Ask Ethan: Do JWST’s results contradict the Big Bang?

When it comes to the science of cosmology — the history of the Universe and how it came to be the way it is today — one of the crowning achievements of the past 100 years is the development of a “standard model” of cosmology. The dominant factor in determining how the Universe evolves is gravitation, which is governed by General Relativity and accounts for the expanding Universe as well as the assembly of large-scale cosmic structure. The contents of the Universe have been determined to be dark energy, dark matter, normal matter, neutrinos, and photons. And the Universe as we know…