I think there is a lot of mental clutter that can be cleaned up, to better relate our concept of reality to its basic functioning.
To begin with, as these mobile organisms, necessitating a sequential process of perception and having developed a narrative based civilization, we experience time as the point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events form and dissolve.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it is the present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
With a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past. Which suggests consciousness functions like an energy.
While we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, the central nervous system frames, sorts and organizes the forms/information precipitating out. Suggesting the mind is more lens and filter of this light within, than its source.
This has various implications, such as the issue of determinism, since the process of determination can only occur as the present, but to change direction slightly;
Our intellectual processing of information does naturally tend to focus more on the patterns, than the processes generating them, so math tends to be viewed as fundamental, rather than reductionist. Map versus territory issues.
Epicycles, as description of our view of the cosmos, were brilliant math, for their day, but the crystalline spheres postulated from them were lousy physics, as explanation.
Theoretical physics is still having the same problems, in assuming the description gives rise to explanation. It from bit.
Both energy and consciousness pose the same problem for science, as they can only be defined in terms of the forms they express, rather then the dynamic they manifest.
Consider the 3 dimensional view of space is really just the xyz coordinate system, which is a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude.
If all physical properties are removed from space, it has the non-physical qualities of infinity and equilibrium. Infinity as there is nothing to bound it and equilibrium is implicit in Relativity, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The umoving void of absolute zero. Making space the absolute and the infinite.
What fills space is this energy and the forms it manifests. Energy is dynamic, constantly pushing on and outward. While form creates structure and definition, the effect is also to condense. Positive and negatives cancel and balance. So the overall effect of form is to contract, as it loses/radiates energy. The wave flatlining. Thus the primary feature of the universe are galaxies, which amount to cosmic convection cycles, of energy radiating out, as form coalesces in.
Now to really question the narrative;
The Big Bang Theory can't be falsified, since everytime observation doesn't match prediction, some enormous force of nature or other type of fudge is inserted and all is well. Prior to Inflation, Dark Matter and Energy, the original patch was when they realized that as redshift increases proportional to distance in all directions, which creates the effect that we appear to be at the center of the universe. So it was changed from an expansion in space, to an expansion of space, because Spacetime!
Which totally ignores the central premise of Relativity, that the speed of light is constant in all frames. If the light is redshifted, obviously intergalactic light is not constant to intergalactic space. More lightyears, not expanded lightyears.
Since the premise of this expansion is still effectively being denominated in lightyears, expanding relative to the speed of light, it still asumes the speed of light as the cosmic "ruler."
There is a lot of history in this and I've argued the point for decades and no one bothers to refute the logic, just dismiss it, but to continue the larger argument;
It has been shown that multispectrum light "packets" do redshift over distance, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster, but this would mean we are sampling a wave front, not individual photons traveling billions of years.
That gets back to the observation that energy and its forms are not synonymous. That photons are the smallest quantity of energy that material observation mechanisms can absorb, not indivisible point particles, condensing them out of the field.
So that the fact overall space measures as flat, with total apparent expansion balanced by total gravitational contraction, then is due to these being two sides of the same cycle, not coincidences of our particular universe.
The reason for Dark Energy is to explain why the rate of redshift changes over time. From a BBT point of view, it starts off at near the speed of light, drops off rapidly, then flattens out. To use a ballistics analogy, it's like the universe was shot out of a cannon, then after slowing, a jet motor kicks in. Though to look at it from our point of view outwards, the redshift starts off slowly, but increases and eventually goes parabolic and once it reaches the speed of light, creates a horizon line. Which would make sense, if the redshift is an opitcal effect, compounding on itself.
Then the cosmic background radiation would be the light of even further sources, shifted off the visible spectrum. The solution to Olber's paradox.
As for Dark Matter, if gravity is not so much a property of mass, as mass is the lower end of the spectrum of a process of form/information condensation, that starts all the way out where photons condense out of light fields, it would explain why there is no graviton and gravity maps out as a geometric curve.
Take this as you will, since it does dare question some pretty accepted formulations, but to get back to the basic dichotomy of energy and form; We do exist in this tension between our desires driving us and our judgements steering us. The heart and the head.
When we try to formulate it as one, the focus goes toward the center, the equilibrium, eye of the storm, black hole at the center. Then the entire dynamic starts swirling around this nexus.
Yet the networks in which the nodes exist, goes toward the infinite, expanding out.
Nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems. Patterns and processes.
More yin and yang, absolute and infinite, than God Almighty.
Hopefully this gives you something to look at and doesn't just turn you off, but it is another way to try and put the pieces together.
Cheers.
