Are we really “getting something wrong” about it?
It’s possible that the CMB model is just wrong in some way, and that’s leading to some sort of systematic error in how physicists are understanding the universe.
“Everyone would love that. Physicists love to break their models,” Wechsler said. “But this model works pretty well so far, so my prior is that there has to be pretty strong evidence to convince me.”
The study does show that it would be difficult to match the Cepheid measurement from the local universe with all the others by introducing just one new piece of physics, Mack said.
It’s possible, Mack said, that the supernovas-Cepheid calculation is just wrong. Maybe physicists are measuring distances in our local universe wrong, and that’s leading to a miscalculation. It’s hard to imagine what that miscalculation would be, though, she said. Lots of astrophysicists have measured local distances from scratch and have come up with similar results. One possibility the authors raised is just that we live in a weird chunk of the universe where there are fewer galaxies and less gravity, so our neighborhood is expanding faster than the universe as a whole.
The answer to the problem, she said, could be just around the corner. But more likely it’s years or decades away.
Rafi Letzter, “How the Universe Stopped Making Sense” at LiveScience
It doesn’t sound like that big a problem, actually. Let’s save the “universe doesn’t make sense” for existentialist plays. What the universe is doing makes sense, in a physical way.
With, for example, the Big Bang and fine-tuning, it’s not at all that the universe doesn’t make sense but that it isn’t telling people what they want to hear.
See also: The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.
and
What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?
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