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 Tenfold Worsening of the Spiral Galaxy Explanation Problem?

One of the most amazing facts about the large-scale universe is the very large number of beautiful spiral galaxies. Most of the larger galaxies in the local universe are spiral galaxies. In my previous post The Unsolved Mystery of Why So Many Galaxies Are Beautiful Spiral Galaxies, I discussed the inadequacies of current attempts to explain the existence of so many spiral galaxies. 

The Whirlpool Galaxy (Credit: NASA)

Galaxies rotate, taking about 200 million years to rotate. For spiral galaxies this rotation leads to what is called the winding problem. This is the problem that the rotation of spiral galaxies should cause the spiral arms of galaxies to be ruined after a few rotations (in less than a billion years), due to a “winding up” effect. But somehow the spiral arms of spiral galaxies have apparently persisted for more than 10 billion years. Scientists have attempted to explain the persistence of spiral arms using a theory called the spiral density wave theory. But that theory is not in good shape, and is not well-supported by evidence. A scientific paper with the phrase "A case against density wave theory" in its title mentions “further negative evidence for density wave spirals.”

When I wrote my original post, I had never heard of “super spiral” galaxies. In the spring of 2016, news articles started to appear on this extra-large type of spiral galaxies. A NASA press release was entitled “Scientists Discover Colossal 'Super Spiral' Galaxies.” It said that the newly discovered type of spiral galaxy was as big and as bright as the biggest and brightest galaxies previously known.

The new type of “super spiral” galaxy is ten times more massive than our own galaxy. This apparently makes the spiral galaxy explanation problem ten times worse than it previously was.

Page 4 of this paper shows 53 of the “super spiral” galaxies. They look pretty much like spiral galaxies we are used to seeing in photos of distant space. Referring to a major attempt to simulate galaxy evolution with a computer simulation, section 7.2 of the paper says, “"Even the largest galaxy evolution simulations to date, such as the Illustris simulation...are not big enough to manufacture a significant number of super spirals."

The Illustris project was the largest attempt to simulate the universe using a supercomputer, and used 8000 CPU's running in parallel. I searched all 4 scientific papers published by the Illustris team, and found no evidence that their simulation had produced an outcome in which a large fraction of the galaxies are spiral galaxies. The authors made no attempt to categorize how many of their simulated galaxies were spiral galaxies. One of the papers claims that the simulation produced “ a reasonable population of ellipticals and spirals,” but from that statement we cannot tell whether the number of spiral galaxies was 10%, 1%, or .0001%.

I also tried using the “Infinitely Scrolling Galaxy Explorer” of the Illustris project, at this location. This allows you to scroll through simulated galaxies produced by the simulation. Very few of the simulated galaxies had clear spiral arms like that of the Whirlpool galaxy. Almost all the galaxies shown looked like elliptical galaxies or irregular galaxies or disk-shaped galaxies with random concentrations of stars but not spiral arms. It seemed that less than 2% of the simulated galaxies were spiral galaxies, and the number could have been less than 1%. In our universe ring galaxies are rare, but in the Illustris simulation there seemed to be many times more ring galaxies than spiral galaxies. In the Illustris simulated galaxies, in the rare cases in which there was something what looked like a spiral arm, there was almost always just one spiral arm, rather than the two or three spiral arms we see in real spiral galaxies.

I therefore find the way in which the Illustris project reported its outputs to be misleading in regard to the issue of whether the project was able to produce a universe in which a large fraction of the galaxies are spiral galaxies. Here is what an MIT press release of the project stated (a press release reproduced on the Illustris web site):

“With this model, we are able to get agreement with observational data on small scales and large scales,” says Mark Vogelsberger, an assistant professor of physics at MIT and first author of a new paper in the journal Nature that describes the modeling effort. While modeling 41,416 galaxies in all, the simulation closely matches the rate at which certain types of galaxies develop across the universe as a whole. “Some galaxies are more elliptical and some are more like the Milky Way, [spiral] disc-type galaxies,” Vogelsberger explains. “There is a certain ratio in the universe. We get the ratio right. That was not achieved before.”

