Fumfer Physics 15: Gravitational Lensing Discoveries and the Limits of the Big Bang Model
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/07
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Rick Rosner about the recent surge in gravitational lensing discoveries and their implications for cosmology. Rosner explains how modern instruments are producing vast amounts of data, sometimes straining existing theoretical frameworks. He outlines the history of the Big Bang model, from Hubble’s redshift law to the cosmic microwave background, and its ongoing refinement through inflation and the ΛCDM model. Reflecting on confirmation bias, Rosner considers how his own information-centric perspective shapes his interpretations. The discussion underscores both the resilience of the Big Bang framework and the open questions driving contemporary astrophysics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Rick, you sent you an article reporting on the recent discoveries of gravitational lensing. I want to begin with a question about that. What is the central finding? The article describes a large amount of gravitational lensing being detected, but it does not clarify whether this amount is consistent with the Big Bang model. Increasingly, it seems that many findings no longer align neatly with the traditional Big Bang framework.
Rick Rosner: Our telescopes and other instruments are improving quickly, producing so much data that theory struggles to keep up. The Big Bang was an early framework. About a century ago we confirmed that there are other galaxies—Hubble’s work in the 1920s—and that the farther away a galaxy is, the greater its redshift (Hubble–Lemaître law, 1929). The modern Big Bang model builds on solutions to Einstein’s general relativity (Friedmann and Lemaître in the 1920s).
It became the leading explanation after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Penzias and Wilson at Bell Labs in 1964–1965. That radiation does not come from the “earliest moment” but from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled enough for atoms to form and light to travel freely. Subsequent missions—COBE (1992), WMAP (2003), and Planck (2013/2018)—measured its spectrum and tiny temperature variations, strongly supporting the Big Bang framework.
With new data, not everything fits neatly. Inflation, proposed around 1980–1981, solved several issues (horizon, flatness, and relic problems), but open questions remain. Still, the ΛCDM (Lambda–Cold Dark Matter) model—the current standard Big Bang cosmology—continues to match a wide range of observations, including the cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure, baryon acoustic oscillations, supernova distances, and many gravitational-lensing results.
Maybe I am wrong; I do not know.
Jacobsen: You have been reading and reflecting on this material for more than thirty years from an information-structure perspective. Are you vulnerable to the same confirmation biases as others? When you encounter evidence that appears to challenge the Big Bang, do you interpret it differently because of your theoretical commitments?
Rosner: Sure, so yes.
Let me add something. The Big Bang Theory was the inevitable first large-scale cosmological theory, once certain observations were made. Suppose there are many alien civilizations that reach a stage similar to ours. In nine out of ten cases—perhaps even higher—the first widely accepted theory they would form, once they discovered cosmic redshift and the existence of countless galaxies, would be something like the Big Bang.
Around 1900, astronomers thought the universe was just the stars within our own system. By the 1920s, with Hubble’s work, they realized those “nebulae” were separate galaxies. Before then, the term galaxy wasn’t widely used; astronomers sometimes referred to them as “island universes.” Humanity went from thinking there was one galaxy to understanding there are on the order of 100 billion galaxies, each with about 100 billion stars. That was a radical change in perspective. Given the available evidence, the Big Bang became the natural conclusion.
Now, regarding confirmation bias: I have my own analogy between human information processing and the universe’s information processing. That parallel may be strong, or it may be weak, but not nonexistent. Even a weak parallel challenges the traditional Big Bang picture. If the universe is an information processor, then you would expect temporal homogeneity—that it should appear roughly uniform across very long stretches of time, billions of years into the past or future.
That said, I recognize my bias. I look for articles that seem to support my IC (information-centric) view, at least in my interpretation. But my physics skills are limited. Ideally, I would be in a building with physicists and cosmologists, tossing around ideas, running the math, and testing them with code and data. Instead, I am just one person collecting anomalies from articles and online discussions. I do not even read the journals directly.
I do not subscribe to any physics journals. For me to see something, it has to come through a science writer who explains physics for the general public. They read the journals, then translate the content into periodicals or websites. There are probably very rigorous mathematical analyses of how much gold should be produced in supernovae in a Big Bang universe, along with gold created when two neutron stars merge. (Black hole collisions, by contrast, do not produce heavy elements because they swallow material rather than eject it, though some debris may be flung away in certain scenarios.)
Astrophysicists have certainly run these calculations and compared them with observational evidence, such as the abundance of gold and other heavy elements detected through stellar spectral lines. But I never see that side of things. What I encounter is a 450-word article on some website claiming that the universe may contain more gold than the Big Bang model predicts—without showing a single equation.
There is a principle in popular science writing about avoiding math. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time included just one equation—E = mc². According to the story, Hawking wanted to add more, but his publisher warned him that each equation would cut sales in half. Even with only one, the book sold millions, though it is often described as the least-read bestseller of all time. It is under 200 pages, but many people bought it with good intentions and then found it too challenging.
The material I read never contains equations. But the journal articles behind them likely contain dozens, with integrals, Hamiltonians, and other advanced symbols I never learned—or long ago forgot. I am just an amateur. I am not on the level of the retired shop teacher in Florida who claims to have disproved Einstein, but I am also not working in Duane Physics, the tower at the University of Colorado where George Gamow once worked. (Gamow died in 1968; Duane Physics was completed in 1972, so he never worked there.)
The tower itself has a poor reputation. It is an ugly building from the 1970s, with narrow hallways and cramped offices. I imagine that frustrates the physicists who work there because it limits casual interaction. Collaboration probably happens elsewhere, in spaces with whiteboards and room to actually exchange ideas.
I never get to just walk up to physicists and ask, “What’s going on? What’s shakalaking?”
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