Professor who correctly predicted every US presidential election since 1984 is certain Donald Trump will be impeached - Independent

Professor who correctly predicted every US presidential election since 1984 is certain Donald Trump will be impeached

Academic says disciplinary action against US President is a matter of when rather than if

Ben Kentish @BenKentish Wednesday 22 February 2017

Allan Lichtman said he is 'quite certain' Donald Trump will do something to warrant impeachment Getty Images

A professor who correctly predicted the result of every US presidential election since 1984 has claimed Donald Trump is certain to be impeached.

Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University, uses a system of measures he calls “keys” to predict political outcomes and is now so convinced Mr Trump will face impeachment that he is writing a book on it.

The text, titled “The Case for Impeachment”, will be published in April by HarperCollins. It will include Professor Lichtman’s assessment of how Mr Trump could be impeached, based on analysis showing how his actions make him “uniquely vulnerable” to disciplinary proceedings.

More than half Americans 'disapprove of president's job performance'

“Professor Lichtman has correctly predicted every Presidential election since 1984, including the election of 2016”, said a spokesperson for HarperCollins.

“Now, he focuses on the 45th President of the United States and his next forecast, that it is not a question of if President Trump will be impeached, but a question of when.”

Professor Lichtman forecast Mr Trump’s impeachment even before the Republican’s shock election win over Hillary Clinton,

Speaking last September, he told the Washington Post: "I'm going to make another prediction. This one is not based on a system; it's just my gut.

“They don't want Trump as president, because they can't control him. He's unpredictable. They'd love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican.

“And I'm quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook."

Mr Trump’s conduct has come under close scrutiny, with questions being raised over his behaviour both in the past and since taking office. Some charges relate to alleged sexual assaults on women, including several cases which are set to end up in court. Mr Trump has strongly denied all the allegations.

Other critics point to alleged conflicts of interests relating to the President and his multibillion-dollar business empire. Mr Trump has taken a number of steps to try to extract himself from such issues and has denied having any conflicts of interest.

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The Republican is also facing renewed questions over his connections with the Russian state. Mr Trump denies his team had any contact with Kremlin officials during a presidential campaign in which Moscow is accused of hacking Democratic computers in an attempt to influence the election outcome.

Mr Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, was forced to resign earlier in February after admitting he had misled colleagues, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the nature of conversations with Russian representatives during calls in December, before the Trump administration took office.

The Germans are making contingency plans for the collapse of Europe. Let’s hope we are, too - Guardian

The Germans are making contingency plans for the collapse of Europe. Let’s hope we are, too

Paul Mason

A leaked defence document has revealed the country’s worries about the breakup of the global order – a scenario with serious consequences for post-Brexit Britain

Merkel and Macron at an EU summit last month.

Tuesday 7 November 2017 00.36 AEDT

The German defence ministry set out its worst-case scenario for the year 2040 in a secret document that was leaked to Der Spiegel last week: “EU enlargement has been largely abandoned, and more states have left the community … the increasingly disorderly, sometimes chaotic and conflict-prone, world has dramatically changed the security environment.”

The 120-page-long paper, entitled Strategic Perspective 2040, is a federal government policy document – and the scenarios it imagines are grimly realistic: an east-west conflict in which some EU states join the Russian side or a “multipolar” Europe, where some states adopt the Russian economic and political model in defiance of the Lisbon treaty.

That the document exists at all is a sign of the increased tension in the global system. The German military’s tradition of rigorous logistical planning for every eventuality began with the celebrated German field marshal Moltke in the 1850s and has three times paid off with initial success: in 1871 against France, in 1914 and 1939 against the rest of Europe. In the post-cold war era, as Der Spiegel puts it, allowing German generals to make statements about the future was “too risky”. That changed with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Despite the alarmist headlines it has generated, the leaked document is, if anything, overoptimistic. In three out of the six scenarios, things go so well that Europe resembles the Biedermeier era – 1815-1848 – of domestic bliss and military boredom. Its negative scenarios – which see the US struggling to avoid isolationism and China locked in a cultural war with the west – were written before Donald Trump came to power and before Xi Jinping’s strategy of creating a politicised Chinese infrastructure across Asia.

