[i_think_so]

It might also be nice if cosmologists stopped claiming their Big Bang "Theory" wasn't more accurately termed a mere Hypothesis. IIRC, 12 out of 13 predictions failing and necessitating "model" "tweaks" is not a fantastic track record for a Theory, which are supposed to robustly survive investigation.

[atoav]

The model failing is a question of how accurately you want it to model the world.

Many laypersons have absolutely no conception of how accurate those "failing" models were.

A good example is Newtonian physics. Strictly speaking it is a failing model, after all, under certain conditions and if you look very closely ot falls apart. Yet, every bridge you ever walked on and the most precise mechanical watches ever made were all only calculated using newtonian physics. It is still accurate enough for most tasks on earth.

A model can still be useful despite its limitations, you just need to know those. People who are like "Ha! It is not accurate!" often have their own mental models of the world which are magnitudes worse, miss key bits or get other parts completely wrong (despite clear evidence to the opposite). As if a morbidly obese person for whom even walking presents a challenge made fun of an Olympic silver medalist for only getting second place. "Ha! You didn't get it 100% right so now my fringe theory that fails to even explain the most basic observations must be seen as equally valid!"

So if you say it fails, consider how many digits after the comma it was accurate before it failed and how many digits your own theory would manage.

[dingdongditchme]

This is what has always made it hard for me to go beyond the Newtonian physics. The only thing I know and use daily that relies on relativity is GPS and having looked into the equations on how it accounts for this it seemed to me that I could not discount that the equations account for some arbitrary consistent (or random) error, not relativity specifically. All experiments I have run never needed precision beyond Newtonian physics, but I am not at the end of my career yet so maybe relativity will become relevant some day. I will be looking forward to it if that is the case...

[kergonath]

You could well live your whole life without needing anything more than Newtonian Physics. For most of us, relativity is a fun thought experiment. If you want to grapple with it, special relativity is the answer to "how can the speed of light be constant regardless of the speed of whoever is measuring it?" In his "vulgarisation" books, Einstein explains it with nothing more sophisticated than trains and stopwatches.

General relativity is more complex and quickly goes in complicated mathematical weeds but is just as profound from a philosophical point of view, which is that things do not merely affect other things around them, but instead change space-time itself. You can see with a couple of clicks observations of phenomena predicted by it, like black holes and gravitational lenses. It’s interesting to think about even if you are not directly affected.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> You could well live your whole life without needing anything more than Newtonian Physics.

Or Aristotelian.

[eesmith]

Once upon a time most households had a small particle accelerator, used daily. While the the electrons in the cathode ray tube (CRT) traveled at relativistic speeds (something like 0.1-0.3 c, from what I can tell), people did not need need to know about special relativity to change the channel on their TV.

That said, those effects would have been small, and likely handled in practice as "some arbitrary consistent (or random) error."

[pfdietz]

Also, models are most interesting on the boundaries where they fail.

Take for example Lord Kelvin's model of thermal conduction in a solid Earth. He used it to incorrectly predict the age of the Earth, but if he had taken that failure to heart he could have used it to predict mantle convection and plate tectonics.

[kergonath]

See the relativity of wrong by Asimov for a simple development of this theme.

[dudisubekti]

We can literally observe cosmic microwave background and it fits our prediction that the universe was denser and hotter. It is a scientific theory.

You might be confusing the established big bang with the more speculative cosmic inflation model. They're very closely related.

[i_think_so]

> We can literally observe cosmic microwave background and it fits our prediction that the universe was denser and hotter.

I can't observe that, because I don't have the gear. (Nor the time, budget, inclination nor training, for that matter. :-) But I am happy to admit the possibility that some of those observations, as reported in the literature, are correct.

However, unlike a depressingly large percentage of my former scientific colleagues, I also appreciate just how much of what gets reported in the literature, from the conclusions all the way back to the raw data, is anything from sloppily wrong to flat out lies. Witness the decades-long fiasco in genetics that is only this past month being corrected:

Before: https://www.nature.com/articles/437047a

After: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08816

TLDR: The original work by the CSAC reported only a fraction of the actually relevant data and hid the remainder where nobody was going to look. This was not the kind of Reproducibility Crisis mess, where an undergrad isn't paying attention when he grabs the electrophoresis gel off the shelf and then writes down the wrong brand name in his lab book. This was fraud. They intentionally misrepresented the data and hence the conclusions by an order of magnitude, which allowed them to delude the whole world for decades that "humans are 98.8% the same as chimps!"

