I may or may not have posted this as a comment to a Quanta article. It has been modified. 25Feb2022

The belief in a wholly imaginary “universe” lies at heart of modern cosmology’s ludicrous, absurd and irrational standard model. The assumption of a universal metric with homogenous and isotropic contents underlies the FLRW equations that form the basis of all modern cosmological models.

Applying the imaginary universal metric to the field equations of General Relativity was an oxymoronic exercise that produced a ridiculous cosmological model, the Big Bang, that looks nothing like the Cosmos we actually observe. The observed Cosmos does not contain a Big Bang event, inflation, expanding spacetime, dark matter, or dark energy.

Those entities and events are part of the BB model but they are not part of empirical reality, which is to say they are not part of scientific reality. The entirety of the BB model is theoretical nonsense unhinged from the physical reality that is the only proper realm of scientific study.

Alexander Friedmann’s simplistic “homogenous and isotropic universe” assumption, made at a time when the known Cosmos consisted of our galaxy, was simply wrong. The vast Cosmos that falls within our observational range is neither homogenous nor isotropic and it makes no sense, no physical sense, to imagine that vast Cosmos constitutes a unified, coherent, and simultaneous entity.

The vast Cosmos, of which we will always have only a partial view constrained by the finite limit of light speed and the cosmological redshift, cannot be treated as a simplistic unitary entity capable of being modeled by our limited mathematical scribblings. In a very real physically meaningful way, the “Universe” of the Big Bang model doesn’t exist. It is a wholly imaginary entity.

To sustain a belief in their model of the “expanding Universe” modern cosmologists have to ignore the things that are there while believing in model-dependent imaginary things that aren’t there. Cosmology has devolved into a cult devoted to the care, maintenance, and defense of the ridiculously unscientific Big Bang model.

Modern cosmology is a mess and will remain so until the “expanding Universe” paradigm is consigned to the dustbin of history alongside Ptolemy’s geocentric model. It is time in other words to drag cosmology away from its cult-like fixation on the Big Bang and open the field to the study of cosmological models that are not dependent on the failed “expanding Universe” assumption, but are mathematically constructed to reflect the Cosmos we actually observe and measure. Humankind deserves a realistic cosmology; the dim, misbegotten fantasy we are currently saddled with doesn’t cut it.