Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - No, the Universe ISN'T 27 Billion Years Old! (#332)

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

See the Video! https://www.youtube.com/live/_45U7IjIJDk?feature=share In this episode Brian Keating and Allison Kirkpatrick respond to Rajendra Gupta’s controversial paper challenging the current model of the universe. What is the basis for this claim and why are media outlets and influencers promoting it so wildly? In addition to their detailed critique of Gupta's paper, they discuss galaxy formation, dark matter, and the scientific method. “Our newly-devised model stretches the galaxy formation time by a several billion years, making the universe 26.7 billion years old, and not 13.7 as previously estimated” Rajendra Gupta — Adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa Find Allison: https://kirkpatrick.ku.edu/ Press release: https://www.uottawa.ca/about-us/media/news/reinventing-cosmology-uottawa-research-puts-age-universe-267-137-billion-years The Paper: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.html The paper is now available without a paywall from Gupta’s webpage: https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-science/professors/rajendra-gupta See the Video! https://youtube.com/live/BFuW-zfH5RU Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Galaxy formation and the Big Bang model are two separate ideas. You could have a Big Bang and you could not form galaxies at all. Cosmology talks about like the Big Bang, inflation, formation of matter, possibly, you know, what makes dark matter and green dark matter structures, and then galaxy evolution talks about how the regular matter that we see with our eyes turns into stars into galaxies and eventually becomes the Milky Way. And those things don't necessarily predict each other. There's no, there's no big astronomy.

I don't have a vested interest in the big thing being correct. I go with what the data shows me and what evidence shows me. And so if things are wrong, they're wrong. And that's awesome. Welcome, dear listeners, to this episode of Into the Impossible. There are over 100 billion stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Some astronomers estimate there are over 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. How did these mind-bendingly adore?

structures get there? Has it really been only 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang? How do esteem cosmologists, like your host Brian Keating, know the age of the universe? And why are Joe Rogan and Elon Musk tweeting about it? Has new data from the James Webb Space Telescope disrupted-accepted cosmology? Are Professor Keating and his guest, Professor Alison Kirkpatrick, part of a conspiracy to hide the truth? In this episode, you're going to get a masterclass in how science is done as Brian and Allison respond to Regendra Gupta's controversial paper challenging the current model of the universe. If you love science and open dialogues about the nature of the universe, please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. Pay it forward with his share to like-minded friends.

Take a moment to let us know what you think in the form of a review. To see the video version of this interview, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too. There, you can find many more episodes about the James Webb Space Telescope, Cosmology, and how the age of the universe has been measured. And now, why the universe is not 27 million years old with Brian Keating and Allison Kirkpatrick. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. May doors, please. Hello, out there. Today is a very special day on the end to the Impossible podcast. I am joined by a renowned professor, a colleague, a friend, who I'm only meeting today for the very first time, Dr. Allison Kirkpatrick. How are you doing today, my friend?

I am great, and timing was perfect. I was writing a grant, and there's nothing I want to do less than that. Except maybe respond to referee reports. We'll talk about that as well. So today we're going to be talking about really incredibly provocative claims as part of what I call the academic media hype complex, where something will get maybe good research done on an important topic. And then what will happen is the press office at the institution where the individual works, if they have such a thing. They will come out and promote it, say, because they want to get attention for their researchers. It's a natural thing, and it's fine to do that.

But then sometimes it gets out of control. And in particular that happens with claims that revolutionized, threatened to revolutionize their understanding of the universe or a place within it, et cetera. So today I am going to talk with my friend and colleague Allison, who is an expert in galactic physics and dynamics, astrophysics. I am not. I have no knowledge whatsoever about galactic processes other than I can identify where the Milky Way galaxy is. is. But besides that, it is her purview. But we are going to talk about results claim from a researcher in Ottawa, Canada, Rajesh Gupta, I believe is how you pronounce his name. And I will take the opportunity to have Allison here to describe what the galactic physics is. And I will talk about

the cosmological implications. But before we start, I want to, for show this image that I saw from Twitter, which is the repository of all scientific knowledge, right? So on Twitter, just this past weekend on Sunday, there was a tweet storm by Joe Rogan, who tentatively is going to host me at some point relatively soon. We'll see more information as that develops. But Joe Rogan, of course, is the Oprah of our generation. He is revolutionized our media and communications, and he's very fascinated with science and technology. And just last week, he had on a friend of mine, his name is Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, who has been a past guest on the podcast as well. And he mentioned you, Allison, Stephen C. Meyer did. He didn't mention

you by name. He mentioned me by name. So you've been on Joe Rogan by your work, and I've been on Joe Rogan by name a couple times, and hopefully this will be coming to fruition in the near future. and maybe we'll convince Joe to have you on as my sidekick or I'll be your sidekick or whatever. But Joe is very interested in these claims that the universe is either far older than we see, or we don't understand what the universe is made of, or we don't understand how the universe is evolving. And these are incredibly provocative claims. They've gotten so much attention. So you see on the screen now, if you're watching on YouTube, showing Joe Rogan's tweet,

which says simply, new research puts age of the universe at 26. billion years nearly twice as old as previously believed. It's a link to a fizz.org website. And then right below it is a tweet from Elon Musk. Now, I have tweeted back to both Elon and to Joe to no avail, but we will see maybe they're joining. Hopefully I'm streaming this on Twitter. We'll see about that.

You can follow me on Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating and follow Professor Allison Kropocic at AK Astronomy on Twitter as well. And so what I wanted to do is sort of take through beyond the tweet. I want to go beyond the tweet. And that is to say we should always be respectful of new ideas that can challenge our complete understanding of the nature of our fields. And we should be open to it because a lot of times, Allison, I get this complaint. You physicists don't know what you're talking about, dark matter, dark energy, you know, whatever. you don't know what you're always adding on little, little epicycles.

How is this any different? And then you guys are threatened because you're part of big astronomy. So first of all, I want you to take us back to last summer when I first met you. And that was thanks to a barrage of media coverage over a similar claim, an allied claim, as we will get into, by Mr. Eric Lerner. And I should say that this paper that we're talking about today is of a different caliber and a different sort. than that of Mr. Lerner, who I've interacted with back and forth on various YouTube channels, but never in person. And I should say, I didn't invite Dr. Gupta on this call, but he's welcome to come on the podcast, and we can talk to him at any other time.

I've also had conversations about recent high-temperature superconductivity claims that I invited the authors of that claimed on. They declared they didn't respond. So I love to have these conversations, although I don't think debate is how astronomy gets done. Alison, take us back July, August of last year. You were part of a maelstrom of undeserved attention, negative attention, perhaps, and it was all because of Mr. Eric Lerner. So take us through what happened back at that time. Yeah, sure. And actually, you know what?

I'll agree with you. The paper that we're going to discuss today, I have some problems with, but it is a legitimate paper. And it's got a lot in it that is well thought out. But okay, so last summer, I'm on one of the teams that's getting some of the first data from the James Webb Space Telescope or JWST. And the things that we find are really surprising. And the things that we find are what motivates this paper today. we're seeing galaxies in the very, very early universe that appeared to be pretty massive. And it was surprising and it's really exciting.

