I wonder what we will see once physics has really understood all this dark matter and dark energy stuff.
I guess they will then talk about those like when we talk about pre germ theory medicine, when people believed that "bad air" causes sickness, and vermin was "created" by dirt.
The only difference I see is that "dark" is understood as unknown and not necessarily a single thing.
A lot of older stuff we talk about seems to be assertive in their existence and what they are. Not all of course, but in the absence of a term that indicates "we really don't know", it seems random ideas were pretty common.
That's not to say we don't still do that, but I think it'll be ideas that came out of or overly supported "dark" nomenclature. Like, say we find out we got Hubble's constant wrong. I don't think history will remember us as "believing in dark energy". Just that we got Hubble's constant wrong.
I still think we'll end up thinking of the Big Bang as not a singular thing not even a cyclical thing that keeps happening.
More like fireworks in an empty sky, where if we zoom out enough there's "big bangs" happening all over the fucking place, constantly.
Ours will fade out someday, but there were ones before, during, and after ours.
What we've been doing is like if we saw an apple after it started falling and declared it was never in the tree, and will never hit the ground.
We're just not looking at it on a long/big enough scale.
Well the problem is we may never be able to observe anything beyond our universe, thus can't observe anything on that scale or timescale.
But yes. If it can happen once, there's no reason it won't happen again, or be recreated artificially. Nothing else in the universe is once only. There's no precedent to think the big bang would be.
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