of the universe, with dark energy making up about 68% of the universe.

But such an announcement presents a great paradox. If ordinary matter makes up 5% of the universe, and dark matter and ordinary matter are mixed together throughout the universe, how could it possibly be that a particular galaxy would be 99.99% dark matter? This would seem to be as unlikely as that there might be some weird local change in the composition of the air, which is normally 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. Imagine if somehow the nitrogen in the air became so dominant that the air above a town became 99% nitrogen, causing all the people in the town to die of oxygen starvation. Such an event seems as improbable as that some galaxy would consist of 99.99% dark matter, when dark matter and ordinary matter are mixed throughout the universe.

After a result this surprising, we must take a step back and realize that there is really no firm basis for making statements such as the claim that this Dragonfly 44 galaxy is 99.99% dark matter. Dark matter has never been directly observed, and a multi-year attempt to directly observe it has failed. What we see in this Dragonfly 44 galaxy can most simply be described like this: a galaxy is behaving in a way that is inexplicable under our current understanding of gravity, inexplicable by a factor of 1000 times. Imagine if I see a bus floating up into the air. It would be rather presumptuous to make a statement such as: “The bus must consist of 99% antigravity material.” I should instead simply say that the bus is behaving in a way I don't understand. Similarly, rather than using some exact dark matter figure that makes it sound as if they understand what is going on, our scientists should be candidly confessing their lack of understanding of what is going on.

But that is not the way of the modern theoretical scientist. The modern theoretical scientist seems to be very prone to exaggerate his understanding, to make it look as if his understanding of some great mystery of nature is good, even when it is very poor. Here are some of the techniques that are typically employed as part of such a thing.

Ignore the unanswered questions. Asked to explain what we know about a particular topic, a modern scientist will probably go into a discussion that focuses entirely on what has been discovered, as well as what has been theorized, without mentioning what we are ignorant about. For example, a scientist asked to talk about the Big Bang will go into a discussion of why we think there was a Big Bang, and may also go into speculations about some details of the first second of the Big Bang. He will avoid mentioning that we don't understand the cause of this event.

Weave a blend of fact and speculation. Asked to explain a mystery such as the origin of life, the modern scientist is often like someone who needs to have a coat, but who merely has some assorted threads of fact. The scientists will then augment his threads of fact with some threads of speculation. By artfully weaving these together, and focusing only on bits and pieces here and there, the scientist may leave you with the impression that he has something like a coat, even though he may have perhaps merely a few scattered pieces, like a collar that is half fact and half speculation, and a coat elbow that is more speculation than fact.

Clutter the answer with jargon and minutiae. Asked what we know about some mystery that is not understood, the modern scientist will very often give an answer filled with jargon and a discussion of intricate fine details – the details often being details of a speculation rather than details of fact. To the average person, this may seem very impressive, and may leave him with an impression the scientist has a deep understanding of the mystery, even when the scientist has no such thing. For example, if asked to explain how humans can remember childhood memories for 50 years, a neurologist may launch into a jargon-filled discussion of some “clustering dynamics” theory attempting to explain the persistence of human memory. It may seem impressive in all its details, until you find out that it is mere speculation.

Don't mention the problems with your explanation. Very many or most theoretical explanations have some problems associated with them, reasons for doubting such explanations. When asked about some great mystery of nature, a scientist will very often confidently discuss some theoretical explanation, but fail to make any mention of problems associated with such an explanation. For example, when asked about how memory is stored, a neuroscientist may tell you that this is caused by LTP (long term potentiation) in synapses – but completely fail to mention that LTP is actually something that quickly decays, and generally doesn't last longer than a few weeks. Similarly, when asked about the origin of species, the modern biologist will confidently offer the Neo-Darwinism explanation that the cause was natural selection and random mutations. Our biologist will not mention that such an explanation does absolutely nothing to explain why any particular biological implementation would have made the large leap from a starting point to a “reward threshold” level of complexity and coordination (often very high) necessary for the implementation to first start yielding any survival value reward. Our biologist also will not mention that helpful random mutations are many times less common than harmful mutations. 
 