The journalists to whom the document was leaked have omitted any details of what Germany is planning to do about the EU’s possible collapse and fragmentation. But this is the problem facing the entire western world.

Though the urgent problem is terrorism, the important ones are the decline of consent among populations for the present economic system and high levels of migration. They have begun tearing holes in the fabric of the EU itself – via the Greek crisis of 2015, Brexit and in the standoff between the Polish and Hungarian governments and the European commission.

Brexit, the ministers, the professor and the spy: how Russia

Right now, the issue at the front and centre of German political minds is the French president Emmanuel Macron’s proposal for accelerating Europe’s economic integration, which almost everybody in Germany wants to reject – Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU because it implies requiring more fiscal transfers to poor countries in the periphery; the Social Democrats because it will weaken the remaining social protections for workers; the far-right AfD because it means more Europe. Every conversation I have had with German politicians and activists since the country’s election has revolved around fears that the million-plus recent refugees will not be properly integrated, and that tolerance for further social change among older, less-educated Germans is at breaking point.

After Brexit has happened, the mature democracies of Europe should be pushing to consolidate their project, telling a coherent, positive story to their increasingly critical electorates. Yet they cannot – because the only coherent story Europe has is more globalism and more market, and that is what the populations are rejecting. Meanwhile, Russia and China are no longer nibbling at the edges. They have begun to gnaw. A new “great game” is being played in the eastern Mediterranean in particular and “the west” barely has a strategy.

This weekend evidence emerged that indicted former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos had made a visit to Athens coinciding with the visit of President Putin. There is no evidence that they met, but they did not need to. Papadopoulos’s interlocutor in the Greek government is the defence minister Panos Kammenos, who heads a small nationalist party in the Syriza-led coalition and is one of the most pro-Kremlin politicians in any Nato government.

Now, after the EU ordered the mass privatisation of Greek assets, Chinese money has surged in, buying the whole container port of Piraeus and in August signing billions of euros worth of investment deals with Greece. As Costas Douzinas, the Syriza MP who heads the Greek parliament’s defence committee, put it: “While the Europeans are acting towards Greece like medieval leeches, the Chinese keep bringing money.”

If the Germans are making contingency plans for the collapse of Europe and the breakup of the global order then, presumably, someone at the UK’s Defence Academy in Shrivenham is doing the same. It would be better, though, if politicians started engaging the British electorate in a sober and non-partisan appraisal of the problem we face.

Putin’s Russia is waging hybrid warfare against western democracies; not just through cyber-attacks

Putin’s Russia is waging hybrid warfare against western democracies; not just through cyber-attacks or the placing of millions of pounds worth of ads for fake news on Facebook. It is also funding rightwing populist parties and using media influence to revel in the sleaze, corruption and sclerosis in European democracies. In turn, there is a tendency among centrist politicians to say that all opposition to the status quo – most recently in the Catalan referendum – is Kremlin-inspired.

The assumption behind the UK’s repeated promise of security cooperation with Europe after Brexit is that the core democracies – Germany, France, Italy and Spain – will remain committed to Nato, democracy and the rule of law. And that a reformed and revitalised Europe will deliver enough jobs and growth to sap the energy of the nationalist and xenophobic right. But it would also be wise for politicians to begin admitting that these things are no longer certain. If we want order, we have to create it – through engagement, multilateralism, by accommodating what we can of the demands of rising powers and through the promotion of resilient democratic institutions. If we fail to achieve order, we must deal with disorder when the US is no longer a reliable ally, nor even a stable democracy.

Britain’s new defence secretary should have a long look at the leaked German document. It will make sober reading alongside the defence spending cuts he is being told to make.

• Paul Mason is a Guardian columnist

Priti Patel: Number 10 'knew about secret Israeli meeting and told her not to declare' - UK Minister recalled fro Israel visit - Independent

Priti Patel: Number 10 'knew about secret Israeli meeting and told her not to declare'

Joe Watts Political Editor

Downing Street knew about a meeting Priti Patel had with an Israeli minister, but instructed her not to publicise it because it could embarrass Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office, it has been claimed.

Reports on Wednesday said Number 10 knew about the meeting between underfire minister Ms Patel and Yuval Rotem, but held the information down.

