[HN Gopher] Adam Riess and the Hubble tension
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Adam Riess and the Hubble tension
Author : samizdis
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-05-30 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| observationist wrote:
| Archive link: https://archive.is/51R4k
| boxfire wrote:
| Is there any succinct publication of his observations?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| There's a "general audience" review by the man himself.
|
| > https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04492
| tshaddox wrote:
| > 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).
| tinix wrote:
| The Hubble Tension is not Hubble's constant.
| dataflow wrote:
| I think they're talking acceleration, not velocity? Hubble's
| law says more distant galaxies are receding faster than slower
| ones at some calculable rate, but it doesn't say the rate at
| which they're doing that is accelerating over time. (I do find
| it kind of shocking that one can prove this without observing
| the same thing over a prolonged period of time.)
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Disclaimer that I'm not an astronomer and might be totally
| wrong, but from some quick searching, it seems like the article
| is conflating Hubble's discovery and Riess's. Hubble's law can
| be true even if the expansion of the universe is slowing down,
| not speeding up: a galaxy twice as far away as another can be
| receding at twice the speed, even if that speed is decreasing
| over time. But it seems like Riess's discovery is that the
| speed is actually _increasing_ over time. It 's related to
| Hubble's law but not the same thing.
|
| Frankly, the fact that I could find that out with 2 minutes of
| reading Wikipedia reflects pretty poorly on the author.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| It's the second derivative.
|
| Riess et al's findings showed that galaxies farther away are
| not just receding faster (as Hubble's Law already described),
| but that the rate of expansion itself is increasing over time.
| This discovery suggested the presence of a mysterious force,
| now called dark energy, driving this acceleration.
|
| This was unexpected because most astronomers at the time
| thought the expansion should be slowing down due to
| gravitational attraction between galaxies.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Yes, but the article is indeed unclear about this. In
| particular this line:
|
| >The farther away that galaxies were, the faster they were
| receding.
|
| This is already the case in Hubble's law, which says that the
| velocity is proportional to the distance. Hubble's constant
| is the proportionality constant and thus the expansion rate.
|
| Riess found that the Hubble constant is not constant.
| Instead, the expansion rate is increasing over time.
| mathattack wrote:
| How many journalism majors did you encounter in undergrad
| who knew how to apply second derivatives to Physics
| problems? (I've given up on pop science articles - podcasts
| with experts interviewing experts has a much higher signal
| to noise ratio)
| tshaddox wrote:
| I wouldn't expect a journalist to _apply_ second
| derivatives, but I would expect them to talk to
| physicists and _accurately report_ what the physicists
| say. Of course, I have no real physics or astronomy
| education beyond high school, but I can recognize a
| textbook one-line description of Hubble 's law and know
| that something's off when it's being attributed to a guy
| in 1998.
| freedomben wrote:
| I have quite low expectations of journalists when it
| comes to anything technical or that requires expertise,
| but I _do_ generally think highly of the Atlantic and
| think they are generally a lot better than average at it.
| I 'm a disappointed in this one though.
| daedrdev wrote:
| 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."
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Eh, I think that is just the result of more attention/funding.
| Plenty of scientists have wacky ideas (very much encouraged!)
| that do not pan out upon further investigation. If you are a no
| name lab that tries a novel idea that fails, nobody knows or
| cares. "Celebrity" scientist with a failed idea and now you are
| off the deep end.
| api wrote:
| The blaming of cliques of scientists for rejecting alternate
| ideas was cliche and kind of a red flag.
|
| That does happen, of course. Science is conservative because if
| we have a theory that is a good fit to the data it should take
| a lot of evidence to unseat that theory and the new one must
| _also_ fit all the data the old one did. (Unless some data was
| wrong, but that also takes evidence.)
|
| But this is also something every crank says, and loudly. The
| more obsessed and loud someone is with a conspiracy against
| them the more they sound like a crank.
|
| Was Einstein or quantum theory instantly rejected and held down
| forever by a conspiracy? Not really. There were skeptics but I
| seem to recall these ideas taking hold pretty fast because they
| fit a lot of anomalous data very well.
| jshaqaw wrote:
| Agreed. People point to the edge cases where orthodoxy and
| conformity crushed the brilliant innovator but for every one
| of those there are 1000 cranks or embittered dead end
| researchers claiming that only a conspiracy prevented their
| genius from being recognized.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| This sort of argument implies that Riess must have turned
| into a crank since his Nobel prize winning turn... Seems
| unlikely though doesn't it?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Having hesitancy of any new theory that directly conflicts
| with the known/accepted theories is not a bad thing. Telling
| someone that their theory is so different than what everyone
| else thinks that they might want to go back and double/triple
| check just in case someone forgot to carry a one or something
| else simple/embarrassing is just a CYA bit of advice. Other
| quotes like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary
| evidence" would also be apropos.
