SMage:
A splendid description of current cosmological/astrophysical dogma, a "mathematical" construct piling assumption upon assumption (big bang, dark matter, dark energy, gravitational lensing, etc., etc.), and purging any elements (quantized redshifts, structural linkages between galaxies, etc.) which don't fit.
JGulick:
Ummm... I'm way in over my head here, but what the hey.
More than a decade ago I was driving solo across the Great Basin desert, kind of zonked, and listening to a Hawking book on tape. The more I listened, the more exasperated I got. The astrophysical/cosmological discussion pretended to be accessible to the ignorant layperson (and I certainly was that!) but it was mostly gibberish to me... yet I managed to pick up on the two following exasperating, and seemingly contradicatory, tendencies.
On the one hand, whenever an anomaly required explanation and a theory needed revising, a new concept would be introduced. Said concept almost always seemed haphazard to me (almost as if it was invented on the spot) and certainly it rarely seemed to have anything to do with hard evidence or material reality... rather, it almost always seemed to be drawn from some self-contained world of formal (or mathematical?) logic.
That was annoying enough, but then there was an equally annoying though seemingly antithetical tendency. At several points it seemed as if the narrator was only willing to entertain conversation about those aspects of material reality that are accessible to instrumental observation. On occasion this tendency was so pronounced it seemed as though the narrator was suggesting that material reality itself is a byproduct of recording technologies and techniques.
It was weird and infuriating, this bizarre and mad combination of freewheeling abstraction and rank empiricism. Kind of like Parsonian sociology. What's up with that? I've wondered ever since that trek through the desert...
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