From Deep Time to Deep Fried Ice-Cream and the James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope.

At the beginning of this year, 2023, internet news media gleefully reported that photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope proved that the long-held Big Bang theory is wrong with headlines like “Study Confirms: Webb Telescope Debunks the Big-Bang Theory.” These claims rest on a paper published by James Webb scientists published in the journal Nature that found fully formed galaxies much earlier than the current Big Bang theory had predicted.

What is fascinating about this news media reporting is that in the interest of garnering clicks and web traffic, it completely ignores the conclusions published by the NASA and James Webb scientists. These super high-resolution images of space show much more than any space telescope has shown so far, of course they will expose new things we have not seen before, that’s why the James Webb telescope was built. The conclusions from the scientists are to explore the fact that the universe may be older than we first predicted or that galaxies can form much quicker than we expected. This is an exciting scientific breakthrough that needs to be explored and not overshadowed by false news reporting. 

None of this disproves the Big Bang theory, in fact it helps us improve the theory and thus our understanding of deep time and the universe. The reporting on the ‘debunking of the Big Bang theory’ ignores the basic and collaborative aspects of modern science. Science is like a brick wall, always building on itself. Yes, sometimes scientists must remove a brick or shuffle a few around, but the wall is built on the scientific method and on previous discoveries and theories. These exciting new images and subsequent discoveries brought to us by the James Webb Space Telescope are simply the latest bricks in this wall, built on layers of scientific and physics discoveries and observations of the universe and deep time. James Webb is just one tool that we can use to look at deep time and cannot with one image disprove all the other observations and tools used to observe and understand the universe and its beginning.

Deep time speaks to time through both cosmic and geologic ages in millions and even billions of years from the beginning of the universe. The study of deep time uses different methods to reconstruct the atmosphere and climate of earth in previous ages. It also looks out into space to reconstruct the universe before the earth formed. A key scientific theory that explores deep time is the Big Bang theory, first put forward in 1931 by a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest. While revolutionary in the 1930s, this theory has since become the accepted explanation of the beginning of the universe. Many scientists have built upon the brick wall of the Big Bang theory by observing the universe, like showing that the it is constantly expanding and exploring how light ‘redshifts’ as it travels through space. The latest addition to this brick wall of deep time scientific exploration has been the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a multidecadal project funded by NASA and launched on Christmas Day of 2021. After six months in space by mid-2022, the James Webb telescope sent its first images to earth and continues to send new and stunning images. The James Webb Space Telescope has been hailed as one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the past two years. 

One of the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope.  

I have no doubt that the James Webb Space Telescope will continue to advance our understanding of deep time and the beginning of our universe. However in the age of deep fried ice-cream and the internet, I remain sceptical of news that claims that James Webb will be disproving all of our theories about deep time and our universe. Science and its collected theories and history is not a Jenga tower, where one single new finding or conflicting piece of research can bring the whole tower down. As a young scientist myself, I build upon the knowledge of my predecessors and will hopefully add my own research to the wall of our collaborative human science project.