Many people had their entire worldview swayed by this pronouncement, myself included. I don't like being lied to.

So yeah, you'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical when it comes to scientific observations and reportage that I'm a few $million shy for confirming myself. And I'll continue to think poorly of those who have been making lucrative careers out of doing "well-established" physics that "everybody" "accepts", only to have to quietly admit under scrutiny that their predictions didn't work out quite as nicely as the popular press has told us.

Furthermore,

> It is a scientific theory.

It is a scientific hypothesis. It has not been subjected to repeated experimental trials or observations and found to be correct.

A hypothesis does not become "well-established" simply because every college professor whose salary depends upon supporting the grant authority's narrative repeats it.

I am fully aware that some people (present company excluded; I'm not placing any blame here) have watered down the definition of these terms. They are wrong. I do not consent to and will not be bullied into accepting changes to my language. Especially nothing as important as the language of science.

> You might be confusing the established big bang with the more speculative cosmic inflation model. They're very closely related.

Perhaps. I was never too terribly interested in things "smaller than an electron"[1] or larger than a whale.

Lerner's arguments[2], particularly on relative elemental abundances, are persuasive to me. That may be because during my formative years I was a bit preoccupied with H vs D, because deuterated compounds for the NMR were too expensive for me to just play around with as I liked, so I had to tinker with spectroscopy/spectrophotometry instead. In any case, he's right. You can't have a cosmological constant be one value to account for the D and another value to account for the He3.

As for the CMB, he addresses that as well, though once again I haven't done the work to confirm either side myself.

Lerner has a whole basket full of other arguments as well, but I'm not a fan of lazy people posting Youtube links to hour long videos and saying "watch this!", so I shan't be a hypocrite. I believe that pdf should give a good flavor of it. It's been a while since I read it and I only skimmed it now, but I believe it a good representative sample of his other work.

[1] PS: Yes, I know, I know. Stop being pedantic. This site is a hobby and I'm not about to cheat and get a chatbot to write me a 12 page essay every time I want to save a few words. I get to abuse quotation marks when I'm feeling lazy.

[2] See sections II and IV in particular: https://web.archive.org/web/20260429053749/https://www.resea...

[dudisubekti]

I think you have too high an expectation of the scientific community.

People work there, and it will have people's dramas and problems, like everywhere else: fraud, crime, jealousy, simple mistakes, etc.

Despite their imperfections, the reason people with power trust their consensus more is because they are a lot more useful than other groups of people.

If you reject this statement, you can start by joining the Amish, since virtually all modern technology is built on top of the scientific community's consensus and work.

[i_think_so]

> I think you have too high an expectation of the scientific community.

Indeed, I did. I joined expecting it to be above mere politics. I paid for my folly.

> People work there, and it will have people's dramas and problems, like everywhere else: fraud, crime, jealousy, simple mistakes, etc.

Yes, but it's far worse in the scientific communities. In the "real world" the average person is way better at doing their average job than the average scientist publishing their work.

Imagine even a civilizationally incompetent modern society today (without naming any names). Now imagine what it would be like if >50% of the time you got into a taxi something far worse than the expected result occurred. You got: taken to the wrong destination; or cheated by the driver; or woke up in a bathtub missing your kidneys; etc. Extend that behavior to even a tiny fraction of the whole. That society would have collapsed already.

Compare that to any journal you please and let's see what percentage of their published works can be verified. Even for the "better" fields their rates are shockingly bad. Some are below 50%.

I don't know about you, but my standards for the behavior of scientists are considerably higher than that for taxi drivers.

> Despite their imperfections, the reason people with power trust their consensus more is because they are a lot more useful than other groups of people.

Hard disagree. The reason people with power "trust" scientific consensus is because they manufacture that consensus by controlling the funding. This is fact. It's not pleasant, and is far from uncontroversial. But it is what it is.

The people with power today who are telling you that <topic X> is "settled science" are the spiritual (and in some cases genetic!) descendants of the people who were telling Columbus that he was going to sail off the edge of the Earth and locking up Galileo. Eppur si muove!

