Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Well, if the Washington Post agrees that the universe is out of whack…

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Only the rubric morons of flyover country would dare to wonder when we read such as this, about Hubble Constant discrepancies:

This summer, as leaders in the field assembled in Santa Barbara, Calif., to discuss the “tension,” physicist Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago presented a new estimate of the constant that was based on examination of red giant stars. Her number: 70. But the advocates for 67 and 73 held their ground. The tension remained. Freedman told The Washington Post, “There can’t be three different numbers.”

There are more than that, actually. On Oct. 23, researchers at the University of California at Davis published a paper that looked at three gravitational lenses — in which massive galaxies function like magnifying glasses for things behind them in deeper space. Their number: 77

… One obvious, boring explanation is that one of the speed guns needs to be recalibrated.

Joel Achenbach, “The universe doesn’t look right. It suddenly looks . . . out of whack” at Washington Post

Johns Hopkins astronomer Adam Riess cautions us against trying to understand what is going on: “We are wired to use our intuition to understand things around us,” Riess said. “Most of the universe is made out of stuff that’s completely different than us. This adherence to intuition is often wildly unsuccessful in the universe.” (Achenbach, “Whack,Washington Post )

If we dared to assume such a thing, we might suspect that the universe is actually okay but our methods of studying it are not giving us the answers we need just now.


See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: There is a crisis in physics and it may spread to other sciences

Comments
Nothing strange about reaching different results when you're counting complicated things that are hard to define. How many walls does your house have? Depends on whether you count the little pieces of wall between bookshelves, or the hidden wall inside the attic.... How many homeless people in your neighborhood? Do you count Bill's adult kid who is temporarily staying with Bill? Do you count the squatters who were in the vacant house last week but not today?polistra
November 5, 2019
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' Joel Achenbach, “The universe doesn’t look right. It suddenly looks . . . out of whack” at Washington Post.' I tried to explain in a post on the Smithsonian Institute that that understanding of the ultimate mystery of the universe was why Einstein closest to a panentheist, was so popular with the public. They knew that materialism, the Establishment's surreally-presumptuous, favoured understanding of the universe, was beyond laughable, and Albert had smacked it down with his fundamental and seminal paradoxes, a priori imponderable, if the mysteries of Christianity are discounted. Well, that's my 'take' on it. But after mature consideration, the doughty Smithsonian, designated it as spam.Axel
November 5, 2019
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In the Ancient world, the explanation for the flight of an arrow, which clearly rose higher than the target and then fell, was that the flight was in 2 parts: the arrow first ROSE in a STRAIGHT LINE to the mid-point. And then the arrow turned down and FELL, also in a STRAIGHT LINE, to the target. This completely explained the observations, and everybody was happy. This was the standard SCIENTIFIC explanation for CENTURIES.vmahuna
November 4, 2019
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