14 Outside the box, looking in
It is easier to think outside the box if you're not in it.
This is the fifteenth post in this series. You may want to read the Introduction titled The Myth of Scientific Uncertainty, and posts numbered 1-13 first.
We hear a lot about thinking outside the box. Wikipedia defines it as “a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective.” In the history of science, there have been many examples of discoveries that came about by thinking ‘unconventionally.’
One of my favorites is Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen. He was one of several scientists studying the chemistry of combustion around 1775. The prevailing theory was that burning something released a substance. That explained why a piece of coal or wood loses weight and size when burning. The substance released was called “phlogiston.”
This explanation made sense, but there was an anomaly. When sulfur or phosphorous burns, weight is gained. Lavoisier considered the possibility that the addition of something during burning was the norm, not the aberration. He reasoned that, with some flammables, the added substance which he called oxygen created a gas which went away. In other cases, the product of combustion was not volatile, and the oxygen remained, making the starting substance heavier.
Other examples of thinking from a new perspective are the above-mentioned Ida Noddack’s interpretation of Enrico Fermi’s neutron bombardment experiment and Alfred Wegener’s postulation of continental drift.
Thinking outside the box is not easy if your professional life has put you in it. When I was trying to design a new kind of mass spectrometer called distance of flight (DOF), getting outside the box of ‘standard’ mass spectrometry principles was a struggle. I understood time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF) in which different substances fly down a tube at different rates and reach the detector at different times. In DOF, I wanted to see the positions each of the substances would have after a given flight time. Imagine ‘freezing’ a 100-yard dash just before the front runner has crossed the finish line.
Focusing the different substances at their detection point is needed for reasonable resolving power. The method to achieve focus in DOF would differ from TOF, but subconsciously holding on to the ‘rules’ of TOF focusing kept getting in the way. It took months of studying simulations to learn the characteristics of this new system (and unlearn the old). When I solved the problem, it made sense, but from a completely new perspective.
Resolving situations where new data conflicts with existing explanations can be easier when you are outside the box looking in. You are not as stuck on the shared beliefs of the ‘in’ group. But then, as we have seen above, the ‘insiders’ might not welcome your intrusion. Perhaps if, while believing our data, we could hold our explanations more lightly, outside-the-box ideas would be more available.
Astrophysicists may need that now. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is sensitive to infra-red photons, can see spectral lines that have been redshifted further than were previously observable. Greater redshift means a greater velocity of the light source away from us. Based on the universe expanding at an increasing rate, that also means the sources are at a greater distance and the light has taken longer to reach us. It’s that same expansion, played backwards, that gives us the age of the universe, or the time since the big bang (13.8 billion years).
The problem is that the JWST has seen mature galaxies like the Milky Way that are calculated to be only four or five hundred million years old when their light started toward us. We thought it took much longer to form such a galaxy. Our Milky Way galaxy is thought to have begun 13.1 billion years ago and taken several billion years to form. We are at that point where observations are dissonant with current explanations. Either galaxies can form more quickly than we thought, or the universe is more than 13.8 billion years old.
It’s time for thinking creatively. But however we resolve this, the data will remain valid, as will the laws governing the spectra of the elements, the measurement of brightness, and many others. It is our explanation of some observations that will adjust. My bet is that a mechanism other than the Doppler effect is contributing to the redshift.
Please spread the word that there are some things we know for sure, and that we can logically show why that is so. We can better defend science if we know what will endure and what might change.