Simple trial and error works for me. “Natural selection.”
The problem is when people become blinded by sunk costs and double down on failing ideas. They’ve certainly circled the wagons around string theory, not to mention super symmetry and few others that have faded from too much evidence otherwise. We still have multiworlds and multiverses, lurking in the background.
The fact is that our current cosmology can’t be falsified, because every time there is a gap between prediction and observation, another, otherwise invisible force of nature is proposed and all is well. What if accountants could just write in a figure and call it “dark money,” whenever they find a gap in the books. It would certainly make their jobs easier.
Before Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the initial patch was when they realized that with redshift increasing proportional to distance in all directions, it creates the effect that we appear to be at the center of this expansion. So they changed if from an expansion in space, to an expansion of space, because spacetime!
Which totally ignores the central premise of GR, that the speed of light is always measured as a Constant. If it is redshifted, obviously intergalactic light is not Constant to intergalactic space.
Two metrics are being derived from the same light, one based on its speed and the other based on its spectrum. Since they are being compared, which is the denominator and which is the numerator? As the universe is presumably expanding relative to the speed of light, ie. more lightyears across, then the speed is still being treated as the denominator and thus the presumed “ruler.”
We are at the center of our point of view and so an optical effect might be worth considering. Multispectrum light “packets” do redshift over distance, as the higher spectrums dissipate faster, but that would mean we are sampling a wave front, not individual photons traveling billions of lightyears, yet that would call to question the irreducibility of quanta and there is certainly a lot of sunk theoretical costs in that.
Scientists are human.