| jerf wrote:
| If even getting a Nobel Prize isn't enough to protect someone
| from being accused of deviating from orthodoxy and therefore
| _ipso facto_ "off the deep end", then the entire claim the
| science apparatus makes about being all about ideas and not
| about orthodoxy is falsified, and all subsequent beliefs in a
| belief net based on that proposition need to be updated
| accordingly.
| staunton wrote:
| "Being all about ideas" implies that whether someone has a
| Nobel prize should play a very small role when evaluating an
| idea. If the idea sounds implausible, it's OK to say so, no
| matter whose idea it is. Some people will still look into it.
| eej71 wrote:
| I think this is a misunderstanding of the underlying issue.
|
| It isn't about protection from straying from some level of
| orthodoxy. It's about people who are incredibly brilliant in
| one area of their life - and yet be incredibly dumb in
| another. I've always seen Linus Pauling as an interesting
| example of this. Brilliant in some ways, but going all in on
| Vitamin C is just weird.
|
| I see the basic claim as - sometimes these prizes - well
| intentioned as they are - may lift critical guard rails that
| unintentionally let them drive off into their weeds. They go
| deeper and harder into the weeds because the prestige that
| comes with these prizes creates a halo effect that blunts or
| hides critical criticism that can no longer reach them.
| kadoban wrote:
| Someone getting the Nobel Prize and then being assumed
| correct from then on would be approximately the opposite of
| science.
|
| They can put their ideas out there, and people can evaluate
| them on their merits just fine, with maybe a bias towards the
| ideas being interesting due to the source. What's wrong with
| that?
| daedrdev wrote:
| I mean some of these are just easily problematic and wrong,
| so its better to take their good ideas and not the rest.
|
| Like these are just 2 cases of a number of examples
|
| 1993 chemistry doesn't believe AIDS is caused by HIV, doesn't
| believe in Climate Chiange, believes in astrology, thinks he
| talked to talking alien racoon
|
| 2008 medicine founded their own journal and claimed viruses
| emitted radio waves to arrange water in nanostructure that
| let you teleport DNA though Homeopathy and also claims
| vaccines cause autism.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Is there a correlation between being born in Superfund sites
| and being a Nobel Prize winner?
| bsoles wrote:
| Reminds me of Roger Penrose more recently. When Nobel Prize
| winners start making YouTube rounds, you have a good indicator
| of someone going of the deep end. Thank God, Eric Weinstein
| doesn't have a Nobel Prize...
| gamma42 wrote:
| How has Penrose gone off the deep end?
| bsoles wrote:
| His theories about quantum consciousness...
| nimih wrote:
| Penrose published "The Emperor's New Mind" some 16 years
| before YouTube existed as a website, so you may need to
| clarify which particular theories about quantum
| consciousness you're referring to.
| ryandamm wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
|
| This is a decently-well documented observation. (I hesitate to
| call it a "phenomenon" as that would imply an actual casual
| mechanism.)
| gaoshan wrote:
| 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?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Riess' original discovery is the opposite: The universe expands
| faster and faster over time.
| pavlov wrote:
| An explosion has a center. I'm not a cosmologist, but my
| understanding is that the universe expands everywhere and at a
| rate that's in fact accelerating rather than slowing down.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What does the has a center comment have to do with the rest
| of the comment? The big bang had a center too. That doesn't
| mean anything in the context though.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I thought the big bang had no center because there is no
| edge. Rather expansion was of space itself that happened
| everywhere.
| layer8 wrote:
| No, it's not space itself. Relative to what would it
| expand? It's galaxies moving away from one another, which
| necessarily increases the space between them.
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_
| universe#Expa...
| meroes wrote:
| I don't think the big bang or the universe ever had a
| center.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| The other two sibling comments expressed some doubt, but I
| can tell you with absolute certainty that in the standard
| model, and to the best of our knowledge in reality, the big
| bang did not have a center.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This makes no sense to me. Are we saying the universe
| existed before the big bang? The big bang went boom and
| everything started expanding from it. How is it not the
| center?
| mr_mitm wrote:
| No, we are not saying that. We are saying that the
| entirety of space - and not just its contents - have been
| compressed into a point (ignoring quantum gravity for
| now). Any two points in space have been arbitrarily close
| if you play the movie backwards sufficiently close to the
| first moment.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a 4D spacetime, not a 3D space.
|
| Start with a tiny sphere. Expand it. The sphere gets
| bigger, but no point on the 2D-like surface is the
| centre.
|
| It's like that, but the surface is a 4D spacetime.
|
| You can't use your imagination to visualise this. But you
| can use math to describe it.
|
| Whether there's some kind of ultradimensional hypercentre
| is a different question. Even if there was, it wouldn't
| be accessible from this universe.