I love it. Every time we get a surprising result, it's great. And I got interviewed for a nature piece. And I said that right now I find myself lying awake at 3 in the morning, wondering if everything I've ever done is wrong. Which is true. I did. We were rethinking everything, but not the Big Bang, not like our understanding of the universe. We were rethinking the parts that we don't understand so well, which is how galaxies form and evolve. That's an area of just really rich, ongoing scientific discovery.

So that's what I meant. And Eric Lerner does not think that the Big Bang happened. And for those of you out there, I guess, the competing model. There's two, I don't really want to say competing because the other model doesn't have as much scientific legitimacy. But historically, there have been two competing models. There is the Big Bang, which basically means the universe had a start. So the universe had a start and it is changing in time. So when you hear the Big Bang, that's what you should think of.

I don't know, Brian, if you've ever talked about this on your channel before, but the term Big Bang was actually started as a derogatory term. Yeah. And, you know, and nowadays people are like, there was just an explosion. No, no. Just the universe. is out of start and it's evolving and it's changing. And then there's the steady state model, which says that the universe didn't have a start and it's not changing.

And so Eric Lerner is a proponent of the steady state model and presented some very spurious evidence. Brian has a great video on this that I watched last year. If you haven't seen it, go back and find it. It's awesome. Very spurious evidence that just proves. the Big Bang. It did not. JOST hasn't done that and it's not even capable of doing that. That is not what it's looking at. It is looking at how galaxies form. And he used my quote and he used my quote

and used it to imply that I thought that the Big Bang didn't happen, which is it true. I definitely believe the universe had to start and it's been expanding and changing it ever since. And, yeah, Yeah, since then, I guess I've become one of the leading cosmologists theorists in astronomy, which is not the science that I do at all. Congratulations. We'd love to have you. We'd love to convert you, you know. I get asked for my opinion on this stuff a lot. I get to talk to journalists a lot. The most bizarre experience, I got to be live on the air on a Canadian radio morning show.

talking about this. So it's been pretty fun. But JWST has not disproved the Big Bang, and it cannot disprove the Big Bang. That's not what it's doing. That's right. Yeah. And I guess I, let me, let me, you know, pull out this analogy on you and you can smack me down as you see fit. But, but it's as if, you know, we saw life on Earth that emerged. There's so-called great oxidation event, then there's this Cambrian explosion. And imagine if someone were to observe these paleontological formations and from them say, no, no, no, there's too much rich structure in the archaeological record for a 4.32 billion-year-old Earth. So in fact, not only is the Earth never formed, it's been existing for all time in order to make it compatible with our models of evolutionary

biology. So what do you think about that analogy? Because essentially what they're looking at. They're looking at size of shapes applying a hundred-year-old test called the Tolman test that we'll get into, which Tolman himself used as a proof that the Big Bang was correct. So what do you make of those? So I think that's a great analogy. I think we're able to do a little bit better on the earth than we are in space because we at least understand some things about how the earth was different in the past. And I think if we saw a whole bunch of fossils, we would just refine our theory of.

of how fast animals form. The problem, so looking, doing galaxy evolution is very similar to looking at the fossil record. We cannot watch things change in time. No grad student lives that long, unfortunately. I've kept mine allowed a long time, you know. And so all we get are snapshots of what galaxies looked like in the past and what the universe looked like in the past,

and we try to figure it out from there. very much like looking at the fossil record on Earth. The issue is, and we can get into this more because this is my issue with the paper that I want to talk about today, conditions in the early universe might have been very different. And unfortunately, we really can't measure those. And so everything that we're basing our understanding of early galaxies on is based on what we see around us today in our own Milky Way and our own galaxy. And we know, like, we know that some of that is faults, but we don't have good models for how it's fault or how it can be. Yes. Yes. And so, you know, there's a difference between the Big Bang model, the components that go into the Big Bang model, cosmology itself, the Big Bang itself.

And conflating these many different disparate pieces of data, evidence, models, hypotheses is very dangerous. And it's the mark of kind of, of a sloppy, you know, ham-handed or very fast-paced attempt to potentially make a headline or potentially to stake a claim. And I think that, well, as much as I like to rail on my fellow colleagues, in this case, I think it might have been the media office. Let me take you through the chain of events as I understood it. And so let me turn down. People usually complain about my volume being too loud. So I'm going to turn it down. Or too soft. But now I cranked it up with my special booster software. Hopefully...

Fllicting feelings up the media office. I mean, so for one thing... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. I think it's great that like you have this podcast and I love talking to the media because I think it's so important to disseminate science to people.

I mean, JWST is the people's telescope. It was built with taxpayer dollars. So we should be talking to them. On the other hand, the media have a very different job than we have, and they want to make our science exciting. And so that can make things a little bit more clickbaity than perhaps we're comfortable with. That's right. And then, you know, I think you have to have, you know, apply Newton's law, right? For every, you know, clickbait, there's an equal and opposite clickbait.

So you could say, well, here's a piece of evidence potentially against the interpretation of the age of the universe within the context of the Big Bang model. And then here's 50,000 other, you know, pieces of information in supporting the Big Bang model. And that's why I want to go through the paper because I think it is taking on some interesting challenges. And it's not to say that the Big Bang model is right. And I always left to quote Isaac Asimov. Isaac Asimov said, if you believe the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you believe the Earth is a perfect sphere, you're also wrong, but you're less right. In other words, our job as physicists, as astronomers, as

professors, is to look for the flaws. We don't, we don't just sit around confirming, confirming, confirming, confirming. No, no, no. We look for the variations, the unexpected surprises and deviations from what our current model is. And then we refine it. And it's called the scientific method.

And I think it's a very powerful thing, but there is no one scientific method so it can confuse people by saying, if you believe the Big Bang is not wrong, then you believe it's perfect. And that's a dangerous syllogism to draw. So let's go through the paper. Oh, sorry, let me start with the press release, because this is where it all began, at least for me, when I saw this, I started off looking at it and was a little bit, a little bit consternated, if that's a word.

So here's the press release from U. Ottawa, University of Ottawa, which I believe is in the 51st state known as Canada. Just kidding out there, my Canadian friends. Just kidding. So it's called reinventing cosmology. That's pretty bold, right? U-Ottawa research puts the age of the universe at 26.7, not 13.7 billion years. And of course, there's this beautiful picture, you know, which is, and there's a bunch of quotes. What I love about it is that there's now a new term for something called the impossible early galaxy problem. I love that, like impossible. That's great. Part of the name of this podcast, right? Into the Impossible. The name of my second book,

Into the Impossible. Nothing is impossible. Arthur C. Clark said the only way to go, the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. So we'll be talking about that. But in reality, this paper starts off by looking at this quote. And the quote says, newly devised model puts galaxy formation time by several billion years. Well, wait a second. That just shifted the playfields, right? Uh-oh. Are you still there? Continue without. Okay. That's weird. It just said that it's not got me on there. Okay. Oh, I think it just kicked off Twitter. All right, whatever.

