Adam Riess and the Hubble tension

Archive link using a tool I built to automatically redirect to archive links :)

https://unbloq.us/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archiv...

Archive link: https://archive.is/51R4k

Reminded me of this thread from a couple of days ago. Interesting that both Riess and Gough argue there's a sociological phenomenon amongst cosmologists. Though who knows what Riess might think of the "blowtorch theory." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973

> For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, because the galaxies that we can see around us through telescopes are all rushing away. Riess studied how they moved. He very carefully measured the distance of each one from Earth, and when all the data came together, in 1998, the results surprised him. They were “shocking even,” he told his colleagues in a flustered email that he sent on the eve of his honeymoon. A striking relationship had emerged: The farther away that galaxies were, the faster they were receding. This “immediately suggested a profound conclusion,” he said in his Nobel Prize lecture. Something is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

I'm quite confused by this early paragraph. It seems to be claiming that Hubble's law was discovered in 1998 by Adam Riess, instead of in the 1920s by Edwin Hubble (and others).

Adam Riess might be right, but for reasons he won‘t like. Much of his measurements (and also his Noble prize) depend on the supernovae 1a, which according to the standard model are standard candles. That means it is assumed they always reach the same luminosity, so they can be used to measure distances in the universe (the fainter they are, the farther away they are).

However what if supernovae 1a are not standard candles and their luminosity varies over a much greater range? Then a lot of distance measurements from Riess et. al. are wrong. I belief that scenario to have higher probability than many of the proposed alternatives. But Riess cannot see that, because it would put into question his lifes work.

I guess they've watched the expansion between two galaxies over time and found it increasing?

Otherwise, the fact that "the further away from us they are, they faster they were receding" made me think of this way:

-the further away they are, the longer the light had to travel to get here

-the longer the light had to travel, the longer it took to get to us

-the longer it took to get to us, the further into the past we are looking

-the further into the past we look (further distances), the faster they are receding - doesn't that imply it was faster in the past? The further past we look, the faster it is. The closer we look to home (the closer to "now"), the slower it is.

I wish the journalist asked the leading scientists in the field “Before you learned of the Hubble tension, what did you think the odds were of the standard model being correct? And after?”

And everything would be much clearer.

All of this is wildly exciting - I wonder if this is how people in the 1800s and 1930s felt like, as electricity and nuclear science was going through its hey-day.

The description of how the universe is expanding sounds like how an explosion expands. Rapidly then slower until it settles down and stops (with no collapse at the end, just matter in place where it landed). I wonder if that could be the closest analogy?

Is there any succinct publication of his observations?

Very well written. I felt like reading a good novel.

I'm not an astrophysicists, but dark energy and dark matter have always felt like "fudge factors" to me.

Paywall bypassed:

https://archive.ph/51R4k

> He compared the theory to an egg that is breaking. “It’s not going to cleave neatly in one place,” he said. “You would expect to see multiple cracks opening up.”

Someone needs to send him an https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eierschalensollbruchstellenve...

They may certainly have a point, but many Nobel Prize winners do have a track record of going off the deep end which is something to keep in mind when an article tries to justify their points using Noble Prizes

edit: I'm just trying to say that "Having a Nobel Prize" doesn't mean they are an authority on subjects they talk about since many wen't on to promote homeopathy, aliens, believed aids wasn't caused by HIV, don't believe in climate change, etc."