Bet 425
Duration 16 years (02008-02025)
PREDICTOR
Rogier M Sluimers
CHALLENGER
Unchallenged
I'm not a physicist nor an astronomer, but a mere simple student in computer science.
The Big Bang theory is based on redshift, supported by CMBR images made by the WMAP telescope.
The idea is that because most galaxies are found to be reddish, that at some point in the past all matter and energy of the universe used to be lumped together.
Galaxies sent out these light wave-particles billions of years ago and during that time the galaxies were moving away from us, or we from them, resulting in a lower wavelength light wave-particles, known as the Doppler effect, giving it a more reddish colour.
If I'm correct, the only galaxies that are more blueish are most galaxies from our local group, including our big neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy
and a few from our local supercluster.
If all is going to plan, the new James Webb Space Telescope will unravel the secrets of how the big bang began.
That's not going to happen.
The Doppler effect may sound like the most logical choice for redshift, but I don't read anywhere that they have measured whether galaxies are becoming bigger or smaller, supporting the idea that redshift really is a Doppler effect.
Showing that galaxies are closer to each other the further away we look would also be nice.
Since the universe has already proven to be more than 150 billion lightyears across, an age of 13.7 billion lightyears should be inconcievable.
I'm making an assumption here that it's human nature for many, including the most revered scientists, not to reinvent the wheel as that would cost too much time, effort and money.
So scientists have decided that since WMAP says that if the universe is 13.7 billion years old and Einstein saying that light cannot travel faster than c, space itself must be expanding. They call the cause of it dark energy.
So what do I think?
First of all the James Webb Space Telescope probably will see is more of the same. Simply more and more galaxies, just like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image.
Second, WMAP will never be able to correctly filter out radiation coming from plasma in our own solar system and milky way. Especially when this plasma is "dark flowing".
Third, it seems that the universe is endless, it just goes on and on forever and ever. Perhaps we might see that we're only part of something even bigger, but so far that´s not the case.