That's not big time. Elon, you had your chance to join. So our newly device stresses galaxy formation time. So what is the difference here? What are they trying to do? They're trying to say that galaxies seem to be too highly developed, too structured, to be consistent with the Big Bang taking place at a certain period of time. And I think that is a fundamental flaw to then say because of that,

the model known as the Big Bang Cosmolinger, Lambda CDM, et cetera, is wrong. So what do you make of this conflation? And then we'll get into the details of what Professor Gupta, Dr. Gupta, is claiming. What do you make of this? When you combine a flaw and then you say the underlying arc superstructure itself is wrong because there are things that are inconsistent with the model itself. Go ahead. Right.

So Galaxy Formation and the Big Bang model are two. separate ideas. So, you know, just for everyone out there, we have galaxies because we happen to have a matter, anti-matter asymmetry in our universe. And so we happened to be left with enough matter to form gas and to form stars. You could have a big bang and you could not form galaxies at all. You could, in fact, have an expanding universe that has no matter in it. Like, they're two separate ideas. Because of specific things in our universe, we get galaxies from the fact that various things happened very early on in the universe itself. But it's really, I don't know, it's really odd to me to keep seeing people conflate these two ideas because cosmology is not the same as how

galaxies evolve. Cosmology talks about like the Big Bang, inflation, formation of matter, possibly, you know, what makes dark matter and green dark matter structures. And then galaxy evolution talks about how the regular matter that we see with our eyes turns into stars, into galaxies, and eventually becomes the Milky Way. And those things don't necessarily predict each other. That's right. And when we look at the back to this paper or back to the press release, me let me just keep reading from it. The question that keeps coming to my mind is why is this being picked up? Why is there seeming to be almost a desperation to have the Big Bang model, which has a very aged universe as it is, have it be overthrown? What do you make of those kind of in a sociological

sense? And then we'll turn to the actual paper itself, which is behind a paywall, but I've penetrated the paywall and I can give tips on how you can do the same out there. But let's Let me ask you, what is this fascination, obsession, et cetera, going back 30 years in the case of Eric Lerner, promulgating the same types of proposed or supposed tests? And why are there so many, why are there so many people out there who really adhere to this and want to believe it's true? Is it like, you know, believing in aliens exist or is this something deeper? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think on the one hand, science is exciting and people love science. And so when we learn big results, that just makes people really excited.

So I think on the on the most basic level, you have people who genuinely love science, maybe don't have a highly educated. I hate to say highly educated, but have just like gone on and have a bachelor's degree in science or have an advanced degree in science. Maybe they don't have that. So they don't really have all the tools. And so they're just, they're relying on us to disseminate our results. But they love science and they want to learn about it.

And so when the media disseminates results in a way that's easier for them to understand, but as we said, maybe kind of clickbaity, they really like that. But it comes from a genuine place. On the other hand, I think that you get into the less genuine place, which is, and I'm going to relate this to like anti-vaxing and things like that in the flat earth. I think there's people who like conspiracy theories, like we didn't land on the moon and things like that. Because there's a distrust of the government, which may be deserved. I mean, come on, the government doesn't tell us everything.

I'm going to, you know. And so there's this distrust of the government. And then scientists start getting lumped in with that. And they start seeing us as, I guess, proxies of the government. And so therefore, we can't trust scientists. And therefore, I found out the secret thing that makes like everything makes sense. And so I think it's an anti-disestablishment as well. And that really, like that breaks my heart because the amount that the government is

influencing my science is exactly zero. Like, even though I take from the government, they're not like rubber stamping everything I put out. I can put out whatever I want. Right. There's no tribunal where, you know, people are suggesting that, you know, unless we tow the line of big astronomy that we will lose our funding, lose our students, et cetera. In fact, the way to get, you know, the most attention would be to kind of follow along these narratives and see where they lead. That's why I say in terms of extraterrestrial intelligence, you know, physicists are the most. most interested and most impressive, you know, that this is important to study because if so,

it's short circuits, you know, tenure to zero, you know, seconds, but also because the short seconds are understanding the physics of the 29th century potentially. And physicists are more nerdy and even than the most diehard UFO, you know, kind of believer, so to speak. So, so here's Professor Gupta and his quote, as I said, now things start to get interesting because unlike learner, This is an esteemed professor. This is someone who has a PhD. And I'm not saying you can't make contributions without a Ph. Freeman Dyson, my very first guest on this podcast, Allison, you may not know, was he's known as the Rebel without a PhD.

He did not have a PhD, but he went out to some success, right? So don't worry about, you know, Professor Lerner, Dr. Lerner, not Dr. Lerner, Mr. Lerner. But this is a serious person who has many papers, many of which are published in the same journal. And it's a little bit questionable, you know, why this, how this went through so straight to publication and the co-time press release, effectively on what's a model, right? Allison, this is somebody who's got a model. He's using the model, adjusting the model, as he admits, to fit the data in two different ways. One, he's invoking a very old explanation for the large extent of the observable universe called Tired Light to explain red shifts, which has been going on, like I said, for probably 50, 60 years.

And secondly, he's invoking another modification, not just to the astronomical observation of data and its interpretation, but to the laws of physics, because he's proposing, and it's mandatory this happens in the best fitting of his models, which is a combination of tired light and what's called changing cosmological constants or changing constants of nature. So in other words, you think of a constant, you think of something that's never changing. He's introducing variable constants, and to do so, he applies a bit of what I claim is authority bias. He cites Dirac.

And it is true. Dirac did investigate some of these notions for various reasons to explain what are called numerological problems in physics. Why is the fine structure constant so small? DRAC and many other people wanted to come up with the fine structure constant being the reciprocal of an exact reciprocal of an integer, namely that it was 137 when you divided one by the fine structure constant. And so he adapted and adjust that.

In this paper, ad hoc, as it may be, Dr. Gupta inserts in a changing constant. And these changing constants are all over the place, and they're mandatory for this. How did you react when you saw that? I'm going to blow up the paper and you walk us through what that implication is or what you made of it when you first encounter. I found it raised a huge red flag. as the media are a complete oblivion to. But how did you react to it? Let me ask.

