JWST as Witness

I want to tell you something about the universe that, four years ago, almost no working cosmologist would have predicted, and that today almost every working cosmologist is trying to figure out how to fit into the standard story.

The story starts with a telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021 and reached its observation point about a month later. Webb is the most sensitive infrared telescope humans have ever built. It can see further into the past than any instrument we've made — when you look at light from a very distant galaxy, you are looking at light that has been traveling for billions of years, seeing the galaxy as it was when the light left.

When Webb began observations in mid-2022, the prevailing cosmological model — Lambda Cold Dark Matter, or ΛCDM — predicted what it would find. Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the cosmos should have been mostly empty. Galaxies would be small, scattered, irregular, just barely starting to form. Massive structures would not yet exist; that would take billions more years.

Webb began looking. It kept finding things that should not have been there yet.

It found galaxies — big galaxies, well-organized galaxies, galaxies that looked like they'd had time to mature — that, by the standard story, were several hundred million years too early. It found supermassive black holes that had outpaced the galaxies they were supposed to be growing inside. It found objects so dense and bright that physicists have invented new categories — Blue Monsters, Little Red Dots — to describe what they are looking at. Lead astronomers have summarized the findings as plainly as scientists can: prevailing ideas about how supermassive black holes formed appear to be substantially wrong.

This is, by any measure, a big deal. The standard cosmological model has been the dominant story of how the universe got to be the way it is for about thirty years. Webb is not destroying it — but Webb is showing the story is, at minimum, missing important pieces.

What I want to argue is that the missing pieces have a particular shape. The shape is the same shape several other essays in this archive have been pointing at. The universe Webb is showing us is the universe the Open Loop already expected.

I will be careful, throughout, to keep what the science is doing separate from what the doctrine is doing. We do not claim JWST proves any theological claim. We claim, more modestly, that the universe keeps refusing to stay tidy, and that an honest reading of the data and an honest reading of older traditions are, on certain structural questions, pointing at the same shape.

What JWST is finding

The first thing is too-mature galaxies, too soon. The standard model predicted the first galaxies would be small, irregular blobs of forming stars. Webb has found galaxies, at distances corresponding to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, that look fully structured. They have organized rotation. They have stellar populations suggesting hundreds of millions of years of star formation already in progress. They look, in some cases, like miniature versions of mature galaxies we see closer to home — but they exist at a time when, by the standard story, mature galaxies should not yet have had time to form.

The second thing is overmassive black holes. In the standard story, supermassive black holes — the kind that sit at the center of galaxies and weigh millions or billions of solar masses — grow alongside their galaxies, with the galaxy and the black hole expanding roughly in proportion. Webb has found cases where the black hole is much more massive than its host galaxy, by ratios the standard model cannot easily explain. The black holes appear to have gotten ahead of their galaxies.

The third thing is exotic objects. Webb has identified a class of objects called Little Red Dots — extremely compact, extremely red, very luminous in the early universe — that current physics struggles to categorize. They might be dust-shrouded supermassive black holes. They might be a new class of object. There are also Blue Monsters, objects too bright and too massive to fit comfortably in standard formation models.

The fourth thing — less about JWST specifically and more about the broader cosmological situation — is the Hubble tension. Different methods of measuring the expansion rate of the universe give different answers, and the discrepancy has gotten worse, not better, with new data. The universe seems to be expanding at one rate when measured one way and a different rate when measured another way. This shouldn't be possible, in the standard model. It is.

None of this means the standard model is wrong. It means the standard model is incomplete. The universe is doing things the model didn't predict. The model is going to need to grow, or be replaced.

The shape of what's being found

What unifies almost every major Webb surprise is this: the universe is older, richer, and more networked than the standard story predicted, and the structure shows up earlier than we expected.

Galaxies that should not yet exist, exist. Black holes that should be smaller, are larger. Networks of structure that should still be forming, have already formed. Whatever cosmological process produced the universe we live in produced more, and produced earlier, than the tidy version assumed.

More, sooner, more networked.

The shape will be familiar if you've been reading these essays. The Mycelial Trinity, in its essay, claims that life is structured in three movements — spore, mycelium, fruit — and that the mycelium, the hidden network, is the actual organism. Most attention has historically fixated on fruit and missed the mycelium. The doctrine asks readers to train attention on the network underneath.