I have seen these techniques used hundreds of times by scientists trying to depict themselves as “lords of knowledge” about matters which mankind is really very ignorant about. So I was utterly flabbergasted to read a statement by galaxy expert Pieter van Dokkum, a statement of great candor. Talking about the mysterious Dragonfly 44 galaxy just discussed, van Dokkum says, "It means we don’t understand, kind of fundamentally, how galaxy formation works."

No doubt van Dokkum's colleagues would respond by saying, “It's just gravitation,” but I would remind them that gravitation cannot explain the persistence of spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way, nor can it even explain the appearance of galaxies with such a shape.  See here for more on why the persistence of spiral galaxies is so hard to explain.

A spiral galaxy (Credit: NASA)

I think van Dokkum deserves great applause for this rather rare case of explanatory candor by a scientist. This is what I want from a scientist – a candid statement of ignorance where knowledge is lacking, rather than some pretentious pedantic affectation in which the speaker pretends to understand some deep mystery he does not really understand. Let's hope we can start seeing more of this candor from our biologists and neuroscientists.

A Bob Fosse Universe?

A new scientific paper has announced a “strangely coherent coordinated motion” of galaxies that suggests a degree of cosmic choreography never before imagined.

The universe is made up of billions of galaxies, each consisting of many stars. The largest are spiral galaxies like our own galaxy. Our galaxy (the Milky Way) is surrounded by about two dozen much smaller galaxies called dwarf galaxies, which each have a much smaller number of stars. In recent years astronomers discovered that the dwarf galaxies surrounding our galaxy are found in a plane-like structure that is known as the Vast Polar Structure (or VPOS). They have also found that the dwarf galaxies surrounding the nearest nearby spiral galaxy (the Andromeda galaxy) are also found in a plane-like structure called the Great Plane of Andromeda.

Such findings have raised doubts about the prevailing theory of large-scale structure formation, the lambda cold dark matter theory. Such a theory predicts that dwarf galaxies should be located in an irregular blob around our galaxy, not in a plane-like structure.

This week a paper published in the scientific journal Nature announced two big findings. The first was that rather than being a local fluke involving only our galaxy and its biggest neighbor galaxy, the tendency of dwarf galaxies to exist in a plane (around a spiral galaxy) is apparently quite typical. The study suggested data "may indicate planes of co-rotating satellites, similar to those seen around the Andromeda galaxy, are ubiquitous." Such a finding seems to be bad news for the lambda cold dark matter theory.

The second finding of the paper may be bad news to anyone who doesn't like to hear about mysterious unexplained examples of large-scale cosmic order. The scientific paper found an astonishingly strong tendency for the motions of opposite pairs of dwarf galaxies to be anti-correlated. That phrase is quite a mouthful, so let me give a visual which explains it.

In the picture below, we see a galaxy with two much smaller dwarf galaxies next to it. (The picture is a composite image not intended to represent some particular galaxy.) The dwarf galaxies rotate around the larger galaxy. But they rotate in opposite directions, as shown by the red arrows. This is what is meant by an anti-correlated motion.

The Nature paper (by Neil Ibata, Geraint Lewis and others) first checked a huge computer model of the universe to see whether we should expect to see any difference between these two things:

1. The number of dwarf galaxy pairs on opposite sides of a galaxy which have their rotation motions anti-correlated with each other.
2. The number of dwarf galaxy pairs on opposite sides of a galaxy which have their rotation motions correlated with each other.

The model predicted that there should be no difference between these two. In other words, the model predicted that the type of motion labeled as A below should be as common as the type of motion labeled as B:

But the observations gave a dramatically different picture. As shown in the graph below, the study found that for every dwarf galaxy pair that had a correlated motion, there were between 2 and 4 that had an anti-correlated motion. 

“We were surprised to find that a large proportion of pairs of satellite galaxies have oppositely directed velocities if they are situated on opposite sides of their giant galaxy hosts," said Neil Ibata, one of the paper's authors. "Everywhere we looked we saw this strangely coherent coordinated motion of dwarf galaxies. From this we can extrapolate that these circular planes of dancing dwarfs are universal, seen in about 50 percent of galaxies," said Professor Geraint Lewis. "This is a big problem that contradicts our standard cosmological models. It challenges our understanding of how the universe works including the nature of dark matter."