Yeah, okay. So I'm going to be completely honest. My issues with this paper, I got bogged down in the introduction. You made it past the abstract, unlike me. No, I actually read it. And I looked up a lot of his references, and I didn't agree with what was in the introduction. And then I didn't agree with him using tired. light at all because that has been. And even I found, I thought it was interesting that he said in the paper, tired light doesn't actually work. And so for people who don't know what this is, this is light, every photon of light has energy. And the idea is that as your photon travels through space, it loses its energy. And this is something that can be hearken back to,

the steady state model, the idea that the universe doesn't have a beginning. So how can we explain like things that we're seeing a really high red shift? Well, the light's just getting tired, and so it's losing its energy. But that's been pretty resoundly disproven because this theory, well, okay, the nail in the coffin of any steady state model is that it cannot explain the cosmic microwave background. Tired light can't do it. Not what we see. And so I kind of got hung up on that. So I would like to know. I should, sorry to interrupt Alison, but I should say,

learners model relies on that too. And no one since Tolman himself proposed these tests that bear his name that they use to substantiate their claims believes that there's any mechanisms whatsoever to cause light to lose energy to exactly compensate for the redshift behavior, nor can they actually use it to explain the patterns of the cause of. microwave background. But yes, yeah, go on. There are many problems with this so-called tire light model known for decades, if not hundreds of years by now. Right. No, actually, I would love for you to point out what the red flags are with the changing constants. So, yeah, so there's,

well, the first thing that there is no evidence for these changing constants, these changing constants. And you can get anything you want if you change the constants, because fundamentally, what do astronomers do? We're looking at fossils. These fossils are, Botons, particles of light, traveling through the entire universe since they were created. And in this model, unlike learners model, which is effectively a static universe, which doesn't change at all, which can't explain even more data, in Dr. Gupta's model, there is evolution, and there is redshift, and there is expansion. So it's a hybrid.

That brings up other problems because there's a famous saying that, you know, if you give me five parameters, I can fit it to an elephant. and if you give me a six parameter, I can make his tail wag. I think that was Von Neumann. I'm not sure. Someone in the chat room, please correct me. But the point being that you keep adding in these things. And it's not just one constant has to change.

He goes through and says all these, multiple constants have to change. And what's the reference for it? A paper by Rajesh Gupta from 2022 about globular clusters. And so just like with Lerner, when Lerner first published his paper, the Big Bang didn't happen in 1990, you know, two or three, that was just after the first images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Lo and behold, 30 years go by, you know, and a new tool is launched. And the whole point of the new tool is to supersede what was done before. So he's using, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not exactly, you know,

there's no malfeasance that's being gone. There's no fraudulent behavior by Dr. Gupta. But in, in the end, you have to wonder, well, when you have one constant vary, now you have to have multiple constants vary. again, like in tired light, there's no justification given. It's just saying if it does, then you can get these results. So if the speed of light slows down, then you can make it appear that the universe is younger than it. You know, there hasn't been as much light time travel.

And then if you use other tools like the size of galaxies, which I want to turn to next, because you're more of an expert, you know, than I could ever aspire to be in that realm. When we talk about galaxy sizes, when we talk about the morphology of galaxies, to me as a physicist, it seems a little bit squishy. Like, where does the atmosphere of the Earth end? It's not well-defined, and multiple reasonable people can have multiple opinions about that. But it seems like, you know,

when you talk about a well-formed galaxy or the size of a galaxy, those are almost subjective. Am I wrong in that? Yeah, well-formed. I wouldn't call these well-formed. For anyone online who's got Google, just look up an image of Maisie's galaxy.

It's a blob. So yes, we are seeing disks earlier than we thought we would, but we are not seeing disks in the earliest galaxies. And one of the things that we, like I said, there's a lot of things we just don't know in galaxy evolution. And so one of the things we don't know is disks and how all disks form and whether they're long lived. And so that's really exciting.

but that has nothing to do with the Big Bang. And you don't need to change cosmology to understand how disks form. The size of these galaxies, so I actually did a back of the envelope calculation because a lot has been made of the fact that these galaxies are really compact and their masses are really high. So let's say that the masses,

that we're going to take the mass of these very early galaxies at face value, I don't think we should, but let's say we are. Even if we take the mass at face value, the density of these galaxies is slightly less than the density in the Omega Centauri cluster. And so Omega, so why is this important?

Okay. The Milky Way has several globular clusters surrounding it. Globular clusters, a lot of them, we think are the ripped out nuclei of galaxies, of other galaxies that the Milky Way has kind of eaten. So a mega centauri is a really special globular cluster because it has some of the oldest stars in it. It's one of the things that you can use to constrain the age of the universe because it has stars that are like 13 billion years old. So it formed very, very early on.

Star formation in the very early universe, everything was dense. Everything was a lot more compact than it is today. So today, we actually can't form globular clusters. We don't form them in the local universe. It's one of the big mysteries of like, well, how do you form a globular cluster? They're all old. They need to be formed in dense environment. So that's a mega sen up there on the screen.

For any of you who are amateur astronomers, you can see it with your eye or with the telescope. And so these early galaxies that we're finding have this density. that dense. And so they're a little bit bigger than that. So that's that's kind of surprising is how big they are. But the density itself isn't a problem. We think that they should have to be that dense to get the globular clusters that we that we see. So that's not a problem. And then the angular sizes, that's not really a problem either. Galaxy should form small. They should, I mean, again, you're a lot denser. And we think that a lot of galaxies get puffed up. Well, we don't think that, I mean, we see evidence for it. We see that a lot of galaxies get puffed up, basically over the last 10 billion years. So we've seen really compact galaxies before. We know that they're the progenitors of massive ellipticals today. Massive ellipticals today are all really puffy. They're very big. How do you get that? You get that through mergers over time. Okay. So you can, you can, form something really compact in the early universe and still get something really big today

because then you've got 12 billion years to interact with other galaxies and accrete all those stars and puff up. That's right. And yeah, so the morphology of it and then this angular momentum problem. Can you talk about that? I have some familiarity, very vague familiarity with it because of the work that I'm interested in on the cosmic microrate background as a probe of what's called primordial magnetism or how do you get the first magnetic fields in the cosmos to kind of spool up? And so maybe you can walk us through what the angular momentum problem is. And is it, and where does it rank on kind of your list of things that do keep you up at 3 a.m. Unlike, you know, whether or not the Big Bang actually happened.

How do you get a spiral galaxy, basically, at high redshift? They're talking about redshift of 10. How do you? Yeah. I don't know. No one knows. If you form slowly enough. So if your protocellar cloud collapses very quickly,

you're going to get an elliptical galaxy. But if you collapse slower, then you have time, like protoplanetary disks, then you have time to actually collapse down into a disk. So angular momentum has to be conserved. But in general, momentum has to be conserved as well. And so you're always forming things in a 3D space. And so the idea is as one particle collapses down from above,

you're going to have another particle collapsing down from below. And so their Z directions are going to cancel out, and you're going to wind up with an X, Y disk. So you're going to actually lose your three-dimensional. But right now, there's not a great explanation for it. The best explanation is basically things just need to happen slowly enough that you have time to dissipate that momentum before through, through basically, like, interactions so you can settle down into a desk. Here's from Gupta's paper. He says he's talking about the tired light model and how it has lacunae and flaws and so forth.

He says, the entire light model, and this is for people. So the articles behind what's called a paywall because it hasn't been published yet in the way these journals make money is they make libraries and universities subscribe to it. So I'm here at UCSD. Allison, you may not be at your home campus in Kansas, but nevertheless, we have access to it by virtue of the fact that instead of paying full wage to my graduate students and me, they pay some money to these predatory. These journals are fine.

