It does seem theoretical physics has wandered off into a post empirical world, where more epicycles are assumed whenever observations don't match predictions.
The Big Bang Theory certainly can't be falsified, as whenever there is a gap, some enormous new force of nature is assumed. What if your accountant could just write in a figure and call it "dark money?" It would certainly save him the trouble of having to go back and figure out what's wrong. Just as cosmologists are saved from actually having to question their model.
Before Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the original patch was when they realized that since redshift increases proportional to distance in all directions, it makes us appear to be at the center of this expansion, 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 the speed of light is measured as a constant in any frame. If intergalactic light is being redshifted, it is obviously not constant to intergalactic space. Two metrics are being derived from the same light.
The cause of doppler effect, the shifting of the frequency as a source is moving relative to the observer, doesn't affect the space, only the amount of space. When the train moves away, it doesn't stretch the train tracks, only increases the distance.
Similarly the stated reason for cosmic redshift is that light takes longer to cross, as the universe expands.
Which means the speed of light remains the assumed ruler. Like the train tracks, it is not expanding. There are more lightyears, as the sources presumably move away.
Simply put, it is nonsense. All the complex math has obscured a basic fallacy.
The problem then, is that we still appear to be at the center of the universe, but we are at the center of our point of view, so an optical effect would make sense.
While single spectrum light only redshifts due to the recession of the source, multispectrum light "packets" do redshift over distance, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster. Yet that would mean we are sampling a wave front, not individual photons traveling billions of years, which throws a monkey wrench into some fairly basic assumptions in quantum theory.
Safe to say, we will be hearing about multiworlds and multiverses and other modern unicorns and epicycles for some time to come. Old habits die hard, especially when careers are at stake.