The meeting on September 18 did not appear on a list of 12 published by Ms Patel this week after she was censured by Theresa May for arranging them without her knowledge.

China's New Jet Is Straight Out Of A Sci-Fi Movie

It was thought the emergence of the Rotem meeting in New York would give Ms May further reason to sack Ms Patel, who is expected to lose her job today.

But if the Prime Minister already knew, it raises questions as to whether Ms May is keeping Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson in the loop as to the foreign activity of all her other ministers.

One ex-Conservative minister told The Independent: “This is an absolute mess.

“There is already a turf war going on between Boris and Priti. The idea that Downing Street knew about her stepping on his toes and didn’t tell him is hugely embarrassing for him.”

The Jewish Chronicle reported on Tuesday that two different sources had told them, Ms Patel did disclose the meeting with Mr Rotem to Downing Street but was told by Number 10 not to include it as it would embarrass the Foreign Office.

In addition, the newspaper reported that although Ms Patel’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not authorised in advance, the British Government was made aware of it within hours.

On August 24, the same day Ms Patel spoke to Mr Netanyahu, Middle East minister Alistair Burt and the British Ambassador to Israel met Michael Oren, Deputy Minister at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, the JC reported.

According to the notes of the meeting, Mr Oren referred to Ms Patel having had a successful meeting with Mr Netanyahu earlier. It is understood that this information was then conveyed to Number 10.

The JC, went on to report that Ms May spoke to Ms Patel in advance of the UN General Assembly in September and they discussed the minister’s meeting with Mr Netanyahu, as well as the details of Ms Patel’s plan for UK aid to be shared with the Israelis, something which Ms May said needed Foreign Office sign off.

More follows…

Trump welcomed in China amid North Korea, trade tensions - CBS News

November 8, 2017, 2:07 AM

Trump welcomed in China amid North Korea, trade tensions

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump arriving on Air Force One in Beijing on November 8, 2017 ALY SONG / REUTERS

BEIJING -- President Trump is making his first official visit to China amid regional tensions on trade and North Korea.

Mr. Trump landed in Beijing Wednesday following a visit to South Korea.

He's scheduled to meet multiple times with China's President Xi Jinping during the two-day stay.

Xi was treating Mr. Trump to a lavish welcoming ceremony and tour of the Forbidden City, home to China's ancient imperial palaces.

The visit came hours after Mr. Trump addressed South Korea's National Assembly and pressured China to stop supporting North Korea.

He also delivered a sharp warning to Pyongyang, telling the rogue nation: "Do not underestimate us. And do not try us."

In a speech delivered hours after he aborted a visit to the heavily fortified Korean demilitarized zone due to bad weather, Mr. Trump said he had a message for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"The weapons you are acquiring are not making you safer, they are putting your regime in grave danger." He called on all nations to join forces "to isolate the brutal regime of North Korea."

"The world cannot tolerate the menace of a rogue regime that threatens with nuclear devastation," he said.

Mr. Trump made equalizing trade with China a centerpiece of his presidential campaign but has signaled that he may ease up in exchange for China's help with North Korea.

Mr. Trump arrived in Beijing with mounting U.S. trade complaints in the air, limiting prospects for progress on market access, technology policy and other sore points.

The strains between the world's two biggest economies are fueling anxiety among global companies and advocates of free trade that they could retreat into protectionism, dragging down growth.

Washington accuses Beijing of backsliding on market-opening promises, and Mr. Trump said last week that the U.S. trade deficit with China - $347 billion last year - is "so bad that it's embarrassing."

"I don't want to embarrass anybody four days before I land in China, but it's horrible," he said.

China is the third stop on Mr. Trump's ten-day Asia tour, which opened in Japan.

A year after his surprise election, 65 percent say Trump's achieved little (POLL) - ABC News

A year after his surprise election, 65 percent say Trump's achieved little (POLL)

By GARY LANGER Nov 5, 2017,

A year after his surprise election victory, President Donald Trump is underperforming expectations and lagging behind his predecessors, with the lowest job approval of any postwar president at this point in office, broad distrust across a range of issues and majority belief that he’s not delivering on his campaign promises.