I've published papers in monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Anyway, he's talking about this. So this is for, you know, embargoed, I guess, if you don't have it, but it's letting me, as you can see on the side, we did pay for it. So this is part of our mission of explaining to the consumer, no cost to the consumer, as Andrew Huberman says, information that their tax dollars pay for. Okay, anyway, that's my rant. However, tired light models cannot explain the extreme directional uniformity of the observed cosmic microwave background CMB radiation. There's way more in that sentence than's actually at first glance. obvious because the tired light model can't even explain the CMB in terms of so they're talking about

the uniformity directional uniformity but it can't even explain why it has a temperature that it does without any there's no mechanism given to lose energy so what he's going to do here is he saying there's the tired light model has its problems the expanding universe solves those problems but then the expanding universe has other problems and though so therefore let's take the combination of tired light plus the expanding universe. That's model number one, roughly. And then he adopts, he calls that Lambda CDM plus Tired light plus TL. Then he does another thing where he says, well, let's take the expanding universe and

add the covariing coupling constant, which means varying constants of nature, including things like Planck's constant, the gravitational force of Isaac Newton, et cetera. So here we go. He says, since Penzius and Wilson. So it's a little bit misleading to say, Dr. Gupta, that the uniform. is the only lacuna. It's actually the isotropic behavior of it, not just the uniformity, which is the antisotropy, but the actual thermal temperature of it.

There's no mechanism in tired light to do that. And there's also no mechanism to describe not just the extreme directional uniformity to describe its antisotropy as well. And there are many, many other tests of this called the Soniaev-Zoldovich effect and others that he's just completely ignoring when he says that that's the one flaw. he's leading the reader to believe there's only one flaw with the tired light, and of course, he's going to use it. And he says that the next, the next says, he goes, additionally, the tired light does not fit the supernova type 1A data, except at very low red shift. So now it's like the old joke, you know, the restaurant has such crappy food, and they give you a really small portion.

You know, like, how many things are we willing to kind of accept about the tire light model? And now we're going to be led to believe that although it has these big flaws, now we tack it on to the experience. universe plus a constant changing cosmological constants, that somehow is the solution that results in the truth, revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos, and that the universe becomes twice as old. So, again, it goes, however, an expanding universe can easily account for the observed redshift of distant galaxies and the CMB isotropy. That's wrong, Allison.

The CMB expansion, actually, the universe, when the isotropy was discovered in this paper, Penzias and Wilson, they mentioned they couldn't see if it was isotropic. Of course, it's not perfectly isotropic or we wouldn't be here having this conversation. But the best guess that Penzias and Wilson got was from my PhD advisor's PhD advisor, David Wilkinson and Robert Dickie and Jim Peebles. And that was that the universe that we observe in the Big Bang was not a single or event. It was actually the result of a cyclic collapse of a pre-existing universe. So he's wrong there. It's not, they didn't say that it was accepted because it explained the isotropy. In fact, they didn't observe the isotropy until 1992. So this is just completely

factually wrong, Dr. Gupta, and I would expect that you would have a little bit more care when you describe such things, especially when you have such huge implications on the public's understanding of science. But let's keep going, Allison. Sorry to drone on so much. I hope you'll interrupt me if I'm boring you. But Gupta also in these other papers that contemplate the existence of tired light in an expanding universe. So he says the expanding universe has problems too.

Okay, well, what are those problems in the expanding universe? Because actually, the only problems that I've heard talked about are those of Eric Lerner and Gupta and others saying that the formation of galaxies seems to be inconsistent with the timescale

that we thought from our computer simulations to be required to create these galaxies with their spiral structure, etc. So he's saying that we don't need an extra parameter, but they do need to change the values of these constants as they evolve over time. And now we can dive deep because my audience is the smartest in the known universe, as you are aware. I've been clamoring to have you on. So he goes through the math.

And this is actually unlike Eric Lerner's claim, which is based on hearsay and the stuff that you said, you know, I called up and, you know, and set off the cuff. And everybody who is an astronomer knew exactly what you're talking about, by the way. And I'm sorry that you had to endure this kind of treatment that came up. Did he ever contact you? Did he ever apologize? Okay.

So he's still waiting for that, that apology. So now he's got there. Gupta's going through the actual math of it. And he's using my favorite book, That Bypass guest, Barbara Riden. I'll put a link to my interview with Barbara. was one of my favorite guest on the podcast and also wrote the book that I use in my cosmology class. I don't know if you use her book,

but we do here. And then he goes through and derives of the Hubble, the so-called Freeman equations, and here's the kind of money plots here. When you vary the cosmological constants, you allow for an additional term in the Hubble constant that then becomes time dependent. So the Hubble parameter

current time evaluation of that is the Hubble constant. And he goes through it. And I believe, I haven't checked through the math, although he does cite Well, from Alpha, that was a little bit of a surprise to me. But, you know, these are standard things that we teach our undergraduates, right? So. I was still saying, besides a press release in the introduction. I know.

Yeah, I was going to mention that, but I thought, let's not. Yeah, there's a nature press release. So there are a lot of red flags. Let's take a break here. Let me reintroduce you to the audience because we've got 300 plus people already almost a thousand have tuned in to this, to this one segment that we've done. This is Professor Allison Kirkpatrick, who's a renowned observational astronomer, who's dealt with quasars galaxies and was the subject of some controversy when it was first announced that the Webb telescope saw some unusually shaped structures in the early universe that were predicated on an age that was seemingly inconsistent with their divined structure. So I have my JWST here that one of my students made for me.

It floats through my office. And just a reminder, you know, we're not just two yokels here. So in my second book called Into the Impossible, which I'm not plugging, but I talk to none other than John Mather many times, I think three times on the podcast so far. But John Mather, of course, is the PI or the principal scientist of the James Webb Space telescope. So we had a great conversation, multiple conversations. And last year, when the data first came out, the actual images from web, he was on the podcast. So I'll have a link to that once this podcast gets edited. But he, of course, you know, measured the cosmic microrate background spectrum

to be more accurate than any human made spectrum of a black body ever made or ever could be made. So we're, two of us are pretty well versed in this. And as I said, Alison, if they were to show something that's inconsistent. That's really exciting, isn't it? Talk to me about what it would mean. Let's assume there, let's steal man or steal person, as we have to say nowadays. Let's steal person, their perspective, Gupta and Lerner. Can you take us through that? What are some of the arguments that could sound persuasive, not just on Twitter, but to a professional such as yourself? Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for

today's superstars. Catch the job. Jonas Brothers returned to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Uh, yeah, so, okay, I guess the nail in the coffin for me would be if we were able to identify a stellar population that is older than the age of the universe. So this is one of the common tests to make sure that our cosmology is correct, is we look at stellar populations and we determine how old they are.

