James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to News@lemmy.world – 825 points –
James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe
livescience.com
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We have a very limited view of the universe so it's no surprise that our theories are often wrong or incomplete. The beauty of science is that when a theory proves inadequate, it gets replaced with a more complete one.

yeah, but it's always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it's almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.

That's because alternative models like MOND or string theory end up breaking more things than they solve. Fixing the leak in your roof is great, but doing so by breaking the living room wall isn't really an acceptable solution.

In optimization problems, you can get stuck at a local maxima. It looks like any direction you go makes things worse. But the only way out of that is to try something that does make things worse and try refining from there to see if you can get to something better. Maybe that living room wall does need to come down in the process.

Isn't string theory basically dead at this point?

It works perfectly as long as you assume there are a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that can't be seen...

It's always funny to me when people bring up how science was wrong in the past, as evidence for why we shouldn't trust it now.

You know what replaced the bad science? Good science.

Or rather, we replace the bad science with the best explanations we can offer, right now.

I'll take the plumb pudding model over "deity did it, stop asking questions" any day, because you can still do something useful with it.

Doesn't even matter if our understanding is wrong and will be updated later.

Science is the best philosophy 💪

I've always liked the adage: science doesn't tell us what's true, only what isn't.

We don't know the best way to treat cancer, but we know leeches don't work.