But this statement does not match what you see when you scroll through the galaxies produced by the project, using the “Infinitely Scrolling Galaxy Explorer” on the Illustris web site. While a large fraction of the simulated galaxies are disk-shaped, only a tiny percentage (perhaps as few as 1 percent) look like spiral galaxies with one or more spiral arms (spiral galaxies have 2 or 3 spiral arms). Who should we blame here for this misleading statement? Given the fact that the MIT press release writer has inserted in brackets the word “spiral” (a word Vogelsberger apparently did not use), we perhaps cannot directly blame Vogelsberger. But we can fault him for failing to correct the modified version of his statement. With the insertion of the word “spiral,” the reader is left with the very misleading impression that the Illustris simulation “got the ratio right” by creating a simulated universe in which the number of spiral galaxies was similar to the ratio in the known universe. The simulation did no such thing. 

Another press release of the Illustris project claimed that the project created “a realistic mix of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and giant elliptical galaxies.” That phrase (repeated by many other news sources that used the press release) is not accurate in light of the fact that in our universe a large fraction of the galaxies are spiral galaxies, but in the Illustris simulation only a tiny fraction are spiral galaxies (as little as 1% or less). 

It seems that our scientists do not actually have a credible explanation for the high occurrence of spiral galaxies in the universe. The recent discovery of spiral galaxies ten times bigger than any previously observed underscores this explanatory shortfall.

The Unsolved Mystery of Why So Many Galaxies Are Beautiful Spiral Galaxies

One of the most astounding characteristics of the large-scale universe is the very large number of beautiful spiral galaxies. Most of the larger galaxies in the local universe are spiral galaxies. Why is that fact surprising?

It's surprising because of what is called the winding problem. Galaxies rotate, and a galaxy like ours takes about 200 million years to rotate. But consider a rotating spiral galaxy. The stars closer to the center of the galaxy will take a much shorter time to rotate around the center of the galaxy than the stars closer to the edge of the galaxy (just as planets close to the sun have much shorter years than planets far away from the sun). That's because the circles of rotation of stars closer to the galaxy's center have a much smaller radius. Therefore, based purely on rotation speeds, we should expect that the spiral arms of a spiral galaxy should “wind up” after only 2 or 3 rotations, and that spiral arms should last less than a billion years.  

But the age of the universe is about 13 billion years, and spiral galaxies are believed to be about that age, or almost as old. This means the average spiral galaxy has undergone more than 50 rotations. Based on simple rotation considerations, it seems that we should not at all be seeing even a tenth of the spiral galaxies that we see in the sky.

But don't worry, scientists have an explanation to cover this: what is called the density wave theory. But it's not a particularly credible explanation. It doesn't seem to stand up very well to observations, and it isn't well-confirmed by computer simulations.

Explanations of the density wave theory often use an analogy involving traffic patterns. We are told that just as we can explain concentrations of cars near freeway exits, we can explain the concentration of stars in the spiral arms of spiral galaxies.

But anyone familiar with the distance between stars should be suspicious with this analogy. Cars on a freeway exit are relatively close to another. But stars are not relatively close to each other. The distance to the nearest star is 6 million times the diameter of our sun. So how can any type of freeway exit car concentration analogy be appropriate for stars so far apart?

The “density wave” imagined by the density wave theory is merely an area where stars are about 10% more common. But given the immense relative distance between stars, how can anything that far apart act like a wave?

A recent scientific paper studied the spiral galaxy M81. The paper concluded, “Our data therefore provide no convincing evidence for a stationary density wave with a single pattern speed in M81, and instead favor the scenario of kinematic spiral patterns that are likely driven by tidal interactions with the companion galaxies M82 and NGC 3077.” The “tidal interactions” theory is a completely different one from the density wave theory, and one with its own plausibility problems (tidal interactions are random gravity tugs that we should not expect to produce all that often the orderliness of spiral arms). 

The spiral galaxy M81 (Credit: NASA)

In a paper that calls itself  “A case against spiral density wave theory,” some scientists stated the following: 

An offset is expected between these subsamples as a function of radius if the pattern speed of the spiral arm were constant - as predicted by classic density wave theory. No significant offsets are found....The standard scenario of density wave theory with a constant pattern speed results in an offset with respect to age for the distribution of distances to the spiral arms as one moves from the central regions... No significant differences are found in the distribution of these sources, giving further negative evidence for density wave spirals.

