Cosmologists have found galaxies that are said to be too old to exist. Why isn’t this simply evidence that the universe is older than we think?
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Academics speak with undue certainty about their findings. When evidence that contradicts accepted models is found, they reject the evidence before they reject the model.
The fact is, we dont know how old the universe is, or how big or far the galaxies we can see actually are. We only know these things by taking certain assumptions, like that euclidean triangulation works in a non-euclidean space of unknown curvature. We don’t know that there was a big bang. We dont know why the cosmic background ration is relatively constant, and we dont know if it’s random.
What we know is how to interpret evidence in a given model, and we know how to measure the accuracy of the model. Our cosmological models are very good and yet very incomplete.
But it’s not so simple to throw away the model after one observation. Measurement could be innacurate. Galaxies could have formed differently before some time threshold. Dark energy is not understood. There are a lot of reasons why our initial time can stay the same with the model changing slightly.
Basically you can think of the cosmological model as a function *F* of many variables like *F(a,b,c,d,…)* where changing initial time *a* is not the quickest/easiest path to fit new data to the disagreement between observation and the output of *F(a,b,c,d,…)*.
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