We Hit a Little Snag When the Universe Sort of Collapsed in on Itself

This story about the earliest stars maybe being made of dark matter – matter that exists only hypothetically – reminded me of this essay about how modern cosmology is a lot of smoke and mirrors. It reminded me of a string-theory joke (or maybe it was dark energy, or dark matter) by which I recall being very amused, but about which I remember nothing, sadly.

It also made me think about the Ptolemaïc model of the universe, the geocentric one with the planetary orbits that had lots of nested epicycles to accommodate the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. They kept adding in new epicycles to fix the small departures of observation from theory, but it never worked because the theory was fundamentally wrong. The way that article describes current cosmological theory sounds much the same: throwing in ever more fudge-factors.

I particularly appreciated the house-of-cards implications of the layers of cosmological theory. Nothing before this essay had ever made me doubt the basic correctness of the universe-from-a-point model. Not that I disbelieve it now, but I have cognitively reclassified it as hypothesis rather than fact, or even theory.