|
| And don't forget we don't have a clue what spacetime is.
| Relativity has some nice descriptions of what it does,
| but there's no _fundamental_ explanation of how the
| universe generates the phenomena we call position, time,
| and distance.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| The Big Bang is not a physical explosion and the universe
| is not a balloon. All space was condensed together, but
| space is (to our current ability to measure it)
| topologically flat and infinite. It was still infinitely
| big in every dimension, it was just unfathomably dense.
|
| The expansion that's occurring is that the space
| _between_ things is growing. But it 's every space
| between everything all at once, everywhere.
|
| There is no physical equivalent.
| layer8 wrote:
| We observe that the matter density in the universe is
| decreasing with time. As far as we know, this looks the
| same from every point in the universe: galaxies move away
| from each other. The speed with which they move away from
| each other doesn't depend on where in the universe you
| are. (It only depends on the time, as the speed is slowly
| increasing.) There is no center from which they move away
| from. Or alternatively, every point in the universe is
| such a center. It's like when zooming into a grid. It
| doesn't matter at which point of the grid you zoom in,
| the grid expands in the same way regardless. The grid has
| no center, and also no boundary.
|
| Due to the laws of general relativity, extrapolating that
| observation into the past, the implication is that the
| matter in the universe was ever denser the further you go
| into past. Furthermore, there is a point in time where it
| becomes infinitely dense. This is what we call the Big
| Bang. Because our equations break down at that point, we
| don't know what happened at that point in time, or
| before, or whether there was a before. However,
| observational evidence like the cosmic microwave
| background strongly support the theory: https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Observational_evidenc...
|
| Note that "infinitely dense" does _not_ imply that the
| universe shrinks to a single point at that time. Rather,
| it was infinitely dense at every point. (Again, this is
| like zooming out from an infinite grid infinitely far.
| The grid always remains infinitely large.) This means
| that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once. It's a
| point in time, not a location.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| spauldo wrote:
| Your time's a bit off - electrification didn't really take off
| until the early 20th century and nuclear applications outside
| of weapons until the 1950s and 1960s.
|
| My grandmother grew up when cars were scarce, electric wires
| were stapled to the wall, and indoor plumbing was for city
| folk. She hit a certain level of technological advancement and
| then just stopped, probably around the 1980s. She died last
| year, having never used the Internet or a computer and still
| using a console TV (with an adapter box installed by the cable
| company).
| cogogo wrote:
| 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
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Every scientist knows there is a sociological component to the
| practice of science. This is not a novel or noteworthy
| observation and I don't think Riess was intending it to be.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Also, every cosmologist knows the standard model is not the
| final answer. I think the author is really trying to
| overstate the controversy.
| cogogo wrote:
| But many non-cosmologists like me aren't so aware. Many of
| us learned basic physics where the standard model is
| treated as a given. Or the standard if you don't mind dad
| jokes.
| cogogo wrote:
| I happen to not be a scientist but found the observation
| interesting given the overlapping subject matter. Especially
| given the stark differences in training/background. E.g.
| scientist/not scientist.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| > 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...
| ge96 wrote:
| interesting was trying to figure out how it works looks like
| the metal bead you raise and drop it
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| Genau!
| kylecazar wrote:
| "It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven
| through the eye of a rich man's needle than it is for any other
| foreigner to read the terrible German script."
|
| Mark Twain
| wahern wrote:
| I only recently learned what this is actually referring to,
| after scouring archive.org for Spanish, French, and German
| language versions of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. Twain
| is being perfectly literal, though these days we'd narrow the
| debate to typeface as people rarely handwrite these days.
| Example: https://archive.org/details/erstesdeutsches00wormgoo
| g/page/n... When first opening that book, I was like, "what
| kind of inanity is this!?" The same author wrote Spanish and
| French versions of that book, but both were printed using a
| perfectly familiar Latin typeface. After reading about the
| issue, I can sort of appreciate why that typeface was chosen,
| though it definitely steepens the learning curve.
|
| There was a centuries long debate in Germany (and Germanic
| lands) over this issue. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant
| iqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput... for info about the debate over
| typeface specifically. TL;DR: The Nazis resolved the dispute
| by fiat, in an odd twist of history settling on the Latin
| typeface.
|
| (For typeface enthusiasts, I apologize for any poor use of
| terminology.)
| pixelpoet wrote:
| These days, even here in Germany, Fraktur script is mainly
| used to determine when you're finally doing serious
| mathematics.
| djmips wrote:
| I remember that font from Walt Kelley's Pogo - used for the
| undertaker vultures
| lproven wrote:
| Paywall bypassed:
|
| https://archive.ph/51R4k
| otherayden wrote:
| Archive link using a tool I built to automatically redirect to
| archive links :)
|
| https://unbloq.us/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archiv...
| zvorygin wrote:
| 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.
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