See Astronomers Reveal a Cosmic ‘Axis of Evil’ to learn:
Astronomers are puzzled by the announcement that the masses of the largest objects in the universe appear to depend on which method is used to weigh them.
…
Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe containing thousands of galaxies like the Milky Way and their weight is an important probe of their dark matter content and evolution through cosmic time. Measurements used to weigh these systems carried out in three different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum: X-ray, optical and millimetre wavelengths, give rise to significantly different results.
To those not well-read in cosmological physics, this weighing of clusters of galaxies is a part of the project of determining the fate of our universe — eventual contraction or unending expansion, itself an important part of the greater project of understanding created being.
This weight-measurement problem raises a variety of possibilities, including a radical incompleteness in our understanding of fundamental properties of matter-energy. Serious problems of this sort are often a sign of the potential for someone to do some good, creative thinking, maybe even discovering what might be called “new physics.” Reality might be different from what we currently think and we can maybe better shape our minds by shaping them to a better approximation to the truth.
Whatever our beliefs, Christian or Jewish or pagan or atheistic, we can explore and analyze this dynamic universe only if we have courage and also a faith that the effort will prove rewarding — a faith that the universe is coherent and that we can reach an understanding of that coherence. I’m not sure if physicists and other scientists are continuing at the level of creativity shown by Einstein and Feynman. There have been some serious thinkers who have claimed to see signs that, over the past century or so, the deeper forms of creativity have faded a bit even in the physical sciences. Some of those thinkers have been scientists themselves, such as Michael Polanyi who also saw moral problems developing in the conduct of science; others have been respectful observers of science, such as Jacques Barzun who saw signs that all fields of Western endeavors have been living off the creative explosions of the decades around 1900. Maybe science has seemed a bit more creative than, say, political philosophy in the 20th century because the second-tier of scientists simply had more to work on because of the work of Einstein and Planck and those who followed soon after.
I’ll return to an upbeat note of sorts by repeating my words from above:
Whatever our beliefs, Christian or Jewish or pagan or atheistic, we can explore and analyze this dynamic universe only if we have courage and also a faith that the effort will prove rewarding — a faith that the universe is coherent and that we can reach an understanding of that coherence.
If we truly have any sort of freedom, we have the freedom to shape our minds to the vast mountains of partially processed empirical knowledge piled up in recent centuries. History would indicate that no civilization can continue without a coherent understanding of the world and without a creative response to that world. A good number of thinkers and doers in the West need to respond to a dynamic world, not to our inherited and no longer plausible understandings of the world. If this is done, if that good number show faith and courage, business entrepreneurs as well as philosophers, political activists as well as physicists, novelists as well as civil engineers, we have a chance to reform the West or even to found a radically different phase of civilization for some part of the human race which might correspond to what’s called the West or it might be a larger part or a smaller part.