Big Bang or Big Think?

On June 12, 2025, I published a Substack essay about new research suggesting that CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) “’radiation doesn’t exist at all,’ according to Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa from the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn and Charles University in Prague. ‘At the very least, we are convinced that its strength has been overestimated…. Our results are a problem for the standard model of cosmology. It might be necessary to rewrite the history of the universe, at least in part.’”

And now today comes another article in Big Think, co-written by the same Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa, highlighting research that evidence from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggests CMB radiation “might come from early galaxies instead” and not the Big Bang. But CMB is one of the cornerstones of the Big bang theory; so if this JWST evidence is correct, it makes the Big Bang theory even harder to digest.

Here are some excerpts from the bigthink.com article (entitled Ask Ethan)….

“Since its discovery in the mid-1960s, the cosmic microwave background has long been treated as the surefire signature of the Big Bang, cementing it as our mainstream theory of cosmic origins. However, JWST has found many more bright, early galaxies than was expected, and they emitted lots and lots of energetic light. Perhaps that energy, after encountering dust, is re-radiated and responsible for the radiation we see? That’s an idea put forth by scientists Eda Gjergo and Pavel Kroupa in a provocative new paper.

“For background, let’s start by understanding that the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB for short, is taken to be the leftover radiation from a very early, hot, dense stage in cosmic history: specifically, the epoch when the primeval plasma — the ionized atomic nuclei and electrons and much, much greater numbers of energetic photons — expanded and cooled enough so that neutral atoms could form. When the nuclei and electrons combine to form atoms, the photons, previously in thermal equilibrium through their collisions with those charged particles, now stop bouncing off of other particles and instead free-stream in a straight line for all eternity.

“But what if there’s something else at play? What if the CMB isn’t what we think it is, and what if it doesn’t tell us the properties of the Universe the way we think it does? Instead of this conventional story, the authors contend, there’s an additional, previously overlooked foreground effect: the massive early galaxies found by JWST.

“These early-type galaxies evolve and grow up quickly, and then [the authors of the paper] assert that the traditional picture of structure formation in the Universe — known as hierarchical mass assembly (where small-scale structures form first, then merge together to form larger ones) — is incompatible with the galaxies that we see.

“But then, [authors Gjergo and Kroupa] go on to say, based on that recognition, that there must have been these enormous clouds of matter-and-gas that must have collapsed to form those early-type galaxies. Those clouds must have been huge: more than two million light-years in diameter apiece. And these clouds of material must have formed very early on: when the Universe was between 180 and 270 million years old, or earlier than even the most distant galaxy ever detected by JWST is found. And then they go on to claim that the energy from these early-type galaxies is an important source of CMB foreground contamination, representing anywhere from a low of 1.4% up to a possible high of 100% of the total CMB energy.”

The Big Think article continues with the writer (Ethan) debunking the paper’s conclusions. It ends with “The CMB truly is of cosmic [Big Bang] origins, and the contentions of the paper that these massive early-type galaxies can play a substantial role is not borne out by the evidence. Early-type galaxies do produce energy, but in the wrong wavelength range and on the wrong angular scales to meaningfully contribute to the CMB. The idea that the entirety of the CMB could be explained by them is dead on arrival; we wouldn’t get a blackbody spectrum or the spectrum of fluctuations that we see. Even the basic concept — that these early-type galaxies are a meaningful CMB foreground — is highly suspect.”

The author of the Big Think article I’ve quoted is Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, host of the popular podcast "Starts with a Bang!" So, who are we going to believe? The authors of the new paper: Eda Gjergo, astrophysicist at Wuhan University, and Pavel Kroupa, a Czech-Australian astrophysicist and professor at the University of Bonn, or Ethan? Maybe Ethan’s right. Maybe not. But it’s obvious that he’s invested in the Big Bang theory. So it doesn’t surprise that he will defend it again any and all attacks. But time, I guess, will tell.

In the meantime, we should be open to new alternatives to the Big Bang theory. One such alternative is: Type RUN and hit Enter.