Learning by researching the consensus is nearly all a physicist can do, too - except they might also research what the consensus is not, and experimental physicists may even have access to the means to conduct their own tests to back up or disprove either consensus, non-consensus, or any new compelling hypotheses as yet not considered.
Like everyone else here, I’m not an experimental physicist, and I too am interested in deviating from the consensus just like obsrvr, as I sum up in this previous post from this thread, in the paragraph before I quote myself.
The consensus is that the universe is flat, following extremely precise measurement, and concluding that if it is perfectly flat now then it was always flat. As with all experimental data, there is a margin of error, and I understand there is a limit to the scope of the measurements taken.
I am interested in and arguing in favour of something that recently occurred to me to be parallel to debunking flat-earthers, but instead of having all evidence in my favour, I only have logical argument and only some evidence in my favour. I contend that the extrapolation of experimental evidence of “everything moving away from everything else” back to a singularity, with all matter and energy maximally condensed at some previous point in time (as is the scientific consensus), formerly fulfilled the conditions of maximum spacetime curvature (which experiment confirms to occur under the highest gravitational forces and under conditions of the highest velocities e.g. at the “big bang”). I am unaware of why these two pieces of experimental evidence aren’t considered to be in conflict with one another, hence my hypothesis that the singularity had maximal spacetime curvature and the universe wasn’t always flat, even though it appears to be now, a ridiculously long time after the event itself.
This is no doubt due to my own ignorance, but do you see the reasoning behind my point of interest? Not only does it seem justified to me, it also does away with the paradoxes of infinity and finitude, which Jakob and obsrvr are chasing. From the James quotes it reads as though he was too. I think they each go too far with the experimental evidence that they have to reject in order to justify their directions - including not least the rejection of the laws of thermodynamics and relativity. It appears their struggles are in part made harder by their respective treatments of infinity - which would be why the topic has been so prevalent so far in this thread. I think if these struggles are resolved, some progress could be made on the main topic of the thread.
The most fascinating part of my line of inquiry to me is the topology of extra dimensions. Spacetime curvature can be modelled as curving around at least one extra dimension to what people popularly understand as what we can see of spacetime. My guess is that mass is at least part of how we perceive this extra dimension, since mass curves spacetime along its axis (and not along spacetime axes - though this is how it is represented in drawing aids to help people conceive of the effect). Orbits are in fact moving straight relative to spacetime, but spacetime itself is curved around the mass to make the orbiting mass “go around” the mass it’s orbiting.
I suspect not only the gravitational fundamental force, but also the electromagnetic force and its cousins the strong and weak nuclear forces are further dimensions that curve spacetime - but that seems to be the next step after fully comprehending the effect of mass on spacetime.
I also suspect that getting to the bottom of this will explain away notions of dark matter and dark energy. Perhaps antiparticles and the like will be explainable as some symmetry of the same particles curved back on themselves - but this really is getting into speculation as far as my knowledge goes.
KT pointed out the obvious in his post here, that if energy was infinite, everything would hurt rather a lot.
We can confirm without doubt that energy is not infinite by the very fact we are alive at all.
All experimental evidence shows that energy is conserved, as in the first law of thermodynamics.
So with infinite energy easily disproven, whether or not time could go on infinitely from now is not the same question as whether it has been going on infinitely so far.
Whether you go down my line of inquiry, or stay with the consensus, the universe can be determined to have a finite age so far.
So the universe hasn’t had enough time to get to the point where matter is “perfectly distributed throughout all space by now”.
Experimental evidence shows that all matter in the universe appears to be evenly distributed in all directions this far in. As such, the evenness of forces probably won’t result in “local distributions of energy within particular regions in space that are somehow isolated from others”
Another reason why I like my position is because representations of the size of the universe so far show that it kind of “eased into” its current rate of expansion (which is actually still accelerating apart) in its early stages. This also fits with the curvature of spacetime infinitely easing into what seems to be the start of the universe. As such, time has been going on infinitely so far in a way, it’s just been dilated so much while in the conditions of the singularity that it tended towards “taking forever” to actually “begin”, and also without having to have stretched back in “absolute measurements of time” before a zero point of entropy. This is why I’ve been modeling such beginnings on the y = 1/x hyperbola, where y is spacetime curvature and x is entropy.
An interesting piece of experimental evidence is that it’s speeding up its expansion. This disrupts the simplicity of my hyperbola modelling, but doesn’t necessarily rule out its applicability to our humble beginnings as far as I know.
I think it would be more accurate to say that “to experimentally detect” an affect confirms the existence of something, subject to our abilities to detect affect. A kind of Verificationism, that doesn’t necessarily work the other way around: such that all that exists has affect. However, Falsificationism prevents this avenue from being explored, so existence being treated as affect and vice versa is merely “all we have to work with”.
So any philosophies or ontologies based on “affect” presuppose Pragmatism. And why not, eh? Interesting how ancient greeks already considered such an approach.