But for a moment I was just imagining a world where scientists agreed that the Big Bang never happened. How many physicists' work would be thrown in the trash? How many high school science books would have to be updated? How would the general public's trust in science change?
Would be such an interesting thing to observe.
Since photons travel at the speed of light, neither distance nor time are measurable. All that remains is the relative angular concentration of photons. If you imagine the universe as a sphere, the relative concentration of photons represents the pattern on the surface of the sphere.
However there's no longer any way to determine that sphere's size nor whether it is expanding, contracting or even the existence of time itself.
The crazy thing is how close this is to the early universe. You start with the cosmic microwave background pattern and that's basically also exactly what you end up with: a pattern/projection of photons where space and time basically become meaningless or cease to exist.
Science is /= fact or truth. Science is a process.
There should never be a “trust in science.” In fact, science only works if nobody trusts anything and every experiment is questioned and repeated. If this doesn’t happen, then that’s when the general public should be concerned.
Depending how it was taught.
When I was a kid, the T-Rex tail slid along the ground like a crocodile. Now we know dino tails were used for balance and they generally remained rigid.
Dinos didn't have feathers when I was a kid.
Pluto was a planet when I was a kid.
However, one crackpot clickbait article didn't change the three things listed above. Millions of person-hours of research did.
Who? I've never heard of such an idea.
Definitely not ether, those foolish old scientists got the name wrong :D
If the work is good, it's reasonably independent of the story being told.
One of the features of Big Bang is how it’s sufficient to explain the structure of the universe via Gravity alone, yet there’s a ton of data indicating that pervading Plasma and Electromagnetic interactions within are at play.
But since they have no place in the BB model they’re discounted as marginal phenomena.
But, if the paradigm shifted - to put it in Popper terms - a whole new box of interesting goodies would pop open!