The universe could be twice as old if light were tired and physical constants changed

When the James Webb Space Telescope began collecting data, it gave us an unprecedented view of the distant cosmos. The faint red-shift galaxies seen by Hubble as mere smudges of light have been revealed as objects of structure and shape. And astronomers were faced with a small problem. Those early galaxies seemed overdeveloped and too large to have formed within the accepted timeline of the universe. This triggered a flurry of articles boldly claiming that JWST had debunked the big bang. Now a new article in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society argues that the problem is not that galaxies are overdeveloped, but rather that the universe is twice as old as we thought. A whopping 26.7 billion years to be exact. That’s a bold claim, but does the data really back it up?

The model proposed in the paper starts with something known as tired light. In the tired light model, light spontaneously loses energy over time. So when photons travel billions of light-years through the cosmos, they undergo a redshift. Thus, light from distant galaxies is redshifted not due to cosmic expansion, but due to the inherent reddening of light over time. The idea of ​​tired light has been around since Edwin Hubble first observed cosmic expansion as a way to maintain the idea of ​​a stationary universe. It lost popularity as evidence of cosmic expansion became clear and regained some popularity as Webb’s observations started coming in.

We’ve known for a long time that tired light doesn’t work by itself, so this paper adds a new twist by dealing with universal physical constants. Quantities such as the speed of light, the charge of an electron or the gravitational constant appear to be built into the structure of the universe. They have the values ​​they do because of how the universe was formed, and are generally assumed not to change over time. We have geological and astronomical observations showing that physical constants have not changed for at least several billion years.

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But this new paper argues that if you combine tired light and changing physical constants, you can get a universe that looks younger than it actually is. Basically, tired light gives you the cosmological redshift you observe, and the gradual shift in physical constants means that those mature distant galaxies are not just 100 million years old, but billions of years old. By changing the tired light and variable physical constants just so to match the data, you get a universe that is 26.7 billion years old.

Does the model work? Yes, but there are two problems with it. The first is that tweak theories are weak theories. While this model can be fitted to observational data, there is no physical rationale for doing so. There are many models that can be modified to fit the data, which is not the same as having a robust physical model. The author of the paper argues that there may be some underlying mechanism that causes tired light and physical constants to shift in the right way, but there is still a lot of confusion in the model.

The second problem is that the JWST observations do not rule out the 13.7 billion-year standard universe. Galaxies are more complex than some computer simulations predict, but this is not surprising given the limitations of modeling large structures. There are many ways early galaxies could have evolved rapidly that don’t require rewriting cosmology.

But even without a strong physical motivation to create this model, the work is still worthwhile. It’s the kind of card that thinks outside the box, which is a great way to make sure we don’t get stuck in old patterns just because they’ve worked so far. This new model isn’t likely to overturn standard cosmology, but as long as the ideas are testable and disprovable, as this model is, there’s no harm in adding it to the pile of ideas.

Reference: Gupta, R. “JWST Early Universe Observations and ?CDM Cosmology.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2023): stad2032.