There’s a meeting now underway in London on Outstanding Questions for the Standard Cosmological Model, which is the term for the current Big Bang/ Inflation/ Dark Matter/ Dark Energy/ Accelerating Universe view of the history of the universe. Tommaso Dorigo is attending, and reports on the talks on his blog (and also a description of lively debate).
Some people would probably deride this whole meeting as a waste of time– I know where I’d look if I were interested in finding an example– but I think it’s great that somebody’s doing it. The ideas listed on the slide pictured in one of those posts sound pretty far-fetched, but it’s important that somebody does the work to check them out. That’s how science works, after all– its important to poke at all the weak points in our theories, even if they seem unlikely to fail. This is particularly true for a theory as recent as the Cosmological “Standard Model,” which is extremely recent, and has a lot of vague points still.