Been following this post for a while, and although I am nowhere near as knowledgeable as many of the people who post, I believe I kind of understand most of the different ideas that have been exchanged.
I believe the OP (Mister) was stating that due to new observations, he was not entirely as comfortable as he was at one time in believing that the "Big Bang Theory" was the "end all, rock steady, never to be better explained, taken as a given FACT" that some people tend to lend it.
I have no doubt that Mr. Hubble was a quite intelligent fellow and coming up with the whole "Red Shift" idea, theory, measurement thingy, was an exciting mental leap.
I have, personally, over too many decades, been open to new criteria and evidence, and hence feel much the same as the OP (Mister0. I realize we, as a civilazation have gained quite a bit of knowledge over the past couple thousand years. However, that knowledge has only been physically tested LOCALLY.
We seem to have totally locked onto the idea that the speed of light (c) is a constant and could never be exceeded by anything, anywhere, anywhen.
Lately, we have come to begin to give creedence to some shadowy, phantom, not nearly fully examined or explained, elusive substance caled "Dark Matter".
What if, now remember my moniker, what if this as yet unexplained "Dark Matter" in someway affected the speed, propagation or even the frequency of light over different distances or even differently in other areas of our known universe - could that possibly influence the percieved "Red Shift" and hence whether or not galaxies were "receding" or that the space between said galaxies was "expanding" ?
It is just that over time, I've begun to wonder if the physical constants that we take for granted, might indeed be just "locally" true. How do we know, without physical testing, that everywhere in the whole of the universe, is just exactly as it is here.
In these posts I have read of the "Cosmic Backround Radiation", "Dark Energy", "Dark Matter" and those are only a few of the things we have not got a full grasp of yet.
In a few other posts I've mentioned that we have only been expanding our knowledge and actually been contemplating these things for a few thousands of years - and again, ONLY LOCALLY!! We have quite far to go before we ever hope to believe we have empirical universal knowledge. I firmly believe that we are only now beginning to develop the technology to truly get us into and through the "kindergarden" of said universal knowledge!
Mind you now, and remember my moniker, I've been wrong a few billion times already, in this life - and I will be again - but these are just a few of my thoughts on the subject!