Yet for all his shortcomings, Trump runs a dead heat with Hillary Clinton among 2016 voters in a hypothetical rematch in this ABC News/Washington Post poll, underscoring Clinton’s own enduring unpopularity. Ninety-one percent of Trump voters say they’d support him again (albeit down from 96 percent in April). And marking a still-struggling opposition, 61 percent of Americans say Democratic leaders are mainly criticizing Trump, not presenting alternatives.

Democratic disarray, though, doesn’t negate Trump’s own challenges. Just 37 percent of Americans approve of his job performance, the lowest for any president at nine months in office in polling dating to 1946. Fifty-nine percent disapprove, numerically a new high for this president, but essentially unchanged since summer. Half disapprove “strongly,” another high -- twice as many as strongly approve.

And Trump has big deficits on key issues and personal attributes alike. Consider these results from this poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates:

Fifty-five percent say he’s not delivering on his major campaign promises, up sharply from 41 percent in April, at his 100-day mark.

Views of Trump as a “strong leader” have plummeted by 13 percentage points, from 53 percent at 100 days to 40 percent today -- lower than the worst rating on this question for either of his two predecessors throughout their two terms in office.

As the president travels in Asia, a remarkable 67 percent of Americans don’t trust him to act responsibly in handling the situation involving North Korea -- up 5 points from September. Also relevant to his travels, a majority, 53 percent, now says America’s leadership in the world has gotten weaker under Trump.

Two-thirds (65 percent) also now say he’s accomplished anywhere from “not much” to “little or nothing” as president -- up from 56 percent who said so after his first 100 days, and sharply contradicting the president’s own claims to be highly productive.

Again two-thirds (66 percent) say Trump lacks the personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president, and essentially as many (65 percent) say he’s not honest and trustworthy.

Scores also are negative (if somewhat less broadly so) on some of his campaign hallmarks: Sixty-two percent of Americans say he doesn’t understand their problems, 58 percent reject the idea that he’s “good at making political deals” and 55 percent say he has not brought needed change to Washington. (The latter includes his best positive score in this series; 42 percent say he has brought needed change.)

Shortfall

Even with muted expectations when he took office, moreover, Trump’s falling short. At the time of his inauguration, for example, 61 percent expected him to do an excellent or good job handling the economy. Today just 44 percent say he’s doing so, a 17-point dropoff.

Similarly, 44 percent expected Trump to do well improving the health care system, while now just 26 percent say he’s delivering on this issue. He’s 13 points below expectations on dealing with terrorism -- 56 percent expected good work, 43 percent say he’s delivering it. And while just 40 percent expected Trump to do a good job handling race relations, again many fewer, 28 percent, say he’s actually doing so.

As noted in previous analyses from this survey in the last few days, Americans by 56-34 percent give a negative rating to Trump’s efforts to improve the federal tax system. Further, only three in 10 think the full extent of wrongdoing in Trump’s presidential campaign has been disclosed, just 37 percent think he’s cooperating with investigators -- and, in a sharply partisan result, 49 percent think it’s likely that the president himself committed a crime in connection with possible Russian attempts to influence the election.

Declines from expectations of Trump last January to his performance ratings now are broadly based, but steepest in a few groups. In the biggest shortfall, 66 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds expected him to do an excellent or good job handling the economy; just 34 percent say that’s now occurring. He’s also underperforming economic expectations by 25 points among independents, 23 points among suburbanites and 16 points among college-educated white women.

Trump’s troubles extend further. Fifty-five percent of Americans think he’s biased against women, including 59 percent of women; and 50 percent think he’s biased against blacks -- including an overwhelming 73 percent of blacks themselves. His approval rating among blacks is just 11 percent; among women, 34 percent. But he’s underwater among whites (46 percent approval) and men (40 percent) as well. The gender gap indeed is its smallest of his presidency.

On another policy matter, moreover, 59 percent think he’s trying to make the current federal health care law fail -- and 85 percent of them oppose his doing that.

