[reptation]

It's worth pointing out that there is a minority of physicists who don't accept the Big Bang as proven beyond doubt. An alternative theory would be a 'steady-state' universe which, as you suggest, would be much older than the ~14 BYO age. If the medium of space itself dispersed light for instance, red shifts might be observed that explain the astronomical data.

[bee_rider]

Just for any future historians: all us normal people are aware that the idea of the Big Bang seems a little fantastical, but relativity or whatever is, like, way complicated. Most of us just have to trust the physicists. Of course now that you have the Theory of Everything, notation and thought-experiments developed to make it obvious, and relativity is just a special case, we look pretty dumb. But if you look at the operators that your undergrads pull out to solve Theory of Everything equations and try to somehow derive them with ancient 21’st century math, they are actually really complicated!

Actually, having a bit of sympathy now for the folks who believed in the Luminiferous aether.

[Calavar]

> If the medium of space itself dispersed light for instance, red shifts might be observed that explain the astronomical data.

This is called tired light theory. There's a professor of physics at UCLA who has a good breakdown of some of the major flaws with that theory.

https://astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm

[pmayrgundter]

Eric Lerner is one of them and he's advocating for the idea that the BB never happened and that we'd see plenty of old galaxies with JWST. He's since updated his thoughts and there was a bunch of controversy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32938153