Expert: Courtney Seligman - 2/5/2009

Question
How come that we can see photographs of thousands of galaxies said to be > 10 billion years old made by hubble, when the complexity of galaxies was meant to have started somewhere in the middle of the time between now and the big bang? There's a photograph in the wikipedia article on the big Bang showing a large number of these very old galaxies.

Answer
Observations always trump theories, so what those photographs show is that theories which predicted that galaxies formed slowly were wrong. Instead, galaxies formed and achieved surprising complexity in relatively short periods of time, very early on.

You should view such theories, even when altered to fit the current observations, not as absolute truth, but merely educated guesses. They are probably in the right ballpark, but still a bit off-base, and only time will tell how far.

Courtney Seligman