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I have no idea if this is true or not. But for a moment I was just imagining a world where scientists agreed that the Big Bang never happened. How many physic

• TT-392 4y ago
  Wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. We used to think mars had civilization and canals until not too long ago (kinda funny that the drawings of those canals ended up looking a lot like the veins in a human eye). Also, the idea of radio waves going through the ether, on which a lot of science was based got disproved at some point.
  • HKH2 4y ago
    > We used to think mars had civilization and canals until not too long ago Who? I've never heard of such an idea.
    • notpachet 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals
  • aeternum 4y ago
    Indeed, nowadays everyone knows that radio waves propagate through quantum fields which pervade the entire universe including vacuums. Definitely not ether, those foolish old scientists got the name wrong :D
    • eecc 4y ago
      I don’t think anyone thinks fields exist, physically at least. They’re mathematical constructs that model certain operations but there’s no EM field or G field by itself, independently of a physical particle expressing these forces
• sbf501 4y ago
  > How would the general public's trust in science change? 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.
• sdwr 4y ago
  This probably belies my ignorance, but I'm guessing not much would change. All the research on galaxy ages and star formation would have to be reinterpreted, but I bet most of it would be salvagable, just with a different first mover. Like refactoring a codebase to replace a dependency. If the work is good, it's reasonably independent of the story being told.
  • eecc 4y ago
    Well, one of the most interesting and exiting outcomes would be renewed interest in the study of Electromagnetic interactions at cosmological level (not just signals to observe other processes). 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!
• aeternum 4y ago
  Penrose has a crazy theory where he considers what the universe looks like after the heat-death. After all the blackholes evaporate and photons are the only thing left. 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.
• jschveibinz 4y ago
  > “the general public’s trust in science” 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.