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Universe Is Expanding Faster Than We Thought (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Gizmodo: The Hubble Space Telescope has released some new numbers indicating that the rate of expansion of our universe is approximately 45.5 miles per second per megaparsec. It calculated this by measuring the distance between 19 faraway galaxies. Conceptually, the calculations show that space is expanding fast enough to essentially double the distance between our galaxy and our nearest neighbors in about 10 billion years. The new Hubble constant, which is 5 to 9 percent higher than previous estimates, does not match estimated expansion rates from the energetic leftovers of the Big Bang, thus causing a headache for cosmologists. It could mean that Einstein's theory of relativity is incomplete and/or there are processes pushing space apart that we have yet to account for.
A large chunk of science relies on observations not tied to controlled experiments. That doesn't make it any less "science". Regardless of your experiment, after all, what you end up with is only "observations". Heck, for particle physics you get statistical analysis of observations 3 steps removed from the event of interest.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We tend to think the laws of physics are uniform across the entire universe without a shred of proof that this is actually the case.
Actually we have quite a lot of proof of that. Stars has the same spectra which show absorbtion and emission lines consistent with elements here on earth. Supernovae occur in other galaxies in apparently the same way that they do in ours. The nucleosynthesis of the Big Bang seems to work really well etc. There is considerable evidence that the laws of physics are apparently the same everywhere and, if they are not, then fundamental laws such as conservation of energy and momentum will not be correct since these rely on the symmetry of the laws of physics with respect to time and position respectively.
Just because something we originally thought of as constant is perhaps not does not mean that the laws of physics must be different elsewhere all it means is that the laws of physics are not quite what we thought they were, or at least what we have is incomplete.