If scientists actually understand what forms spiral galaxies, they should be able to create computer simulations that show spiral galaxies very often forming from random collections of matter, with the spiral galaxies persisting in sufficient numbers. But the simulations don't do that. A recent major galaxy evolution simulation was the Eagle project, described in this paper written by more than a dozen scientists. But the 38-page paper doesn't mention density waves, doesn't mention spiral arms, and doesn't even use the word “spiral.”

The paper has a visual showing some simulated galaxies that resulted from the simulation, although we have no idea whether the authors cherry-picked those galaxies that most looked like spirals out of some large batch of simulated galaxies. But even the shown simulated galaxies don't actually have clear spiral arms (except for one). We see instead disks seeming to consist of random blobs of matter surrounding a dense core. From the fact that the paper makes no mention of “spiral” or “spiral arms,” we can conclude that no notable success was achieved in frequently creating simulated galaxies with spiral arms like the spiral arms in spiral galaxies (if such a success had been achieved, I can't see how the authors would not have mentioned it). 

When asked about the spiral arms in spiral galaxies, scientists will often speak as if they understand their origin and persistence, without confessing their lack of understanding on this matter. But occasionally you will get some refreshing candor on this topic. The abstract of this 2012 paper candidly says, “After almost fifty years the origin of spiral arms in disk galaxies remains one of the major unsolved problems in astrophysics.” 

Here we have another case of scientists trying to explain a mountainous effect (that a large fraction of the universe's galaxies are magnificent spirals) by using a little molehill of an explanation (that it's just "traffic jams" that cause this). I suspect something vastly deeper is going on. 

Postscript: The recent discovery of "super spirals" ten times bigger than our galaxy makes it all the much harder to explain spiral galaxies, as discussed here.  

Vast Question Mark in Space Highlights Cosmic Structure Mystery

Galaxies are collections of millions or billions of stars. The two largest galaxies in what is called the Local Group of galaxies are our galaxy (the Milky Way) and the Andromeda galaxy, both of which are spiral galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars. Both of these galaxies are surrounded by plane-like distributions of much smaller dwarf satellite galaxies. A recent scientific paper says these structures do not fit in with the prevailing theory of galactic structure formation. 

 Andromeda Galaxy

The plane of dwarf galaxies that surrounds the Andromeda galaxy is called the Great Plane of Andromeda. The plane is about 400 kiloparsecs wide, but only about 14 kiloparsecs thick. On this web site is an animated 3D model simulating this vast structure. As you can see from the animation, when you view the plane from a particular angle, the dwarf galaxies in the middle of this huge plane make a gigantic question-mark shape, which reminds me of the giant question mark formed by the stars of the Big Dipper. 

The structure of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters that surrounds our galaxy is called the Vast Polar Structure or VPOS. It is called polar because it is oriented above our galaxy and below our galaxy, without any matching structure on the sides of our galaxy. In the chart below (from this scientific paper), each of the blue or brown dots is one of the dwarf satellite galaxies or globular clusters in the VPOS (and our galaxy is in the middle of the chart). 

A recent scientific paper points out that both of these two structures (the Great Plane of Andromeda and the Vast Polar Structure) are not what we would expect to exist if the prevailing theory of galaxy formation (the lambda cold dark matter theory) is correct. That theory (which also goes by the ridiculously nerdy name of ˄CDM) has been criticized for being centered around the assumption that there exists a mysterious substance called cold dark matter, the existence of which is still unproven.

“The [lamda cold dark matter] model predicts that dwarf galaxies should form inside of small clumps of dark matter and that these clumps should be distributed randomly about their parent galaxy,” says one of the paper's authors, David Merritt. “But what is observed is very different. The dwarf galaxies belonging to the Milky Way and Andromeda are seen to be orbiting in huge, thin disk-like structures.”