Within his party, Trump has company from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has a mere 25 percent approval rating, with 51 percent disapproval (another quarter have no opinion). Regardless, Republicans and GOP-leaning independents don’t see it as a time to band together; 71 percent of them say Republican leaders should speak out when they disagree with Trump, up from 62 percent during the primary campaign

Groups/change

The president’s difficulties also are reflected in comparison with the election. Most strikingly, he won 81 percent of conservative voters a year ago -- but has just 63 percent approval from conservatives now, a career low. Trump won 61 percent support from working-class white women, versus approval from just 46 percent in this group now. His approval rating lags his 2016 vote share among political independents by 13 points, among men by 12 points and among whites by 11 points.

Trump’s 13-point decline on strong leadership since April also is particularly noticeable among a few groups: college graduates, down 20 points to 31 percent; moderates, down 18 points to 33 percent; and those with $100,000-plus incomes, down 17 points to 37 percent.

Those groups, among others, also have soured on Trump’s temperament. Among all adults, 31 percent see him as having the personality and temperament needed to be an effective president, down 7 points in the last six months. Again that’s fallen most steeply among college graduates and $100,000-plus earners.

History

By historical standards, Trump’s approval rating at nine months isn’t just weak, but glaringly so. He’s seen more negatively than positively by a 22-point margin, 59 vs. 37 percent. Next closest at about this point was President Gerald Ford, -3 points. All others in polls dating to President Harry Truman were in positive territory; Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, for example, had a 17-point net positive rating a year after he first was elected, with 57 percent approving

Approval ratings can be situational; President George W. Bush stood at a lofty 92 percent approval at this point in 2001, as the nation rallied behind him after the 9/11 attacks. That said, the average job approval rating for the previous 12 presidents at about nine months is 64 percent, and the median is 61 percent. Trump lags those benchmarks by 27 and 24 points, respectively.

Methodology

This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone Oct. 29-Nov. 1, 2017, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 1,005 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 31-23-38 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents.

The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Abt Associates of Cambridge, Massachusetts. See details on the survey’s methodology here.

South Korea and Japan 'considering obtaining nuclear weapons' in face of threat from Kim Jong-un - Independent

South Korea and Japan 'considering obtaining nuclear weapons' in face of threat from Kim Jong-un

'If they continue to have nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons must spread in the rest of Asia', Henry Kissinger warns

Samuel Osborne Sunday 29 October 2017

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspects his country's nuclear weapons programme Reuters

South Korea and Japan are considering whether they should build their own nuclear arsenals to counter the threat from North Korea, Henry Kissinger has said.

The former US national security adviser said he had little doubt nuclear weapons would spread across Asia as a result of the North's missile and nuclear programmes.

US Defence Secretary James Mattis has warned the threat of a nuclear missile attack by North Korea is accelerating, and said Donald Trump's administration would never accept a nuclear North Korea.

But Mr Kissinger, a Cold War nuclear strategist, told the New York Times: "If they [North Korea] continue to have nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons must spread in the rest of Asia."

North Korean official Ri Yong Pil tells CNN the possibility of a nuclear threat from North Korea should be taken 'literally'

He added: “It cannot be that North Korea is the only Korean country in the world that has nuclear weapons, without the South Koreans trying to match it. Nor can it be that Japan will sit there.

Mattis warns of North Korean nuclear 'catastrophe'

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British security minister says North Korea was behind WannaCry hack

US moves aircraft carrier strike group to the western Pacific

Nuclear test threat should be taken 'literally'- North Korea

North Korea could be mass producing biological weapons, report warns

“So therefore we’re talking about nuclear proliferation.”

The South and Japan fear Donald Trump's administration might hesitate to defend its allies if doing so might provoke a nuclear attack on the United States, the paper reported.

In South Korea, around 60 per cent of the population is in favour of building nuclear weapons.

Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who won a two-thirds majority in parliament, hopes to overturn Japan's post-war constitution in order to build up military forces against the potential threat from the North.

While public support for nuclear arms in Japan is low, that could change if both North and South Korea had arsenals.

Kim Jong-un inspects weapon North Korea says is powerful hydrogen bomb

General Mattis sought to reassure US allies in the region by saying North Korea is outmatched by the firepower and cohesiveness of the decades-old US-South Korean alliance.

"North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbours and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs," he said, adding that US-South Korean military and diplomatic collaboration thus has taken on "a new urgency."

