There's a lot to the article and anyone interested in how the universe began should read the whole thing, but Lerner opens with this:
To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory.Big Bang cosmologists are having sleepless nights because, as Lerner pointed out, the images of galaxies that the Webb telescope are sending back are showing that the galaxies are too small, too smooth and too old for the Big Bang to have occurred.
In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones.
One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”
Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The ...hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since.
Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”
But why does their size, smoothness and age preclude the Big Bang? Lerner explains:
Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance.In other words, since we're seeing them as they were billions of years ago when, if space is expanding, they were closer to us, they should appear larger just as objects do when they're closer than when they're further away.
Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.)
But they don't appear larger, they appear smaller just as would be expected if space were not expanding.
Smaller and smaller is exactly what the JWST images show.Lerner explains this in more detail in the article, but what does smoothness have to do with this? Big Bang theorists speculated that many galaxies have actually grown over time due to collisions with other galaxies, but the smoothness revealed by the Webb telescope seems to rule this out:
....This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe....Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.
....theorists have speculated that the tiny galaxies grow up into present day galaxies by colliding with each other—merging to become more spread out.....[and] Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers.If the universe is not expanding then there was no initial Big Bang.
What the JWST actually showed [however] was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today’s galaxies....In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory.
....Tiny and smooth galaxies mean no expansion and thus no Big Bang.
The age of the galaxies seen by Webb is also a problem for the standard big bang model of the origin of the universe:
According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old.Lerner also cites the sheer number of very distant galaxies which must've formed impossibly early after the initial cosmic expansion as evidence that the Big Bang never happened:
Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur.
Just as there must be no galaxies older than the Big Bang, if the Big Bang hypothesis were valid, so theorists expected that as the JWST looked out further in space and back in time, there would be fewer and fewer galaxies and eventually none—a Dark Age in the cosmos.There's more to Lerner's argument at the link - he argues, for example, that, based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one - but one of the most interesting aspects of the piece is the reaction to the scientific establishment at having one of its most cherished theories challenged.
But a paper to be published in Nature demonstrates that galaxies as massive as the Milky Way are common even a few hundred million years after the hypothesized Bang.
The authors state that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time, so again-- no Big Bang.
Lerner discusses the censorship and suppression of ideas which conflict with the standard explanations of the origin of the cosmos and his account sounds very similar to what those who challenge the evolutionary paradigm of the origin of life experience.
Perhaps the scientific establishment feels the earth moving under their feet. Not only is it cosmologists who are experiencing panic and sleepless nights, but so too may many Darwinians in various scientific disciplines be experiencing the high anxiety that accompanies the horrible realization that one's entire life's work was all wrong and a complete waste.