Speaker 1: James Webb. James Webb telescope.

Speaker 2: There's been a lot of media reports suggesting that the findings of the James Webb telescope have undermined the case for the Big Bang, but there's an interesting backstory on this. Most of these media reports were based on the writings of a single physics researcher named Eric Lerner who's been, since 1990, kind of carrying a torch to refute the Big Bang. One of his articles quoted a University of Kansas astrophysicist saying that she stays up late at night wondering if, based on the James Webb, that everything that we know is turning out to be false. Turns out that that researcher, that astrophysicist, disclaimed his use of the quote, explaining that he took it completely out of context, that she was talking about theories of galaxy formation, not about whether or not there had been a Big Bang, and not about whether or not the universe is expanding as we would expect.

Speaker 1: So he's confirmation biased.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and in a sense also taking somebody way out of context to make a point of his own. He misused the quotation. On purpose. Apparently. And there have been a number of leading astrophysicists, in fact people who would like to know more about this, I'd recommend Brian Keating from University of California, San Diego, a great astrophysicist, has been writing about this. But here's the short story. I wrote an op-ed in the Daily Wired distilling some of this stuff. What the James Webb telescope is able to do is to, in fact what it was constructed to do, was to detect extremely long wavelength radiation, stuff that's outside the visible range. I call it uber red shifted. It's actually in the infrared range is the more accurate physics term. So it's looking for very long wavelength radiation coming from galaxies that are very, very far out there. Now, why would it be looking for that? Well, because if the universe is expanding as we would expect based on the Big Bang theory, then the radiation coming from things very, very far out in space and therefore very far back in time should be very stretched out, more stretched out than stuff that's closer at hand. So the James Webb was constructed in hopes of detecting that type of radiation if it existed. It's not assuming that it necessarily would, but it would be a way of confirming the expansion of the universe has been going on for a very long time. And in order to do that, the NASA people created some amazing technology. They super cooled the detection apparatus to five, six, seven degrees above absolute zero so that the heat coming off of the instrument itself was not creating infrared that would interfere. And what they were in fact able to detect from these very ancient, very distant galaxies was super red shifted radiation, uber red shifted stuff out in the infrared. And were able on the basis of that to synthesize images of these very, very distant remote galaxies. Now, the very fact that they were able to do that confirms that you have, that what you would expect on the basis of the Big Bang theory, that the amount of red shift that you would expect to be present, if in fact the galaxies had been expanding throughout that vast stretch of time, was in fact present and was detected. Now that didn't get reported. The whole focus was on the fact that there were galaxies that were more mature, there were more of them early on than we would have expected based on our theories of galaxy formation. And so those are anomalies that need to be addressed and have not yet been explained as I understand it. Maybe the astrophysicists have made more progress on that in even recent days. But the basic picture of an expanding universe outward from the beginning has not been undermined, but rather confirmed in a very dramatic way. I think it's a rather dramatic confirmation. There have been many others. The cosmic background radiation that was discovered in 1965. The COBE radiation that George Smoot discovered in the 90s. So there's been this pattern of confirming evidence of this basic picture of an expanding universe outward from the beginning in observational astronomy from the 20s right up until now. And so that I think gives us good reason to think best we can tell the universe at the beginning.

Speaker 1: Can I pause you on that? Yeah. When she was discussing the formation of galaxies, what had thrown that into question? Like what was about the formation of galaxies that undermined previous ideas?

Speaker 2: As I understand it, it's that there are more galaxies that formed earlier and are more mature than we would have expected because they were able to look back to 13.5, 13.6 billion years ago. They think the origin of the universe is about 13.8 billion years ago. So apparently galaxies were forming faster than we would have expected. And I think that's the anomaly that is on the table.

Speaker 1: But is it possible that with further detection we can, with new data, have a better understanding of what is actually going on rather than just saying it all points to this thing?

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's always possible that we can change our minds on things because science is always provisional. But there are many stable theories that have persisted because of a preponderance of evidence that points to and continues to point to the same conclusion. And I think we've had 100 years now where we've had repeated new types of observations that point towards a beginning.