And with JWST, we should have the ability to do that very early in the universe. And people have done that. And occasionally you might see pop up results, they're like, oh, yeah, they found a stellar population. That's older the age of the universe. But it's one of many models that fit the data and the rest of the models are consistent. And so it needs to be like the only acceptable model. And then we would really have to refine the age of the universe. I think the other nail in the coffin would be, I know the thing that that probably

excites you as much as it excites me is like getting a dark matter detection finally figuring out what the dark matter particle is or you know it might be multiple different particles figuring some of that out because right now to get the galaxies that we're seeing again if what we're seeing is correct you need dark matter to collapse pretty fast and so what if we find a dark matter particle that's just not going to collapse that fast you're not going to form structures that fast that would also take us back to the drawing board and make us rethink things. And that could be pretty fun too. But in general, there is no big astronomy.

I don't have a vested interest in the big thing being correct. I go with what the data shows me and what evidence shows me. And so if things are wrong, they're wrong. And that's awesome. I mean, every time we get a paradigm shift in science, it's great. Yeah, I agree. I mean, nothing would be more exciting than to kind of get revealed wisdom from something that's completely new. And in fact, to that end, I actually did cheekily tweet to our friend Elon Musk who said, let me see if I can get his tweet up here.

So, I mean, this kind of shows and belies the interest and fascination of, you know, some of the world's most important influencers as I would think most people would claim someone like Musk is. Of course, he's a genius inventor and he's the owner of this platform that you and I met on. So he's good for that, right, Allison? I wouldn't have met you without this platform. And everyone should follow Allison at AK Astronomy, who's great. And actually, your name on the platform is you love the Big Bang. Allison Hart's the Big Bang because they were saying, yeah, she's lost her faith at it, whatever. But here's a tweet by our friend Elon, and he's saying the evidence.

So he's responding to Joe Rogan's tweet that the universe is this old. And he says, possibly. I love that, you know, that he's opining. And then there's like literally 150,000 views or whatever. Oh, that's up my tweet. But so then he goes, possibly. But Dark Matter is what seems most sketch to me. So my kids tell me sketch means, you know, sketchy, suspicious.

They call me suss. I don't know what that means. But I think it's just what kids do nowadays. The kids, the youths, as they say. But I tweeted back to him. I said, look, dark matter is actually. actually known to exist. It's called neutrinos. Neutrinos satisfy every condition of a dark matter candidate. They aren't sufficient to close the universe, to make the universe flat, spatially flat,

and they can't compensate for the amount of known matter in the universe. But I said, not only, you know, does dark matter exist, it's well accepted that, you know, that there could be either a modification to gravity or an existing dark matter, a particulate dark matter candidate. And I've talk to Mordecai Milgram, who's the father of Mond, and I've talked to Stacey McGaught, my alma Mauna, Case Western, you know, we're open to these things. That's not, and they're on the outskirts. They are, that, that is considered a sort of a fringe belief. Sabina Hasinfeldar, a good friend of mine and, and, and real, you know, mentor in terms of things on YouTube, she and I've talked about it. There's nothing wrong with it. I think it's interesting. But to say that this discovery

is kind of in the same league because Dark Matter is so sketchy. How do you react to that? Somebody says, Allison, in the media, you know, like, what are you talking about? You astronomers don't know 95% of the universe's energy budget. Who are you? How dare you to use Greta Thunberg-Langma? How dare you, Allison? What should we do? What do you say to such a skeptic?

The evidence is there. Okay, so maybe the theory isn't complete, but the evidence is there. We see evidence, Vera Rubin, Zwicki, Fritzwiki, saw that. this very convincing evidence that there is gravity beyond what we understand. Okay, maybe Newton's theory of gravity is not correct. That's certainly a possibility. The other possibility is there is matter that we don't know about, but regardless, we definitely know that there is extra gravity in the universe

that stars can't account for. And so I just always take it back to like, what are the things that we know? We know the universe is expanding. We know galaxies looked different in the past. We know that there are more, so I personally studied a supermassive black holes. We know that those grow more rapidly in the distant universe than we know today. And then we go back to Occam's Razor, which is what is the simplest explanation? Well, the simplest explanation for this is that we have a finite universe that is changing.

I mean, I don't know. Could we change our conception of the universe? Sure. But we need to see clear evidence that cannot be explained otherwise. Yes. That's how we get to the point that we are today. That's how Einstein was able to blow apart what Newton did. Because Newton's laws are correct on Earth.

But when you start looking at larger distances, you start looking at the way stars move when an eclipse, when something blocks out the sun. Newton's laws can't explain that. And so then you have clear and convincing evidence that you need something else and that general relativity happens to work very well. Well, you know, there are a lot of things that aren't fully explained right now. Certainly there are a problem like how do you unite quantum gravity with general relativity? That's one of the things that we don't know. But that's fun.

That's great. We're going to work on it. And we're going to use the evidence that we have and we don't throw out evidence. And we just try to pick the simplest explanation. And so I guess that's my problem with this paper, is that the simplest explanation actually is our understanding of galaxies in the universe is incorrect in the early universe. So because this paper and all these results keep saying

galaxies are too massive for what we understand. Well, that's kind of. Kind of. Number one, those galaxy masses, I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're probably wrong. They're probably too high just because, again, we have to base how we calculate galaxy masses on everything we've learned from the local universe. And that's probably not right. The other thing is that the very first results, you're only seeing the most massive, the brightest stuff. And so we actually don't know what the galaxy population looks like very early on. We've seen the brightest stuff. This is like if people, if an alien civilization came to Earth and they wanted to quantify what humans are like, but they only had celebrities to look at because those are the people who are on the internet the most.

There's a lot of Kardashians out there. That's right. So all of humanity is just like the Kardashians. Well, that's not right. Those are the shiniest people. Okay? So right now we're just seeing the shiniest galaxies, but I'm on I'm on another program and there are multiple other programs right now trying to get down to the more normal, the average, everyday galaxies. And so we just we just don't know yet what galaxies look like. Yeah, that's right. And so I think there's a lot of like assuming the conclusion that's going on in this paper in terms of what a successful theory would have to do in order to be. acceptable, to be commensurate, to be compatible.

And so there's a lot of wiggling of the constants and so forth. This is well known, and there's a lot of different objections to this, not the least of which, once you have these parameters like, you know, the famous quote about the elephant with the six parameter wiggled tail, you can also ask quite, well, why do they have that? Is it just a pure kinematic, you know, just a pure model where you're basically just taking derivatives and then fitting to the different parameters? Well, that's not as impressive as then coming up with a reason for why those. constants would change. So in other words, when Dirac was thinking about variable constants as, as,

you know, as sort of oxymoronic as that would sound, he was still thinking about those as a motivation for explaining different physical phenomena that were known to exist. And the relationship between these constants would explain things. So I want to take questions from the audience in just a bit, because you've been so generous with your time, but I know we both have to go in just a few minutes. But I think, you know, appealing to these, you know, authorities like Dirac from 1937 and wanting to understand the fine structure constant, again, his motivation was to have it fit in and make it basically, you know, a reciprocal of an integer and explain the value of its size, which we now know does change because the fine structure constant depends on scale.

