What I'd love to see is a book on how vigorously incorrect but entrenched ideas were defended by the scientific establishment even despite strong evidence to the contrary. Mainstream science talks about geocentrism but implies that it was a different, darker time and such scientific stubbornness can't happen today. I suspect that a lot of the big ideas today that our understanding of the universe rests on are simply wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but completely and totally wrong.
Gravitational waves. The original detector completely failed to detect them. Then when a bigger one was built for billions of dollars, they detected gravitational waves right away! Curious that they had a sevret system for injecting a signal into the detector that even the scientists operating it didn't know whether the signal was real or fake, and even those working at the detector thought it was fake. And it's suspicious how the detected signal exactly matched theory! We learned nothing new from this novel form of gravitational wave astronomy that we spent billions of dollars on? Oh and did I mention they got a Nobel Prize for gravitational wave detection as soon as the announcement was made? In the past they've held off giving nobel prizes sometimes for 50 years because they had to be sure the discovery is properly confirmed.
Inflation. It's just a fudge factor to make the math for big bang work out. They postulate an inflaton field (That's what they called it. I kid you not.) that appears out of nowhere, makes the universe expand just the right amount, and then decays into nothingness.
Dark matter. If the galactic rotation curves are so far off from what we expect them to be, how in the hell can we expect models of the early universe to have any basis in reality? We either don't understand gravity over large distances or there is indeed a lot of dark matter around. Either way, the early universe looks very different than what we are being led to believe, if there is in fact such a thing as 'early universe'.
I could go on...
I suspect that a lot of the big ideas today that our understanding of the universe rests on are simply wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but completely and totally wrong.
Yep. Evidence our mainstream understanding is completely wrong is overwhelming. If its "theoretical astronomy" or "theoretical physics" it's almost certainly bullshit. It's all thought experiments with credentialed hand waving.
What they do when they find evidence which invalidates the mainstream model (which is in abundance) is invent magic. You name some. Real scientists would step back and figure out why magic is required for their theory. But deep down they also know providing real science is a career ender. So they have a choice. Play the game, create pseudo-science, scientism, and magic, and make a living bolstering mainstream, or do real science and end their career.
The reason we have such fundamental problems with astronomy is that it's not a scientific field. Science is the process of obtaining knowledge through the scientific method. The scientific method relies on being able to perform a controlled experiment. Since astronomy is purely observational, no controlled experiment is possible. Astronomy is closer to the field of history rather than sciences like physics and chemistry. Not having a way to distinguish a bad hypothesis from a good one makes it difficult to displace bad explanations.
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