Dancing dwarfs? Good heavens, that sounds like something out of a Disney movie.

The paper did not suggest any mechanism for this strange choreography, nor did any of the articles about it that I read. Not surprising, as it is hard to think of any natural mechanism that could explain it.

The Sciencedaily.com article on the paper says, “The discovery may mean that our current models need to be completely revised .” So the new finding could be a paradigm buster. 
 
This is the third time scientists have made some distant observations suggesting that the universe may behave in shocking defiance of our expectations of random behavior. One other case (discussed here) was that scientists discovered that the polarization vectors of quasars tend to be aligned in the same direction in particular regions of space. In one gigantic area of space, these vectors may be aligned in one direction, and in another huge region of space, they may be aligned in some different direction. Another comparable case (discussed here) is that scientists discovered that galaxies tend to rotate preferentially in certain directions of the sky. In some directions of the sky spiral galaxies tend to rotate as much as 7% more frequently in a left-handed rotation, even though scientists think there should be no difference between the number of left-handed rotations and the number of right-handed rotations.

At the very end of Olaf Stapledon's novel Last and First Men (available here on a single web page) are seven paragraphs that I consider to be one of the greatest passages in English literature. Below is a brief excerpt:

Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. 
 
But perhaps the distant golden fleece to pluck is not the music of the spheres, but the dance of the spheres. And perhaps now we are starting to glimpse some of that strange and surprising cosmic dance. 
 
Which raises the question: who or what did the choreography?

Galaxy Spin Bias: A Page From the Cosmic “Book of the Damned”

Charles Fort was a writer who wrote four books describing strange inexplicable phenomena. One of these books was called The Book of the Damned. For example, he discussed alleged cases of teleportation, poltergeist activity, mysterious disappearances, inexplicable spontaneous fires, UFOs, ball lightning, and cases of fish, frogs, and organic material mysteriously falling from the sky. The title refers to phenomena that have been “damned” in the sense of being excluded from consideration by modern scientists, because the phenomena fall outside of their theories. Fort's works were so successful that nowadays the term “Fortean” is used for such hard-to-explain phenomena. An entertaining web site that discusses such phenomena is http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/.

We might say there is an earthly “Book of the Damned,” and a cosmic “Book of the Damned.” Inside the cosmic “Book of the Damned” are items discovered by astronomers that are all but impossible to explain within the framework of existing theories. One strange example along these lines is the odd case of spiral galaxy spins.

All spiral galaxies rotate. A spiral galaxy can either rotate in a clockwise direction or a counter-clockwise direction. The directions are called either left-handed or right-handed, depending on the side to which the bottom spiral arm is pointing. In the picture below, we see the difference between the two types of spin.

Scientists originally expected that 50% of the spiral galaxies would spin in a left-handed direction, and 50% of the spiral galaxies would spin in a right-handed direction. That is what we would expect to occur by chance.

Physicist Michael Longo and his helpers studied more than 15,000 galaxies to determine which direction they were spinning (something that seems like the most tedious assignment imaginable). The end result was very surprising. Instead of finding that spiral galaxies always spin in one direction 50% of the time and the other direction 50% of the time, Longo found that in some parts of the sky galaxies prefer to spin one way or the other significantly more frequently.

Longo's results are shown below. The diagram shows different directions of the sky. The numbers along the outer circumference of the circle summarize the overall spin bias for a particular direction of the sky. The results are very strange. In some directions of the sky there is an almost exact balance between galaxies that are spinning in a “left-handed” way and galaxies spinning in the opposite, “right-handed” way. But in other directions of the sky, “left-handedness” can be preferred by as much as 7% over “right-handedness.” 

While it may seem small, such a 7% preference is really huge, when one considers the law of large numbers, which dictates that when you have very many trials (such as more than 1000) the deviation from the expected chance result should be very, very small. The law of large numbers dictates, for example, that if you flip a coin 10,000 times, there is only the tiniest chance that the number of “Heads” flips will be more than 51%.

There is no easy way to reconcile Longo's finding with the prevailing assumptions of modern astronomers. So when Longo's results were announced, scientists took the convenient route of thinking: we'll just ignore this, because after all, it's only one study.