It's different at the quark scale than it is at the electronic scale. But that's not the type of variation that he's talking about. You have to ask why is it. What is the teleology behind it? So then at the very end of the paper, I just want to give him his due and goes through it. And he asked to ask, he said somewhere in the paper that it's, you know, the expanding universe is not consistent with other men. Well, there's a lot of pillars on which the Big Bang stands, the CMB, expanding galaxies, and most importantly, the abundance of the nuclei, which you alluded to in the very beginning, which can only be formed in a extremely hot, dense phase. You know, the famous quote by Carl Sagan that were all stardust, you know, is not true, really. actually most of what we are in terms of, you know, by number density is hydrogen, which came from the Big Bang, not from a star in population two or whatever. So to give him his due, he does say

at the very end, very poetic, very beautiful. JWST is perhaps playing the same role, HST Hubble Space Telescope in the 90s, reinventing cosmology. I don't know if it's reinventing cosmology, but it's shedding new light, new tools. As my hero Galileo said, you know, you should measure what is measurable and you should make measurable, which is not yet so. But here we're saying HST put the Lambda CDM model on a pedestal. JWSTU is challenging the standard. So it's almost like HST put it up on a pedestal. JWST is coming down to knock it off the pedestal, which I disagree with.

It's beautiful language. In this paper, we have attempted to show the extension of the LambdaSTNNNN with deemed dynamical cosmological constant, which is really a variable constant, which is in a great conflict, of course, with the measurements that my colleagues have done on the dark energy being a cosmological constant, in other words, having no evolutionary behavior. But we have to test that. We can't assume that that's true. So telescopes like My Simon's Observatory that my colleagues and I are building, like Vera Rubin,

like the Nancy Roman Space Telescope, these are all going to tell us new things. But he's saying at the very end, eliminates his models, eliminate the need for stretching and tuning existing models to produce such structures in the early universe, thus amically resolving the impossible early galaxy problem. Well, that's beautiful. But it seems like he's salvaging,

he's doing whatever he can, Alison, to salvage the galaxy formation model, even if the Big Bang itself in the way that we understand it. So I find that you can react to that. Otherwise, I'd like to take questions from the audience. So you can always ask me questions at Dr. Brian Keating on Twitter, Instagram, threads, post, mast, no, I don't do any of those things, but I don't know what a mastodon does, to be honest with you.

But the point is you can always contact me, Dr. Brian Keating. I can go to my website, where if you are a student, Allison has received some of these beauties here. This is a meteorite. So if you are a student or a professor or Dr. Gupta or even Eric Lerner, if you have a .edu address, you'll automatically win a meteorite by going to briankeying.com slash edu. And that will get you on. If you do not have an edu, you can enter a lottery to win one of 100 meteorites. But of course, Allison being such a generous, thoughtful, and brilliant colleague, she's already received her batch. She even got a couple of books, which she was telling me about.

I'm very flattered that you shared your book with my book with your dad. Okay. So here we go. We have some questions for, let me just first highlight. Can you mention that you were just on our mutual friend, Ethan Siegel, starts with a bang. It's his handle. Can you tell us about the podcast that you were just on, Allison? Yeah.

So that talked about my actual research. And I researched supermassive black holes. So if you look up, it starts with the bang. We go through the evidence for supermassive black holes, how we measure the mass of supermassive black holes, and how supermassive black hole growth changes throughout the course of the universe. Okay, great. And he has a podcast, and he's also writing for an outlet called Big Think, I believe, right? Okay. So there's a lot of people in the audience that say that things like science should not be totalitarian.

and that's the main problem with the Big Bang. We sort of talked about this. This is from a viewer, Kwan Tin, I believe scientific theory should not be totalitarian, and that is the main problem with the Big Bang models. Big Bang proponents function like a single totalitarian party in power that not allow anything else. I'd say that's completely right. I'm going to say something about that. Go for it.

Okay. It's not totalitarian. It's just when you first see the mathematical expression of the Big Bang and how the universe changed, you're in grad school. It just takes a really long time to build up the physics and mathematical knowledge. And I don't know if this happens to you, Brian, but as a woman throughout my past 20 years, I studied math in undergrad. I kind of don't tell people that I study astronomy anymore because because every person on an airplane or every guy in a bar has a theory to tell me. He's like, I have a theory of the universe. Just tell me study aliens.

That'll stop it, Allison. Yeah. Like, no. The AL and aliens. Finance. You've had zero physics classes. You do not have a theory of the universe that has any merit. And so science is in like this kind of big bang modeling, the kind of expertise it takes to write a paper like Gupta's, you need a PhD for.

And so I can see people thinking that like science is elitist, but that's why I think public outreach is so important. Because I think it's important to disseminate results to the public and hear their questions and what they're interested in. I think that's awesome. But actually refining models like the Big Bang takes a dedicated decades-long study of physics. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan

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I would say I actually agree with whoever Mr. and Mrs. Tin that scientific theory shouldn't be totalitarian. And guess what? They're not. There's no evidence of conspiracies. Our job is to be adversaries. As much as I like Allison, if I had the chance to review, your upcoming paper, and I found a flaw in it, I would be honor and duty bound, as would you with the exact same thing. And we do this on proposals. I've yet to see any corruption forced upon

me. You can disagree with priorities. In fact, it's almost like the opposite. There's so many good things that we would like to publish or like to fund and to get the chance to do it, this proposal that you're working on, sadly, I believe has probably a 10% chance of being successful, if that. And it's gotten even harder over the decades, and I think it's causing a decline in U.S. scientific prestige compared to Europe, but we can debate that another time. Talk about have you, have you analyzed web data? Do you have access to web data? Can we get some web data? How does it work? I've got a lot of web data. So I am on, I'm on a couple different teams. I'm on multiple different teams. Looking at one of the teams is called NG Deep,

and we are running the deepest survey. So like I said before, like so far, we've only seen like the shiniest, brightest galaxies. NG deep is designed to find the most normal galaxies in the early universe. So I'm on that. We don't have clear results yet because we're still trying to like refine our measurements. And then I'm on multiple proposals to study black hole growth over. over cosmic time and then I'm on another like really fun proposal

to find like the smallest supermassive black holes in the local universe and understand what's happening with that. So yeah, I am like drowning in JadWST Tad. So, so jealous. And I should say one more thing to Mr. Mrs. Tinn or whoever,

Ms. Tinn, Mr. Tinn. The proposals for access to Web or Hubble they are double blinded. In other words, you can't, I can't give Allison. I can't suppress Allison. Eric Lerner applies

for a web telescope time, which he's entitled to do. Dr. Gupta applies for web to, they are entitled to you won't know it. You won't be able to say, oh, I'm going to keep him or her down, right? There's no way to do that. It's double-blind. We have no idea who's reviewing us. We have no idea. And you can't even put on that, you know, my name

is Allison. And, you know, most people would say, oh, I know Allison is a girl's name or a woman's name. I'm going to suppress her because I'm a misogynistic jerk. No, you can't do that. Because your name and even your past accomplishment, which I actually disagree with Allison. I talked with Adam Reese recently who was on the podcast, results of previous funding. You're not even allowed to say that because I believe people might use that to kind of divine who it is.