If you want to naively believe that calling one's self a big-s Scientist makes one, if not immune then perhaps we could say resistant, to that fraud, crime, corruption, etc. then I suppose you're entitled to that opinion. I look at the data on their output and my vote is to trash the lot of them and start over. They've fallen that far from grace.

I'm inclined to trust the ancient Greeks, sure. Modern scientists, not so much.

> If you reject this statement, you can start by joining the Amish, since virtually all modern technology is built on top of the scientific community's consensus and work.

Unfortunately the Amish are automatically suspicious of the academically tainted such as myself. Otherwise I'd love to chill with them. Their lives are blissfully stress-free compared to ours.

[suuuuuuuu]

Your reference here is a 33 year old paper whose quoted observations and theoretical claims are totally out of date. The measured light element abundances are now consistent (and have been for decades).

The black body distribution of the CMB is the (confirmed, of course) prediction of the Big Bang. The structure, age, etc. all depend on the cosmological model, and the claims that no such model can explain observations is ridiculous, given the counterexample of the \Lambda CDM model, the cornerstone of the field for decades now, that explains them all.

It's almost impressive how obstinately you've convinced yourself of something so blatantly wrong and out of date, using only a reference predating the entire modern era of cosmology that you even admitted to not having read "for a while." A far, far cry from engaging seriously in a topic.

Like with the frontier LLMs, seeing commentary on this site on topics that I'm an expert in makes me seriously doubt whether I should lend any credence at all to what's said about those that I'm not.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> They intentionally misrepresented the data and hence the conclusions by an order of magnitude, which allowed them to delude the whole world for decades that "humans are 98.8% the same as chimps!"

Your second link doesn't work, but more broadly you and I both know that there are lots and lots of different ways to measure sequence similarity.

[eesmith]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

> The Big Bang is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. .. A wide range of empirical evidence strongly favors the Big Bang event, which is now widely accepted. ...

> The Big Bang models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundances of the light elements, the cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure, and Hubble's law.

> Precise modern models of the Big Bang appeal to various exotic physical phenomena that have not been observed in terrestrial laboratory experiments or incorporated into the Standard Model of particle physics. Of these features, dark matter is currently the subject of most active laboratory investigations. ... Viable, quantitative explanations for such phenomena are still being sought. These are unsolved problems in physics.

[fc417fc802]

In reality it's just that the output of the procedural generation routines doesn't quite match that of the primary simulation loop. A classic worldbuilding inconsistency.

[eesmith]

Even if your observation were 100% correct, it's also 100% irrelevant to the point.

We still refer to Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism as a theory even though we know quantum electrodynamics is a more precise match to the primary simulation loop.

I suppose a few might have decided to rename it Maxwell's hypothesis of electromagnetism, but I would consider them crackpots or dilettantes with little understanding of the meaning underlying those terms.

[i_think_so]

+1

I got your joke and I appreciate the effort you put in to make it. :-)

[mr_mitm]

What are the 13 predictions? Can you list them or provide a link to that list?

[i_think_so]

Whew. This is work! :-)

As I said in my effortpost above, the pdf I linked is a sample. There's more in his book, which I can't post here. And the videos he has put out are long, slow and some might find tedious, so I didn't bother to link them. (I didn't see your response while I was writing. Now I feel bad so I'm going to have to take a look and see what I can find that will post well.)

A simple search for "big bang predictions" will find plenty of even mainstream press discussing them, albeit in a positive light, usually along the lines of "oh look, some scientists are talking about how they discovered something really interesting!" when what they really ought to be saying is "some scientists discovered that their hypotheses were wrong, their models failed to predict observable reality, and they were forced to make corrections that they shouldn't have to, if their hypotheses were actually a correct theory."

As in so many different kinds of scientific endeavors, if your "theory" is based on a "model" and you have to keep correcting your "constants", they aren't constants, they are variables. And you don't have a theory.

[i_think_so]

I didn't upload this and I haven't verified it. But it might be useful to reference.

https://archive.org/download/the-big-bang-never-happened

And this is briefer but more recent.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260321014458/https://www.lppfu...

I trust anyone sufficiently interested can manage to google further without my help.