He said diplomacy remains the preferred way to deal with the North, but added: "Make no mistake — any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated, and any use of nuclear weapons by the North will be met with a massive military response that is effective and overwhelming."

Why Was The Universe Dark For So Long? - Forbes ( Whoa Science blog )

Science #WhoaScience

NOV 4, 2017 @ 10:00 AM 9,046 The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets

Ask Ethan: Why Was The Universe Dark For So Long?

Starts With A Bang The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Ethan Siegel Ethan Siegel , Contributor

C. Faucher-Giguère, A. Lidz, and L. Hernquist, Science 319, 5859 (47)

The expanding Universe, full of galaxies and the complex structure we observe today, arose from a smaller, hotter, denser, more uniform state. Once neutral atoms form, however, it takes roughly 550 million years for the 'dark ages' to end.

At the moment of the Big Bang, the Universe was full of matter and radiation, but there were no stars. As it expanded and cooled, you formed protons and neutrons in the first fraction of a second, atomic nuclei in the first 3-4 minutes, and neutral atoms after about 380,000 years. After another 50-100 million years, you form the very first stars. But the Universe remains dark, and observers within it are unable to see that starlight, until 550 million years after the Big Bang. Why so long? Iustin Pop wants to know:

One thing I wonder though is why did the dark ages last hundreds of millions of years? I would have expected an order of magnitude smaller, or more.

Forming stars and galaxies is a huge step in the creation of light, but it isn't enough to end the "dark ages" on its own. Here's the story.

RHIC collaboration, Brookhaven

The early Universe was full of matter and radiation, and was so hot and dense that it prevented protons and neutrons from stably forming for the first fraction-of-a-second. Once they do, however, and the antimatter annihilates away, we wind up with a sea of matter and radiation particles, zipping around close to the speed of light.

Try and imagine the Universe as it was when it was only a few minutes old: before the formation of neutral atoms. Space is full of protons, light nuclei, electrons, neutrinos, and radiation. Three important things happen at this early stage:

The Universe is very uniform in terms of how much matter there is in any location, with the densest regions only a few parts in 100,000 more dense than the least dense regions.

Gravitation works hard to pull matter in, with overdense regions exerting an extra, attractive force to make that happen.

And radiation, mostly in the form of photons, pushes outwards, resisting the gravitating effects of the matter.

As long as we have radiation that's energetic enough, it prevents neutral atoms from stably forming. It's only when the expansion of the Universe cools the radiation enough that neutral atoms won't immediately get reionized.

Amanda Yoho

In the hot, early Universe, prior to the formation of neutral atoms, photons scatter off of electrons (and to a lesser extent, protons) at a very high rate, transferring momentum when they do. After neutral atoms form, the photons simply travel in a straight line.

After this occurs, 380,000 years into the history of the Universe, that radiation (mostly photons) simply free-streams in whatever direction it was traveling last, through the now-neutral matter. 13.8 billion years later, we can view this leftover glow from the Big Bang: the Cosmic Microwave Background. It's in the "microwave" part of the spectrum today because of the stretching-of-wavelengths due to the Universe's expansion. But more importantly, there's a pattern of fluctuations in there of hot-and-cold spots, corresponding to overdense and underdense regions of the Universe.

E. Siegel / Beyond The Galaxy

The overdense, average density, and underdense regions that existed when the Universe was just 380,000 years old now correspond to cold, average, and hot spots in the CMB.

Once you form neutral atoms, it becomes much easier for gravitational collapse to ensue, since photons interact very easily with free electrons, but much less so with neutral atoms. As the photons cool to lower and lower energies, the matter becomes more important to the Universe, and so gravitational growth begins to occur. It takes roughly 50-100 million years for gravity to pull enough matter together, and for the gas to cool enough to allow collapse, so that the very first stars form. When they do, nuclear fusion ignites, and the first heavy elements in the Universe come into existence.

Chris Blake and Sam Moorfield

The large-scale structure of the Universe changes over time, as tiny imperfections grow to form the first stars and galaxies, then merge together to form the large, modern galaxies we see today. Looking to great distances reveals a younger Universe, similar to how our local region was in the past.

