Joking aside I remain a bit skeptical of the current Standard Cosmology, and very concerned that cosmologists & astrophysicists have overstated the case for DE/DM/Inflation. If any of these mechanisms don’t pan out you can bet that opponents of reason—who use every appearance of revision to discount the validity of science—will have this as further fodder. So I would just like to see modern cosmology all presented a tiny bit more tentatively, as science often should be.

From my perspective the problem with the whole situation is that we haven’t really verified General Relativity on the galactic and intergalactic scales, which make DM/DE/Inflation seem like ad hoc corrections to keep Big Bang + GR consistent with observation. I’m not yet so convinced the assumption that most matter and energy in the universe is exotic and the behavior of spacetime curvature is uniform across scales is any more reasonable than assuming most of the matter and energy is the same while the behavior of spacetime changes with scale. (Though I suppose the last bit is essentially all dark energy says anyway.) When discussing it with experts I hear arguments about the accuracy of Big Bang nucleosynthesis predictions and the CMB fit—I’ll be much more convinced if one of the many searches for dark matter succeeds! (And how many DM searches must fail before it starts to look like aether?)

However, I’m no expert, so I concede that the opinions of those with a greater grasp of the relevant concepts should be valued far more than those (like me) who’s understanding is lacking.

On the other hand, occasionally in discussions with expert proponents of Standard Cosmology they’ll concede that the alternatives are not yet completely ruled out. It seems we’ve succeeded in explaining everything within arms length, and without a bigger ruler we’re stuck with a degree of mere speculation over which rules extend elsewhere and which ones will need revising. (Or maybe the small scale will save us—perhaps a mature theory of quantum gravity would make sense of it all!)

Some young Ph. D. out there will start to look very closely at the factual support for the Big Bang theory and see the holes. You say the decision between steady-state and big-bang models “was finally resolved in the 1960s with the discovery of the cosmic background radiation.” Was it resolved, or was it rationalized into the established big-bang theory? Cosmic background radiatin (CBR) is similar to, in fact impossible to distinguish from, black-body radiation (BBR). BBR naturally accumulate after billions of years of stellar and galactic evolution. CMR data is in fact so smooth that the data is very close to the noise in the data collection system.

If Fred Hoyle had been more creative and collaborative, he would have saved the infinite universe model, but he had to think up an unsupported fiction about matter being spontaneously created in space. Now we know that matter is recycled through black holes at the center of every mature galaxy. The galaxy sweeps in material from intergalactic space, compresses some of it into stars, and then over billions of years, spirals that matter into the black hole. The black hole spins up by conservation of angular momentum, so that, when the disk is thin enough, the instabilities introduced by new matter falling in result in the production of massive jets of extremely compressed material. That is the recycling process of mass and energy. That material is not new, but it is seen as highly red shifted and consequently misinterpreted as more distant than the galaxy, and mislabeled in various categories such as quasars. The energy-mass output is also misinterpreted because, rather than existing at some great red-shift distance, it is actually at approximately the same distance as its parent galaxy. See the heroic work of Halton Arp in his papers and conveniently in his books, including “Seeing Red,” in which he answers every issue statistically and observationally about the relationships between galaxies, black holes, galactic jets, Seyfert galaxies, BL Lac objects, quasars, and other ejecta.

The whole big-bang theory got started by a simple misinterpretation of the red shift seen by Hubble. Hubble never expressed the notion that the red shift was caused by the recession of galaxies. He had some other notions. See Edwin Hubble’s paper “Cepheids in Spiral Nebulae”.

Consider the possibility that the massive, over-kludged big-bang theory is rooted in the misinterpretation of the “cosmological redshift.” From the redshift, the simple explanation was cosmic expansion. But the universe is too smooth, so Guth gave us the physically unsupportable notions of cosmic inflation. But the redshift got larger, the farther back in time we look, so dark energy had to be invented. But wait. Billions of stars and galaxies are being pulled by gravitational fields that cannot be accounted for by known regions of baryons, so dark matter had to be hypothesized.

It is impossible to test these aspects of the big-bang theory. The kludge factors that support cosmic expansion can be dispensed with, if an alternative explanation for the red shift is accepted. The physics community isn’t sure what that alternative explanation is, so they cling to the fiction of cosmological recession. But there are perfectly good alternatives for photon energy loss: 1) traversing continuous gravitational fields, 2) traversing electromagnetic fields, 3) The Compton effect (close encounters with hydrogen electrons), and 4) my current favorite, travel through high-energy plasma, which pervades space. There might be some other cause of stellar red shift. The point is that the whole big-bang theory depends on the current interpretation of the red shift, and ignores hard data that shows other alternatives.

Not all of our citizens are benighted about cosmology. Star Wars fans and Trekkies have grown up in a universe that is intuitively infinite in space and time. One of them will prove it to the astrophysics establishment.

See http://tiny.cc/7vxc8 at LectureMaker.com

These cosmological speculations have nowhere near the kind of concrete and empirical basis that exists work in genetics, neuroscience, etc. It would be foolhardy to look toward them for some kind of metaphysical comfort.

It may also be worth noting that many of those same people also embrace the idea of a universe that is less than 10,000 years old. For them, issues regarding cosmic inflation or dark energy aren’t even on the radar. (If they’ve even heard of the subjects to begin with, they likely consider them to be nothing more than evidence that scientists just make things up to keep themselves busy.)

Now, if we had religious sects that disagreed over whether the universe was 13 billion or 15 billion years old, or over the existence of pocket universes, then I suspect we’d see more public engagement and resistance. But as it is, once you’re already beyond ideas like millions of stars and millions of years, all further elaborations are a little too abstract to engage the tribal emotions.