The Big Bang, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Light

​By Robert J. Siegel MD and Edward Siegel MA
Note: This is an update of a previous entry
The television news show 60 Minutes recently aired a story about the imminent launch of the Webb Space telescope. In that story they talked about how it will be used to look back in time to a period shortly after the Big Bang.  One of our enduring interests lies somewhat outside the boundaries of our professional training. We are physics enthusiasts. One of the issues that keeps coming to our attention is this claim of seeing light that is just now arriving here from soon after the Big Bang.  The 60 Minutes story is just the latest of these claims. The question we have is simple, how could we have gotten here before the light from just after the Big Bang? Some derivative questions are: Wouldn’t we have had to travel faster than that light to have gotten here before the light from just after the Big Bang? What implications does that have for the Big Bang? Inflation? Please, it reminds us of the old cartoon depicting a huge blackboard covered with intricate equations ending with, “Then a miracle occurs.” If someone has a coherent explanation, we would love to hear it.
The scientists interviewed for the 60 Minutes piece also claimed that the new telescope would shed light (no pun intended) on issues of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. We would just like to remind our readers that other than the inadequacy of current gravity theory, there is no other evidence for Dark Matter. It remains nothing more than a hypothetical construct created whole cloth for the purpose of accounting for this shortcoming. We submit that a more mature theory of gravity will resolve the mystery of why galaxies hold together. Newton and Einstein provided great advances and insight into gravity. Now we need another advance. Dark energy is another hypothetical construct that lacks a sufficient theoretical base.
Finally, the 60 Minutes piece opens up by claiming that the Webb telescope will be collecting only infrared wavelengths from shortly after the Big Bang because that was all there was about 100 million years into our new universe. We submit that if they look for wavelengths in the visible part of the spectrum, they will find those wavelengths too.

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