What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: How the Universe Works

This week, the hopeful weirdos of the UFO community were handed a gigantic slab of red meat in the form of a hearing in front of Mexico’s congress, where journalist, ufologist, and hoaxer Jaime Maussan produced what he claimed were the mummified bodies of two alien corpses. There’s not enough evidence yet to say whether the bodies are papier-mâché figures or actual space aliens that happen to look like papier-mâché figures, but you don’t have to see them to lean heavily towards “this is all bullshit”; you just have to listen to Maussan’s patter.

To paraphrase part of his presentation, Maussan explained that mainstream scientists reject his evidence of E.T.s because acknowledging its truth would overturn the established understanding of how the world works—not because he ran this same con in 2017.

Claiming “Big Science is suppressing the real evidence” is nearly universal among loons and cranks, but in reality, it’s the opposite of what scientists do. Scientific discoveries that challenge the established order happen all the time—they’re kind of the point. To add insult: Maussan’s alien-and-pony show is going down while the real scientific community is seriously debating whether they’ve been wrong about almost everything, from the Theory of Relativity, to the Big Bang Theory, to the universal constancy of physical laws themselves. According to an article from astrophysicist Adam Frank and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser in the NYTimes, “The story of our Universe may be starting to unravel.” It’s from the opinion section, but still.

What if everything we know about everything is wrong?

The debate among cosmologists and physicists was sparked by unexpected evidence produced by the James Webb Space Telescope, not mummies supposedly pulled out of a Peruvian cave. While looking toward the earliest evidence of existence itself, Webb spotted fully formed galaxies that seemed to have come together so quickly that it contradicts the accepted sequence of events that happened after the Big Bang—by a lot.

Combine that discovery with the long-standing inability to determine the rate at which the universe is expanding, and you end up with the possibility that the models that science relies upon to explain why everything is like it is may need to at least be adjusted—and at most, tossed in the garbage bin. According to Frank and Gleiser, “We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.”

Or maybe not. Plenty of scientists take issue with the idea that we’ve been fundamentally wrong about everything, but the point is, the people who are possibly getting something wrong this week (and every week for the past 100 years or so) may be the world’s leading cosmologists and theoretical physicists, and maybe Einstein—in other words, the smartest people we’ve got.

How to be wrong about science

If Maussan (and countless other conspiracy theorists) were right, Big Science would be rejecting the evidence from the Webb telescope because it contradicts their worldview—maybe by calling NASA a hoax, like they called Maussan’s “aliens” in 2017. Instead, scientists are debating and defining possible contradictions to long-standing theories to see if and how they were wrong. The Big Bang Theory may stand up to this new information; parts of it may need to be changed to account for new evidence; or it may turn out to have been a mistake all along. If so, The Big Bang Theory will join the Steady State Universe Theory and other ideas in the file of things that were proven false. This process is the opposite of rejection of evidence to protect the established order, and it’s a lesson for all of us in how to handle any new information that conflicts with our previous understanding of the world.

Related: Along with the older-than-expected galaxies, the Webb telescope may have discovered aliens, too. It’s not as dramatic as corpses before a congressional panel, but astronomers using the Webb telescope say they’ve identified dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. As far as we know, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by fish flatulence, so soggy aliens may be farting around on another planet right now. This is real science, however, so no one is building gigantic fishing poles until more evidence is gathered.

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