So I can see some problems with that. But on the other hand, you would like the users of this $10 billion instrument to be among the most elite meritocratically served individuals that can best exploit it. But to answer TIN's question, Kwan Tyn's question, you know, there is no suppression. and it's almost impossible to devise it. And if you don't like it, go and support your own. Data's public, right? You have to make your data public, right, Allison? Yeah, that's right. Wow.

Yes. Okay, great. So a couple more questions. We both got a jet like a galaxy black hole at the center of our galaxy. Okay. Are there any alternatives to the Big Bang? What do you think is the most promising alternative to the Big Bang model, I think, is what Pankhage is asking us here.

Do you have any of your favorites? I should say, we've had on many, many guests on this podcast where we talked about this. So I can. Yeah, I don't know. I would love to hear your answer to this. So I just was at the Royal Institution in the UK and my talk's coming out pretty soon. It was a very, very great honor for me to give a talk at the Royal Institution. I met any of you in the audience out there is pretty cool.

At the most historic and longest running of all scientific lecture halls, Allison, it's this amazing facility in the center of London. It's in a theater in the round. It's how papers used to be presented before there were journals. So I give a talk there. I said the title of talk was, was there a big bag. meaning the A, was there many, were there many big bangs? And I'm actually in the office right now with one of your heroes, I'm sure, and certainly one of mine, this is a plate by Margaret Burbage.

So Margaret Burbage took this plate. This is galaxies. This is a spectrum. She's the one, by the way, I'll see you taught Vera Rubin how to do spectroscopy. Margaret could have discovered dark matter on her own, but she was generous. She let she had Rubin do it as well. But anyway, Jeff Burbage used to occupy this very office. And so he gave a very famous talk once called,

Was there a Big Bang, meaning he believed the steady state was true and the quasi-study state? So I gave a kind of tongue-in-cheek version of that said, was there a big bang or were there multiple big bangs? So there are three leading contestants right now. There's something that past guests or Roger Penrose, also a chapter in this book, and that he has what's called the conformal cyclic cosmology, not to be confused with the Triple C model of Dr. Gupta in the paper just presently

discussed. But that assumes that the university is evolving cyclically through what are called conformal transformations that involve the dissipation and conversion of energy and unknown particles of matter called dark matter, aerobons. So that's one model. Another past guest, Anna EGis and Paul Steinhart and Neil Turak have a model, which is basically a bouncing cosmological model where there was another universe. It doesn't undergo a quantum singularity. So there's no big bang in the classic sense. It does get hot, dense, high pressure. It does happen. 13.76 billion years ago, but it is not a singularity. So it's a classical theory that avoids a single, but it's multiple big bangs that could be more than one or could be an infinite

number. There are things like the steady state universe. And so, you know, I think to take these models, you know, seriously or somewhat seriously, it's important to ask, what are their falsifiable predictions? And that was the basis of my talk, because it turns out that inflation, which also doesn't have a single big bang. People think, oh, inflation, that's just the big bang. Not really, as your friend Ethan will tell you, you know, inflation is sort of the beginning of the hot big bang phase of the universe,

but it's not necessarily a singularity. It doesn't necessarily, you know, extend to meaning, definitive evidence for zero-time singularity. But it also has infinite behavior towards the future in that it creates what's called the multiverse, where you have multiple big bangs occurring with different properties throughout the multiverse. So that's another model.

And the one that distinguishes them, the trait that distinguishes them is that the conformal cyclic and bouncing models do not predict a background of gravitational waves that induce a specific type of polarization that my colleagues and I on the Simon's Observatory and Bicep are trying to detect. So stay tuned for that. Okay, we'll take one more question here. The Big Bang is unfalsifiable. I disagree with that. You could actually falsify both inflation and also falsify the notion of the Big Bang, and it has yet to have happened. So I'm not going to ask you that question.

Last question I want to ask you, because you're a renowned educator as well, and you obviously take great care and thought because you use my book when you taught. No, I'm just going to. You gave my book as a present, I think, or a prize to the best student. Okay. I want to ask you about pedagogy and AI. and what is your pedagogical style? How do you teach it?

And what could artificial intelligence is the question? We'll be able to solve all these entrenched theories. Is AI used in your work? Do you use it for any purposes? And can you envision AI or supplementing revamping? What was the name of this paper again? It was revolutionized cosmology. Let me look at new research.

Yeah, it upends. I forgot. Anyway, how do you use AI, if at all? Yeah, that's a great question. We're using machine learning right now. So machine learning, we're using multiple neural nets and the computer is training itself on basically how to find, how to identify supermass and black holes in the early universe in galaxies, mainly because the data set is so large. And so we're going to need to use machine learning algorithms to do this. It used to be, you know, in my thesis work, I did all these galaxies by eye.

I just like looked at them and fit models and things like that. Yeah, that's not going to happen anymore. And so, and so that's one place where machine learning can be really helpful. So in the classroom, I know there's a big panic right now about AI. Don't say that. Don't say panic. Remember what happened last time? Right.

When people are wondering about chat DPT, for example, which can write things for us, first of all, I played around with chat GPT a bit. I don't find it very useful. I thought you'd say it can write my proposal for me. I, you know, I wish. Look, I wish. But chat GPT is widely misunderstood. It is a predictive language text.

It is not a thinking machine. And so I've seen people put questions in there that they want it to like solve an answer. And that's not what it does. It just analyzes stuff that's already out there and predicts like what the next thing should be. I don't honestly, you know, what, I don't really worry about it when teaching students. I kind of think about it like, our parents really freaked out when we stopped wrote memorization because now we have the internet at our fingertips. And the internet is a tool. And so what we need to be teaching

students is how do we recognize good information on the internet from bad information? How do we ask the right questions? So we're starting to think about this higher order thinking. And so I think AI is the same thing. AI is not going to replace our thinking. It's going to cause us to go to even higher order thinking to understand how to use AI to our best advantage. Hopefully automate some of those tasks that are really boring and take up a lot of our time so that we can do the higher order, the higher order thinking. And so I think, you know, I think as much as AI can help us, it's a good tool. as long as students aren't relying on it to give them an answer and then not thinking logically about the answer,

but that's always the difficulty with teaching. Do you understand what you wrote down there? No, a lot of times they don't. Well, Alison, you've been so generous. I'm going to wrap up. I'm going to bid you a great rest of your evening afternoon, wherever you may be in Kansas. And I want to thank you for being such an awesome guest. And Allison, have a great day.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch, inspired and informed by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday magic email at briankeeting.com slash list. And if you have a dot-edu domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth, forged in the fire of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment.

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