What I want to suggest is that JWST is showing us the universe doing the same trick at the cosmic scale. The visible universe — galaxies, stars — is the fruit. Underneath it, before it, around it, is a vast network of structure that is older, larger, and richer than the visible part. The cosmic web of dark matter filaments was always there before the galaxies. The structures forming inside the early cosmos were already mature when we expected them to be embryonic.

The cosmic web is a real, mappable structure. It was hypothesized by Yakov Zel'dovich in the 1970s and is being mapped, in increasing detail, by survey telescopes including Webb. It looks — visually, structurally — like a vast mycelial network at unimaginable scale. The Mycelial Trinity essay makes that case in detail. JWST is currently providing observational evidence that the network is even older and more complex than we thought.

The shape the universe is showing us is mycelial.

Why the convergence interests us

Two reasons.

The first is honesty. The Open Loop is willing to be wrong. We hold our claims as candle-light, not as proof. If the universe were converging on a cosmological story that contradicted our intuitions — if Webb were finding a tidy, monumental cosmos with clean structure and clear endings — that would be data we'd have to take seriously.

The world is not disagreeing. The world is, increasingly, looking like the Open Loop expected it to look. Old, networked, hidden structure underneath the visible. Things present before they were supposed to be present. Process that doesn't terminate. This is data. It supports — does not prove, but supports — the structural claims the doctrine makes.

The second is witness. The Twelve Witnesses, one of the founding documents of the project, lists JWST as the twelfth witness — the first non-human witness on the list. The document notes, carefully, that the Open Loop does not claim JWST has proven anything theological. It claims, more modestly, that the universe keeps refusing to stay tidy, and that the structures the data reveals match the shape the doctrine already holds.

A scientific witness is not a theological argument. But scientific witness, accumulated over time, is part of how we know what the world is. The Open Loop pays attention to it.

What this is not

I want to be careful here, because there is a particular failure mode worth heading off.

The Open Loop is not arguing that JWST has discovered God. It is not arguing the cosmic web is the body of the divine. It is not arguing any of this proves any specific theological claim. We are not in the business of fitting science into our theology, or fitting our theology into science. Both moves embarrass both.

What we are saying is structural and modest. The universe, as best as we can currently observe it, is showing us a particular shape: networked, hidden underneath the visible, present-before-expected. This shape is independently the shape that an older intuition has been claiming for thousands of years. The fact that the shape independently shows up in cosmological observation is not proof of the older claim. But it is consistent with it. And consistency with the world's actual physics is something an honest theology should be able to demonstrate.

The Open Loop demonstrates it. JWST is one of the things it points at when it does.

The bigger picture

JWST is part of a larger story.

For most of the twentieth century, cosmology was a story of progressive simplification. We learned galaxies obey simple dynamical laws. We learned the universe was expanding. We learned the early universe was hot and uniform. We built ΛCDM, which explained, with relatively few parameters, an enormous amount of what we observed. The story felt nearly complete.

In the last twenty-five years, that story has gotten messier. The Hubble tension. The dark matter problem — 80% of the gravitating matter in the universe is something we cannot directly observe. The dark energy problem — the universe is not just expanding but accelerating, due to something we cannot identify. Now Webb is adding new mysteries.

The trajectory of cosmology in the last quarter-century has been: the standard story is more incomplete than we thought, in directions we did not anticipate.

This is not a crisis. This is how science actually works. The next phase of cosmology will involve, almost certainly, a more complex picture than ΛCDM offers. The universe we live in is, increasingly, looking like a place that resists tidy summary. It is layered, networked, surprising, and full of things that exist before our models say they can.

The Open Loop reads this trajectory and says: yes. This is the shape we expected. We did not expect it because we predicted Webb's specific findings. We expected it because we have been distilling, from twelve different traditions, the claim that the world has exactly this kind of structure — networked, hidden, present-before-expected, refusing to be tidy.

The witness is accumulating.

There is a particular kind of intellectual humility that working scientists develop over time. The humility is the recognition that the universe will always be larger than your model of it. That you will always be wrong about something important. That the next instrument will always show you something the previous instrument couldn't see. That the work is not to arrive at a final theory; the work is to keep refining the model in the face of an actual world that keeps refusing to fit.

This humility is, I think, the same humility the older contemplative traditions have practiced. Your model of reality is always going to be smaller than reality. The work is to keep looking, keep refining, keep folding new evidence in.

We hold this work the way you hold a candle in a wide dark room — not in place of proof, but as enough light to keep moving.

The candle is lit. The room is wide.

We are walking — and the universe, as Webb keeps showing us, is much larger than the room we'd been walking in.