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by jiggawatts 1212 days ago
At the risk of engaging in a thread started by a likely troll: the Big Bang hypothesis has a few inconsistencies. For example, different distance candles disagree on the Hubble constant. Now JWST is finding unusually old galaxies. Etc…

I still lean towards the Big Bang as the most likely model, but it’s not as well established as, say, germ theory.

1 comments

Granted. And those inconsistencies are not new.

I actually had an idea in undergrad (20+ years ago) to probe Hubble Constant variation using quasar reverberation mapping and very-long-baseline-interferometry. Then the professor I was working with pointed out that the baseline I needed was something like 100,000 times earth's orbital diameter.

Back then, one of the sexier ideas was that the universe might have locally different fundamental constants, and that variation could reveal some information about the higher-dimensional "space" that the universe existed inside of. I've been out of that field for a long time though, so I've no idea what the cutting edge is. I just know that the Big Bang theory is still pretty safe.

There are plenty of things wrong in the theory, but none of the evidence suggests that "expansion from a singularity" is wrong, let alone "infinite and eternal" is right.