Merritt's scientific paper concludes (page 18) that under the assumptions of the most popular galaxy formation theory (the lambda cold dark matter theory), there would be only about 2 chances in a million that we would see arrangements of dwarf satellite galaxies such as we observe in the Great Plane of Andromeda and the Vast Polar Structure, occurring near both our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. Instead, that theory predicts that dwarf satellite galaxies would form in a more random arrangement around a larger spiral galaxy.

So where does that leave our galactic astronomers? It leaves them pretty much caught with their pants down (to use an idiomatic expression meaning to be found in an embarrassing situation). Our galactic astronomers have spent at least 60 years trying to get a good predictive theory of the origin of galactic structure, and they apparently haven't got there yet.

We know there are at least four fundamental forces (the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravitation), but we try to explain the origin of galaxies by imagining that only one of those forces (gravitation) was involved. But the laws of nature we have discovered may be the mere tip of the iceberg. It could be there are major undiscovered laws of nature that played a role in the formation of galactic structure; and instead of there being only four fundamental forces, there may be five, six, seven, or more than ten. If so, our current attempts to explain the origin of galactic structure may be as premature as the attempts of ancient scientists to explain the origin of life. 

Postscript: See this post for a new related discovery that seems to greatly deepen the mystery of cosmic structure formation.  

 

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. On pages 64-65 of 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.

We Do Not Understand How the Universe Came to Look This Way

From the time of the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe has undergone an amazing evolution. Imagine if you had been there at the beginning, to witness the hot smooth density, in which supposedly all of our universe was packed into a microscopic size. If you knew nothing about the eventual outcome, you would not have been optimistic about what would have resulted from this explosive event. Your best bet might have been a mess of disorganized space junk, with no more order than the debris resulting from a hydrogen bomb explosion.

But almost 14 billion years later, we have a universe of remarkable order. Matter is organized into superclusters of galaxies consisting of clusters of galaxies consisting of galaxies consisting of solar systems. A large fraction of the galaxies are the particularly beautiful type called spiral galaxies. Do scientists really have a firm grip on how this improbable evolution occurred?

Difficulties in Explaining the Seeds of Structure

Scientists say that the current structure of the universe evolved from what are called primordial density fluctuations. They can see tiny fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, which is uniform to about 1 part in 100,000. But how did those fluctuations get there?

Cosmic Background Radiation

The most common explanation is that the fluctuations began as quantum fluctuations (matter popping into existence in accordance with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), and that these quantum fluctuations were then amplified by a period of cosmic inflation (exponential expansion) that occurred for a fraction of a second when the universe was less than a second old.

The difficulties in this explanation are many. For one thing, no one has ever actually observed a quantum fluctuation that caused matter to appear out of nowhere, not even a fluctuation big enough to produce an atom. Secondly, there are currently serious credibility issues associated with the theory of cosmic inflation, issues that have been highlighted by Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt in this review. Among those issues are what Steinhardt calls an “unlikeliness” problem, plus the problem of creating an inflation theory that both begins and ends an inflation phase while remaining consistent with observations. Cal Tech physicist Sean Carroll says here, “When perturbations are taken into account, inflation only occurs in a negligibly small fraction of cosmological histories,” and then spells that out as a fraction less than 1 in 1.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The leading cosmologist Roger Penrose has described cosmic inflation as a thermalization process, and has stated, “There is, however, something fundamentally misconceived about trying to explain the uniformity of the early universe as resulting from a thermalization process.” He states that any thermalization process doing anything would have “been even more special before the thermalization than after” (The Road to Reality, page 755).

Third, the inflation theory requires a severe fine-tuning of its model parameters in order to perform the trick of inflating these quantum perturbations to be the right size. As one scientist puts it here:

A lumpiness of about 10^-5 is essential for life to get a start. But is it easy to
arrange this amount of density contrast? The answer is most decidedly no! The
various parameters governing the inflating universe must be chosen with great
care in order to get the desired result.

In short, we do not yet have a good plausible explanation of how these “seeds of structure” appeared. The only explanations are ones that resort to extensive parameter tweaking, rather like in the graphic below.

Explaining the Growth of Structure: More Nebulous Fudge Factors

Scientists have done calculations regarding the formation of galaxies and the preservation of galactic structure, and have come up with the resounding conclusion that the gravity of visible matter is completely insufficient to explain the origin and persistence of galactic structure.

