Quote:
Originally Posted by rcglinsk
Hypothesis: the true story of the universe begins with a big bang, from there includes a non-stellar source of light and that the CMB was born of that source.
Questions:
What experiment do I conduct to try to disprove any or all of that hypothesis? What apparatus would I build? What would the experiment entail? How would I tell my results have disproved the hypothesis?
What prediction could I make about something people have yet to observe? That is, what could we do to check that hypothesis' predictions? Does it even make predictions that are checkable? If so, what are they, or what is one of them?
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I thought we'd moved on from the OP, but apparently not ...
rcglinsk, that's not a testable hypothesis.
Let's take something a little bit more specific, the CMB.
Let's assume you could write a good hypothesis concerning the CMB and an LCDM model.
One test of this hypothesis might be the CMB's polarisation, and the apparatus you'd build would be a fancy detector, that you'd place in a stable orbit far from the Earth.
Another might be the constancy of the CMB, and the apparatus you'd build would be exact replicas of WMAP, that you'd launch every decade for the next ten millennia.
A third might be the excitations of certain atomic or molecular states caused by absorption of a CMB at a higher temperature than today's ~2.7K, and the apparatus you'd build would be a very good spectrograph attached to an 8m class telescope at a good location.
A fourth might be consistency of estimates of the Hubble constant, derived from the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, in rich clusters spanning a large range of redshifts, and the apparatus you'd build would be a microwave interferometer.
And so on.
Lots of predictions, lots of tests, lots and lots of opportunities to show inconsistency ...
PS: the first is underway, and the third and fourth have already been done (with limited samples, much more extensive testing is planned); sadly, neither you nor I will live to see results from the second.