But then the next year scientist Lior Shamir produced a scientific paper presenting the results of a much larger analysis on spiral galaxy spins. Shamir analyzed 126,501 galaxies, and found that the effect reported by Longo is very real: spiral galaxies prefer to spin in a left-handed direction in a particular direction of the sky. The degree of preference is about the same reported by Longo, about 7%.

How could such a thing be happening by chance? There has been talk that a “rotation of the entire universe” might be an explanation, but the suitability of such an explanation is very questionable, and the idea of a rotating universe doesn't fit in with prevailing astrophysical theories.

Faced with a second scientific paper showing this mysterious anomaly that spiral galaxies prefer to spin in one direction, did scientists start giving this matter great attention? No. They pretty much continued to ignore the anomaly, putting the finding in the cosmic “Book of the Damned,” where the finding continues to attract almost no attention.

Humanity Prerequisites: A Table of 18 Anthropic Requirements

The Standard Model is regarded as a highly “unnatural” theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist.
Harry Cliff, Particle Physicist, in a Scientific American article

If you have not read much on the topic of the anthropic principle and the issue of possible fine-tuning in the universe, it may be hard to follow the topic. Discussions typically involves subatomic physics, cosmology, biology, evolution and some other subjects that don't exactly make light reading. I think that the topic will be easier to understand if we condense it into one simple table that summarizes the most relevant facts. I have created such a table, which appears below.

The left column of the table lists various items that appear in nature. The right column lists requirements of those items. The table is in chronological order. It starts out with requirements that must be met in the very beginning, near the time of the Big Bang, if the universe is ever going to end up with people like us, inhabitants of a technical civilization living near a sunlike star. Towards the end of the table are items that appeared billions of years later in time. The final item in the table is “Civilizations near sunlike stars.” It is interesting that for the last item to come into existence, all of the previous items in the list must previously come into existence. I have added color coding which makes the various interlinked dependencies much easier to follow. 

Click to Expand

I will now explain why each item has the requirements I have listed.

Row 1 (Higgs field): The Higgs field (related to the Higgs boson) is said to give mass to other particles. Scientists are puzzled by why the Higgs field has the strength it has, and they say that it seems to require fine-tuning to 15 decimal places. This is a problem called the hierarchy problem or the naturalness problem. It is discussed in this scientific paper entitled The Higgs: so simple yet so unnatural. As a Daily Galaxy article put it, “Using theory as it currently stands, the mass of the Higgs boson can only be explained as the result of a random fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe at a level of accuracy of one in one quadrillion.”

Row 2 (up quarks and down quarks, electrons): The particles in the nuclei of atoms (protons and neutrons) are made up of smaller particles called up quarks and down quarks. A requirement of the large-scale existence of up quarks and down quarks (and also electrons) is what scientists call matter/antimatter asymmetry (a situation where matter is vastly more abundant than antimatter). This is a puzzle to scientists, because the standard model of physics seems to predict that matter and antimatter should have existed in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang, which would have caused both types of particles to collide with each other and convert into energy, leaving almost nothing but energy in the universe. A requirement for electrons is the Higgs field, and on this page a physicist says that the electron would not have mass without the Higgs field. 

Row 3 (protons, neutrons): The simple requirement is that there be up quarks and down quarks, discussed in the previous paragraph.

Row 4 (hydrogen atoms): The requirement for a hydrogen atom is that you have one proton and one electron, and also the electromagnetic force, the force of attraction between a proton and an electron. Without that force, electrons would not have any tendency to orbit a nucleus.

Row 5 (galaxies): Galaxies are huge collections of stars. There are many requirements for the formation of galaxies after the Big Bang. The universe had to begin with a fine-tuned expansion rate, as a slighter higher rate would have caused an expansion too fast for galaxies to form, and a slightly slower rate would have caused all matter to collapse into superdense black holes. Scientists also say that numerous other things had to be just right (the other items listed in this row). One requirement is primordial density perturbations greater than .000001 and less than .0001, as explained here. One particularly severe requirement seems to involve dark energy, which is regarded pretty much the same as the cosmological constant. Cosmologists conclude that the level of dark energy seems to have been fine-tuned to something like 1 part in 10⁶⁰ or one part in 10¹²⁰. The issue, called the vacuum catastrophe, has been fretted over by many physicists. This paper refers to the “tremendous, unsolved naturalness problem” posed by the cosmological constant.
 
