Skip to main content

On burying the lede: or not

 




There are fully-formed galaxies very very far away -- more of them than there 'ought' to be according to the Big Bang theory of cosmology as it has developed over the last century or so. When we look at far distances we are of course looking backward in time given the fixed nature of the speed of light. At the very great distances that the JWST can reach we ought to be looking at the early universe, before there had been time for a lot of galaxy formation. It appears that something about the theory will have to be re-worked.  Below there is a link to a story about new developments in astronomy/cosmology:

https://www.vox.com/science/24040534/jwst-galaxies-big-bright-mystery-black-holes-cosmology

But what I really want to talk about today is that the article in question is a very bad piece of writing. The author, Brian Resnick, takes forever to get around to the point. 

Since Resnick buries it here, I just give you in the first graf what should have been his lede: There are fully-formed galaxies very far away -- more of them than there 'ought' to be according to the Big Bang theory of cosmology as it has developed over the last century or so. It appears that something about the theory will have to be re-worked. 

BTW: there are two bits of journalist jargon in the above paragraph. I'm sure Resnick is as familiar as I am with the spelling "lede" for a brief statement of the point of a story, which outsiders think is a misspelling for "lead". Also, I'm sure he recognizes "graf" with an "f" as the usual abbreviation for "paragraph."  

He too should have started there. A lede in the first graf! Instead he started with this sentence, "Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope came online in 2022, astronomers' jaws hit the floor."  So he signalled that he was going to get around to the news only after he had explained various parties' emotive reactions to the news. And indeed the signal was accurate.  

In paragraph twelve (twelve!) he says he has subjected us to "enough teasing" and will soon reveal the discovery that caused jaws to drop.  But he still doesn't! Instead, he digresses into the history of the JWST for another ten grafs or so.  

Finally, when he writes "When JWST went online, astronomers were eager...." he has gotten to where he should have started.  He is now more than half way through his story. This is astonishing because Resnick is often very good at what he does.  This time he was awful. 

Anyway: astronomer are apparently thinking to themselves, "hey-ho the Big Bang may have to go. "  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more