But even with those stars, we're still in the dark ages. The culprit? All those neutral atoms spread throughout the Universe. There are some 1080 of them, and while the low-energy photons left over from the Big Bang are transparent to this normal matter, the higher-energy starlight is opaque. This is the same reason why you can't see the stars in the galactic center in visible light, but at longer (infrared, for example) wavelengths, you can see right through the neutral gas and dust.

ESO/ATLASGAL consortium/NASA/GLIMPSE consortium/VVV Survey/ESA/Planck/D. Minniti/S. Guisard Acknowledgement: Ignacio Toledo, Martin Kornmesser

This four-panel view shows the Milky Way's central region in four different wavelengths of light, with the longer (submillimeter) wavelengths at top, going through the far-and-near infrared (2nd and 3rd) and ending in a visible-light view of the Milky Way. Note that the dust lanes and foreground stars obscure the center in visible light.

In order for the Universe to become transparent to starlight, these neutral atoms need to become ionized. They were ionized once a long time ago: before the Universe was 380,000 years old, so we call the process of ionizing them one more time reionization. It's only when you've formed enough new stars, and emitted enough high-energy, ultraviolet photons, that you can complete this process of reionization and bring the dark ages to an end. While the very first stars may exist after just 50-100 million years after the Big Bang, our detailed observations have shown us that reionization doesn't complete until the Universe is around 550 million years old.

S. G. Djorgovski et al., Caltech Digital Media Center

Schematic diagram of the Universe's history, highlighting reionization, which occurs in earnest only after the formation of the first stars and galaxies. Before stars or galaxies formed, the Universe was full of light-blocking, neutral atoms. While most of the Universe doesn't become reionized until 550 million years afterwards, a few fortunate regions are mostly reionized at earlier times.

How is it, then, that the earliest galaxies we see are from when the Universe was only 400 million years old? And how is it the case that the James Webb Space Telescope will see even farther back than that? There are two factors that come into play:

1.) Reionization is non-uniform. The Universe is full of clumps, imperfections, and inhomogeneities. This is great, as it allows us to form stars, galaxies, planets, and also human beings. But it also means that some regions of space, and some directions on the sky, experience total reionization before others. The farthest known galaxy we've ever seen, GN-z11, is a bright and spectacular galaxy for as young as it is, but it also happens to be located in a direction where the Universe is mostly already completely reionized. It's mere serendipity that this occurred 150 million years before the "average" reionization time.

NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

Only because this distant galaxy, GN-z11, is located in a region where the intergalactic medium is mostly reionized, can Hubble reveal it to us at the present time. James Webb will go much farther.

2.) Longer wavelengths are transparent to these neutral atoms. While the Universe is dark at these early times as far as visible and ultraviolet light goes, the longer wavelengths are transparent to those neutral atoms. For example, the "Pillars of Creation" are famously opaque to visible light, but if we view them in infrared light, we can easily see the stars inside.

NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team

The visible light (L) and infrared (R) wavelength views of the same object: the Pillars of Creation. Note how much more transparent the gas-and-dust is to infrared radiation, and how that affects the background and interior stars that we can detect.

The James Webb Space Telescope will not only be a primarily infrared observatory, but will be designed to view light that was infrared when it was emitted from these early stars. By extending out to wavelength of 30 microns, well into the mid-infrared, it will be able to view objects during the dark ages themselves.

NASA / JWST and HST teams

As we're exploring more and more of the Universe, we're becoming sensitive to not only less faint objects, but objects that are 'blocked' by the neutral atoms intervening. But with infrared observatories, we can see them, after all.

The Universe was dark for so long because the atoms within it were neutral for so long. Even a 98% reionized Universe is still opaque to visible light, and it takes roughly 500 million years of starlight to completely ionize all the atoms and give us a Universe that's truly transparent. When the dark ages end, we can see everything in all wavelengths of light, but prior to that, we need to either get lucky or look in longer, less-well-absorbed wavelengths.

Letting there be light, by forming stars and galaxies, isn't enough to end the dark ages in the Universe. Creating light is only half the story; creating an environment where it can propagate all the way to your eyes is just as important. For that, we need lots of ultraviolet light, and that requires time. Yet by looking in just the right way, we can peer into the darkness, and see what we've never observed before. In less than two years, that story will begin.