Row 6 (carbon atoms): This row refers to the abundant existence of carbon atoms, something which ends up having lots of requirements. Besides the previously mentioned requirements for the hydrogen atom (protons, electrons, and the electromagnetic force), there are the additional requirements of the neutron and the strong nuclear force (the two of them allow you to have a carbon nucleus that holds together, despite the mutual repulsion between the protons). There is also the requirement that you have a law of nature called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, something that is quite necessary for both solid matter and complex carbon bonds. Then there is an additional requirement for something called nuclear resonances, which assures that carbon is produced in abundant quantities by stars through a process called the triple alpha process. Without this additional requirement, there would not be enough carbon (which wasn't produced in the Big Bang). This point has been widely discussed by scientists such as Hoyle, and in this scientific paper stating that a 0.4% change in one parameter would have left us without a universe abundant in both carbon and oxygen. An additional requirement that I had no space to list in my table is the requirement that the neutron mass be higher than the proton mass.

Row 7 (oxygen atoms): Oxygen atoms have all the same requirements of carbon atoms, including the same special requirement involving nuclear resonances, necessary for oxygen to be produced by stars in abundant amounts. The scientific paper here argues that there would not be much oxygen without the weak nuclear force, so I have also listed that as a requirement. 

Row 8 (Heavier atoms): By heavier atoms I mean all atoms than have more than about 25 protons (which includes copper, lead, silver, gold, zinc, tin, and probably also iron). These types of atoms have most of the same requirements of carbon atoms and oxygen atoms, except that to have these atoms in abundance you don't need nuclear resonances but instead the stellar explosions called supernovae explosions (explosions of stars that produce heavy elements such as lead and iron). These supernovae explosions require a tiny particle called the neutrino and a force called the weak nuclear force.

Row 9 (Sunlike stars): I may define sunlike stars as those that are white, yellow, or orange (or some combination of those colors). Sunlike stars require galaxies (since if galaxies had not formed, there would be no stars). Sunlike stars also require a very delicate fine-tuning of some of the most fundamental constants of nature. The physicist Paul Davies says on page 73 of The Accidental Universe: “If gravity were very slightly weaker, or electromagnetism very slightly stronger (or the electron slightly less massive relative to the proton), all stars would be red dwarfs. A correspondingly tiny change the other way, and they would all be blue giants.” Blue giants are too-short lived for life to evolve near them, and red dwarf stars are not believed to be as favorable for life's evolution as sunlike stars. 

Row 10 (water): Water requires oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms, as we can tell from its formula H₂0. Because of its remarkable features that make it unique among liquids, there are probably additional requirements for water, but I haven't listed them.

Row 11 (stable planets): One requirement for stable planets is gravitation, the force that holds planets and stars together. But there is another very interesting requirement: that the electric charge of the proton exactly match the electric charge of the electron, to many decimal places. Electromagnetism (the fundamental force involving electric charges) is roughly 10³⁶ times stronger than gravitation, the weakest of the fundamental forces by far. Consequently a very slight mismatch between the charge of the electron and the proton would cause electromagnetism (roughly a trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravitation) to completely overwhelm the gravity holding the planet together. In his book The Symbiotic Universe, astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) says this about the equality of the proton and electron charges: "Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." In fact, experiments do indicate that the charge of the proton and the electron match to eighteen decimal places. 

A curious coincidence

Row 12 (nucleotides): Nucleotides are molecules that are the building blocks of RNA and DNA, molecules essential for life. Nucleotides require three types of atoms mentioned above (carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms), as well as phosphorus atoms. They also require physics to be arranged in a way that allows for atoms to combine to make molecules consisting of multiple atoms.

