They also go wrong with large scale phenomena like inflation, dark matter, and dark energy.
And I guess less formally there's also the problem of complexity: condensed matter physics exists because trying to solve the standard model for a solid directly is both incredibly infeasible (think "cost of flipping bits in the calculation far extends that of all matter in the observable universe") and fails to capture the emergent phenomena in a natural way.
If no inflation, then no Big Bang, so our Visible Universe is much older.
If our Universe is much older, then life evolved multiple times already. Red stars are shallow gravity wells, so they are primary target of an expansive civilization, because it easy to enter/exit them, so they are colonized first and their light is captured fully.
Note that the 'laws' of physics are no better than normal scientific theories, scientists just had more hubris back then.
It’s a much much bigger problem if the universe significantly older than we think it is… if we were to believe the Wikipedia article on this[0], we’d only expect stars to exist at all for about 100 trillion years, but given that the distribution of hydrogen availability is likely to follow an inverse exponential decay curve of some sort, we’d probably see much lower amounts of hydrogen much earlier than that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_univers...
(Not a native speaker).
Most galaxies in our galaxy cluster are moving away from us because of coincidence: Shappley attractor makes accretion disk by attracting mater from Dipole Repeller void[0], so our local group of galaxies is stretched along the way. At scale of our local galaxy cluster, Doppler Shift is responsible for majority of Red Shift.
At cosmic scale, Red Shift cannot be explained by Doppler Shift alone. If we take into account gravitational waves, then at least part of Red Shift can be explained by gravitational noise: gravitational waves are slowing down light a bit, so photon loses tiny bit of energy with every such interaction, which causes major part of Red Shift at cosmic scale.
> where fresh hydrogen for stars comes from in an ancient universe,
This is though question which is hard to answer. If elementary particles are bubbles, then they are popping up because something is stretching our Universe, i.e. our Universe is inflating ... oh, fck.
> where the cosmic background radiation comes from
[If inflation theory is false, no Big Bang, and visible Universe is much older, then] Cosmic microwave background is just light from distant galaxies with large Red Shift z=1000 (light was stretched about 1000 times from galaxies in range of about 4 trillion light years).
> why the distant universe appears 'younger'...
James Webb infra-red telescope is proving that this assumption is false right now. Read the news.
It is possible and I would judge even likely that some other value is conserved; that conservation of energy can be broken doesn't mean all chaos is unleashed and the Patent Office should revoke their ban on perpetual motion machines. When it is finally worked out, we may even pick up our "energy" label and move it to this new quantity. Depends on a lot of details we don't currently know. But what we today call energy is not necessarily conserved at large scales.
Saying that the universe can't do X because it violates conservation of energy is a circular argument; the precise definition of "conservation of energy" used by physics today is derived from our belief that the universe can't do X, but we also know our beliefs are incomplete. Very good approximations. Don't quit your day job to build a perpetual motion machine. But we are not in a position yet to even claim that our description of the universe is complete and we know the exact thing being conserved.
Energy is in general only conserved locally. More precisely, the covariant derivative of the stress-energy tensor `\nabla_{\mu}T^{\mu \nu}` is zero, but this can only be put into integral form in a few special cases.