The subject line comes from an article in the New York Times (excerpts below). Data from the James Webb telescope is raising serious difficulties with long-held assumptions about the evolution of the universe and the things in it.
This raises yet another objection to the idea of a universal formal ontology of everything. But it adds further support for the idea of an open-ended collection of specialized ontologies for any particular topic or system that anybody may be working on or with.
The overall framework of everything may be more like a dictionary or encyclopedia written by humans for humans (and also computers). Wikipedia is a good example. The editors of Wikipedia post warning notes about articles that need more or better references. But the best articles are far more reliable than anything that can be derived from LLMs -- and they have reliable citations, not the phony citations that the LLMs generate (or hallucinate).
This is one more reason for abandoning the project of creating a universal ontology of everything. Science and engineering have made excellent progress without them. The task of determining what should replace them is a very important issue for Ontolog Forum.
John
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The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel
Sept. 2, 2023
By Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser
Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look as if we may need to rethink key features of the origin and development of the universe.
According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang: First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies.
The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy.
It was not, unfortunately, an isolated incident. There have been other recent occasions in which the evidence behind science’s basic understanding of the universe has been found to be alarmingly inconsistent.
Take the matter of how fast the universe is expanding. This is a foundational fact in cosmological science — the so-called Hubble constant — yet scientists have not been able to settle on a number. There are two main ways to calculate it: One involves measurements of the early universe (such as the sort that the Webb is providing); the other involves measurements of nearby stars in the modern universe. Despite decades of effort, these two methods continue to yield different answers.. . .
Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution.. . .
The standard model today holds that “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and everything else we can see — constitutes only about 4 per.cent of the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).
Cosmic inflation is an example of yet another exotic adjustment made to the standard model. Devised in 1981 to resolve paradoxes arising from an older version of the Big Bang, the theory holds that the early universe expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This theory solves certain problems but creates others. Notably, according to most versions of the theory, rather than there being one universe, ours is just one universe in a multiverse — an infinite number of universes, the others of which may be forever unobservable to us not just in practice but also in principle.
Cosmology is not like other sciences. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.