Row 13 (genetic code): The genetic code is a semantic framework used by DNA and RNA, one in which particular combination of nucleotides stand for particular amino acids. The genetic code could roughly be called the software used by DNA and RNA. The origin of this code is one of science's great mysteries. We do not know how this code (required for all biological evolution) appeared from mere chemicals. This is the “code from chemicals” problem described in this blog post.

Row 14 (RNA): RNA is one of the two main molecules used by all living things, and it is believed to have preceded the more well-known and more complicated molecule DNA. It requires nucleotides (from which RNA is built), as well as the genetic code and water (as a substrate).

Row 15 (DNA): DNA requires nucleotides (from which it is built), as well as the genetic code and water. I also list RNA as a requirement since it is believed that RNA was a necessary predecessor of DNA.

Row 16 (Proteins, cells): Proteins are made by DNA and RNA using the genetic code. Requirements include water and amino acids (which I didn't list in the table for space reasons).

Row 17 (Photosynthesis): Photosynthesis is the process by which plants convert sunlight to chemical energy. Recent studies suggest that photosynthesis uses exotic quantum effects.

Row 18 (Civilizations near sunlike stars): Now we come to the last and most important row, which mentions civilizations such as our civilization. There are many requirements for such a civilization. All of the items on the 17 previous rows on the table are indirect or direct requirements of civilizations near sunlike stars. The well-understood direct requirements of such civilizations are heavier atoms (needed so that the civilization can have the metals needed for technology), sunlike stars, stable planets, proteins, cells, and photosynthesis (the last one being necessary even if the beings in a civilization ate nothing but meat, because they would still rely on a food chain that would require photosynthesis).


The table I have created illustrates the great number of intertwining requirements needed for the universe to be consistent with the eventual appearance of civilizations such as ours. A huge amount of fine-tuning is required to meet these requirements, most notably in rows 1, 5, 9, and 11, each of which require “1 in a trillion” type coincidences with a very low likelihood of randomly occurring, We also have the very mysterious requirements of rows 13 and row 18, both of which almost seem to require “blood from stone” type of requirements (row 13 involving the origin of the genetic code from chemicals, and row 18 involving the origin of human-like consciousness from mere matter).

Our existence seems to require an almost miraculous conspiracy of conveniences, coincidences and fine-tuning within nature. As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow said in their book The Grand Design (page 161), “The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without destroying the possibility of the development of life as we know it.”

Postscript (2/14/14): The table of anthropic requirements above is not at all a complete list of all of the requirements for creatures like us to exist. For example, I didn't list a major additional requirement for atoms: a dependency on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. As discussed here,  were it not for this law of nature, electrons would fall into the nucleus of an atom, preventing any type of atom from existing.

The Universe's Batting Average

People love simple numbers that serve as a measure of someone's level of success. When you are a high school student and you start worrying about getting into college, the first thing you find out is that colleges are primarily interested in two numbers: your SAT score and your GPA number. In the world of baseball, the all-important numbers are batting average (an indication of hitting skill) and ERA (an indication of pitching skill).

But is there any way to “scale up” this concept of “one number as a measure of success” concept? Can we compute a single number that we might call America's batting average? Or can we compute a single number that we might call Earth's batting average? I have no ideas on how someone might compute either of these. But I do have some ideas on how we might compute the universe's batting average.

My general strategy for computing the universe's batting average is as follows:

1. We identify some highly desirable physical occurrence, outcome, or characteristic, with great significance to life in the universe.
   
2. We calculate in what percentage of the cases that highly desirable occurrence or outcome happens.
   
3. We scale that percentage to get a statistic similar to the batting average (a number such as .500).
   

Let's look at three different ways in which we can apply this strategy.

Relevant Fraction #1: The Percentage of Galaxies That are Spiral Galaxies or Irregular Galaxies

Galaxies are collections of millions or billions of stars. There are three main types of galaxies: spiral galaxies, irregular galaxies, and elliptical galaxies.

Types of galaxies (Credit: NASA)

Elliptical galaxies can be considered rather inferior for two reasons. For one thing, most elliptical galaxies have relatively little free-floating gas and dust, and are apparently not forming new stars. This means that the very old stars that make up elliptical galaxies may not have enough of the heavy elements needed for life. It is believed that the amount of heavy elements in a galaxy is proportional to how many generations of stars there have been in that galaxy.

