"Astronomers have pushed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years."
The next generation of telescopes may be interesting in confirming or refuting Big Bang. There are alternate theories, like the minority who think the universe has simply always existed in various forms but much as it is today.
So if your telescopes get good enough to see further than 14 million light years (more than the supposed age of the universe), you would disprove Big Bang (but not relativity). At the rate of advance in space telescopes, we could do this in a decade or so. After all, Hubble was very limited to begin with.
Falsifiability is an essential element of science. This is likely a way to put Big Bang to the test.
I've recently heard the new theory is that the universe has always existed, is eternal. Its the 'agreed' science of the day, lol.
It is still definitely a minority view among physicists.
However, it is attractive because it doesn't need to explain what happened prior to the supposed Big Bang. Conventional Big Bang theory doesn't have the faintest notion of what happened prior to the Bang which is a notable weakness.
Conventional Big Bang theory doesn't have the faintest notion of what happened prior to the Bang which is a notable weakness.
In our current universe, space and time go hand in hand, so if there was no space, there was no time either. Stephen Hawkings described asking what happened before the big bang is like asking what's north of the north pole. A weird concept to wrap one's head around but... that's the argument, at least.
You and I were not always "here." We can observe that. Everything in our universe decays, dies. It has an end. Procreation has a beginning. The universe tells us loud and clear something does not come from nothing.
Taking the "universe has no beginning and is eternal" is a theological statement. Not scientific.