What People Get Wrong This Week: How the Universe Works
This week, the hopeful weirdos of the UFO community were handed a giant piece of red meat in the form of a hearing before the Mexican Congress , where journalist, ufologist and hoaxer Jaime Maussan presented what he claimed were the mummified bodies of two aliens. corpses. There’s not enough evidence yet to say whether the bodies are papier-mâché figurines or actual space aliens that look like papier-mâché figurines, but you don’t have to see them to be strongly inclined to conclude, “It’s all bullshit”; you just have to listen to Maussan’s patter.
Paraphrasing part of his presentation, Maussan explained that leading scientists were rejecting his evidence for the existence of aliens because admitting it was true would overturn the established understanding of how the world works, not because he pulled the same scam in 2017 .
The statement “Big Science is hiding the real evidence” is almost universal among nutcases and cranks, but in fact it is the opposite of what scientists do. Scientific discoveries that challenge the established order happen all the time—that’s what it’s all about. To add insult: Maussan’s show about aliens and ponies is being canceled while the real scientific community is seriously debating whether they were wrong about almost everything, from relativity to the big bang theory to the universal constancy of physical phenomena. the laws themselves. According to an article in the NYTimes by astrophysicist Adam Frank and theoretical physicist Marcelo Glaser: “ The history of our Universe may be starting to fall apart. This is from the opinion section, but still.
What if everything we know about everything is wrong?
The debate among cosmologists and physicists was sparked by surprising evidence obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope, not by mummies allegedly recovered from a Peruvian cave. Looking at the earliest evidence of existence itself, Webb discovered fully formed galaxies that seemed to come together so quickly that they largely contradicted the generally accepted sequence of events that occurred after the Big Bang.
Combine this discovery with the long-standing inability to determine the rate at which the universe is expanding, and you end up with the possibility that the models science relies on to explain why things are the way they are may have to at least be adjusted. and at most, throw it in the trash. According to Frank and Glaser, “We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, which may even require us to change our approach to the elementary components of the universe, perhaps even to the nature of space and time.”
Or maybe not. Many experts disagree with the idea that we’ve got everything fundamentally wrong, but the fact of the matter is that people who might be doing something wrong this week (and every week for the last 100 years or so ), can be leading world leaders. cosmologists, theoretical physicists and perhaps Einstein – in other words, the smartest people we have.
How to be wrong in science
If Maussan (and countless other conspiracy theorists) were right, Big Science would reject the Webb telescope data because it contradicts their worldview – perhaps calling NASA a hoax, just as they called Maussan “aliens” in 2017. Instead, scientists discuss and identify possible contradictions to long-standing theories to see if they are wrong and why. The Big Bang Theory can counter this new information; some parts of it may need to be changed in the light of new evidence; or it may turn out that it was a mistake all along. If this is true, then the Big Bang Theory will join the Steady State Theory and other ideas on the list of things that have been proven false. This process is the opposite of withholding evidence to protect the established order, and it is a lesson for all of us about how to handle any new information that contradicts our previous understanding of the world.
Related: Along with galaxies older than expected, the Webb telescope may have discovered aliens. It’s not as dramatic as the corpses before the Congressional panel, but astronomers using the Webb telescope say they have detected dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b . As far as we know, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by fish flatulence, so raw aliens might be farting on another planet right now. However, this is real science, so no one is building giant fishing rods until more evidence is collected.