alt Hacker News> 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...
Replies
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.
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.