Consequently cosmologists have come up with some “fudge factors” to help explain things. The two biggest fudge factors are called dark energy and dark matter. Scientists say that dark matter is a mysterious type of matter that is invisible. Dark energy is supposed to be a mysterious unseen energy that pervades all of space. Scientists guess that the universe's mass-energy is 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, and 5% regular matter.

Total unambiguous observations of dark matter: 0
Total unambiguous observations of dark energy: 0

It's not as if scientists haven't tried. They have spent many dollars and much time with some very fancy observation techniques, but have still come up short. But that hasn't stopped cosmologists from creating a “lambda cold dark matter” theory (called LCDM) designed to explain cosmic structure.

Besides the fact that it relies on dark matter (the existence of which has not been verified), there are problems in this LCDM theory. One of the main problems is that it predicts way too many satellite galaxies. The paper here describes the problem. According to this link the LCDM theory predicts that our galaxy should have thousands of satellite galaxies, but instead it only has about 26.

Another problem with the LCDM theory is that it predicts that almost all galaxies should have have large bulges in the center or be spherical. But between 58% and 74% of disk-shaped galaxies do not have a bulge.

Another problem with the LCDM theory is the difficulty of getting it to produce not just galaxies but a universe with as many beautiful spiral galaxies as we have in our universe.

A spiral galaxy

As this site says, "Cosmological evolution simulations do not generally produce universes containing large spiral galaxies. Rather they produce clumps of matter making up roughly spherical amorphous galaxies without anything like the broad disks and extended arms of a typical spiral galaxy." 

Strange Anomalies

In this story a scientist comments on strange findings he has discovered by studying deep space:

"The dark matter seems to 'know' how the visible matter is distributed. They seem to conspire with each other such that the gravity of the visible matter at the characteristic radius of the dark halo is always the same...It's like finding a zoo of animals of all ages and sizes miraculously having identical, say, weight in their backbones or something...It is possible that a non-gravitational fifth force is ruling the dark matter with an invisible hand, leaving the same fingerprints on all galaxies, irrespective of their ages, shapes and sizes."

Perhaps this is some strange cosmic conspiracy, or perhaps just a reason why we may need an explanation other than dark matter. Another strange finding is the discovery of a Vast Polar Structure (VPOS), which is basically about 26 dwarf galaxies above and below our galaxy, without any matching structure on the other two sides of our galaxy. This structure does not at all seem to be what we would  expect from a dark matter theory of the origin of structure (and may be hard to explain even with alternate theoretical models). If gravity alone is creating structure, why don't these companion galaxies exist in more of a sphere around our galaxy?

The limits of our understanding of cosmic structure may also have been highlighted by the recent discovery of the planet HD 106906 b, a planet 11 times the mass of Jupiter. HD 106906 b orbits its star at a distance 650 times the average distance between Earth and the Sun. That puts the planet 20 times farther away from its star than the planet Neptune is from the Sun. This finding seems to be quite incompatible with current theories of solar system formation. HD 106906 b is being called “the planet that shouldn't exist.”

Particle Physics Makes the Situation Even Worse

When we look in the world of particle physics for help with these problems in explaining large scale structure, we get no help.

The prevailing theory of large structure formation (the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory) is based mainly on the hypothesis of dark matter, but dark matter is totally unaccounted for in the Standard Model of physics. Dark matter has no place in that model. That leaves dark matter as a kind of nebulous “some kind of something.” Do we know how many dark matter particles there are, or how much mass any dark matter particle has? We sure don't.

Modern quantum physics does predict that dark energy should exist. The problem is that quantum field theory predicts that the dark energy should be at least 10⁶⁰ times (a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times) larger (and probably 10¹²⁰ times larger) than the maximum value that it can be, according to observations. This is known as the vacuum catastrophe problem or the cosmological constant problem. Quantum field theory predicts that every cubic meter full of vacuum should contain more energy than the maximum amount that the observable universe can contain.

In light of all these considerations, the graphic below summarizes the current very shaky state of our current understanding of the formation of cosmic structure.