Also, from a purely esthetic standpoint, elliptical galaxies are lacking. Elliptical galaxies are just boring blobs that aren't nearly as beautiful as spiral galaxies.

Irregular galaxies and spiral galaxies do have lots of dust and gas, and do form new stars. So from the standpoint of life, we can regard both spiral galaxies and irregular galaxies as being more of a “sign of success” than elliptical galaxies.

The internet has differing estimates of the percentage of galaxies that are elliptical, spiral, or irregular. I will take this NASA web page as authoritative, and it says, “Like more than two thirds of the known galaxies, the Milky Way has a spiral shape.” Other sources say that 70% of the galaxies near our galaxy are spiral galaxies. We can therefore estimate that the total percentage of galaxies that are spiral or irregular (not elliptical) is about 70%. This gives us our first batting average for the universe.

Cosmic Batting Average Number 1: .700

This percentage is actually one of the most important success indicators of the universe. There are quite a few reasons why slightly different cosmic parameters (or slightly different laws of nature) would have resulted in either zero galaxies in the universe or a very low fraction of life-favorable galaxies.

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Relevant Fraction #2: The Percentage of Stars That Have Planets

Another important fraction-type indicator of the degree of success of a universe is the percentage of stars that have planets. Of course, it wouldn't do any good to have a beautiful spiral galaxy if there weren't any planets revolving around the stars in that galaxy (or at least the only good of such a galaxy would be the esthetic good its beauty would provide to observers in other galaxies).

Before it developed problems with its gyroscopes, the Kepler Space Telescope did years of observations that allow us to estimate the percentage of stars having planets. There is also a technique called microlensing that astronomers have used to detect planets revolving around other stars. One recent scientific paper by a large team of scientists stated: "We conclude that stars are orbited by planets as a rule, rather than the exception." Based on that study we can estimate that at least 60% of stars have planets, which gives us the following batting average:

Cosmic Batting Average Number 2: .600

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Relevant Fraction #3: The Percentage of Natural Elements That are Non-Radioactive

Another very important fraction-type quality indicator of the universe is the percentage of elements that are non-radioactive. If a large majority of the elements were to be radioactive, it would be incredibly difficult to have much of a life living in our universe. You might live for a short time, but all that radioactivity would quickly give you cancer, so you wouldn't live for long.

Since you know that most people older than ten do not have cancer, you can guess what the answer is here. The percentage of naturally occurring radioactive elements is only about 20%. There are some 98 naturally occurring elements (or 92, according to other estimates). Some 80 of these elements are not radioactive. (In any case in which an element has a stable isotope and a rare but radioactive isotope -- for example, carbon—I am counting that as a non-radioactive element.)

Since there are about 98 naturally occurring elements, and about 80 naturally occurring non-radioactive elements, the percentage of non-radioactive elements is roughly 80%. This gives us our final batting average:

Cosmic Batting Average Number 3: .800

I may note that we should not at all take for granted that we live in a universe with relatively little radioactivity. You could modify the universe's fundamental constants just a little, and we would not be so lucky. A decrease of only about 20% in the strong nuclear force would cause almost all elements to be radioactive. If that were the case, you would probably not reach the age of 20 without dying of cancer.

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Conclusion

If we add up these three numbers and divide by three, we get an average number of .700. So that is our final estimated batting average of the universe: .700.  As batting averages go, that is very good (much better than Ty Cobb's lifetime average). 

There are two other important fractions that would be nice to learn to make a more definitive calculation of the universe's batting average. The first fraction is the approximate percentage of Earth-sized planets (in the habitable zone of a star) where life appears. The second fraction is the approximate percentage of life-bearing planets on which intelligence evolves. Both of these fractions have a great importance when considering the overall “degree of success” that the universe has. Unfortunately, we currently do not know what either of these fractions are. They could have any value between .000000001 and .999.

We might one day have a basis for estimating these fractions, particularly if we ever achieve radio contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. But for now the value of these fractions is completely unknown. So it will be a good long time before we can make a more definitive calculation of the batting average of the universe. All that can be said for now is that the preliminary indications are that the universe's batting average is very high.