Scientific studies often build upon prior research under the assumption that this prior research is conclusive. This assumption implies a high level of trust in the past accomplishments. Similarly, scientific education heavily relies on the scientific consensus on the research output from the past. This raises the question how much past scientific research and the consensus about it can be trusted. To make it easier to answer this question, I will discuss in this presentation my perspective on Pierre-Marie Robitaille’s work on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) (e. g. 1), as a case study. The CMB forms one of the crucial pillars of the Big Bang theory, which on its turn serves as a foundation of the standard cosmological model, also known as CDM. Despite common belief, the CMB can be seen as the weakest link of the Big Bang theory and therefore likely also as the weakest link of CDM. That is, the CDM model hinges on the assumption that the entire CMB signal originates from outer space, which has never been experimentally verified. In as far as this idea has been discussed online and in the scientific literature, critics of Robitaille’s work have tried to counter it with several arguments. These counterarguments, however, do not hold, neither in isolation nor in combination with each other, as explained in my previous communications 2-3 and as I will further discuss in the presentation. The fact remains that no experiment has ever been designed and executed with the dedicated purpose to identify the source of the main CMB signal, i. e. the blackbody radiation component also known as the monopole. This contradicts the common claim that the CMB forms strong evidence for the Big Bang theory. A dedicated satellite mission is required to identify the source of the monopole signal. The design of such a mission is now in progress. If this or any other future experiment reveals an Earthly origin of the signal, it will be disastrous not only to the CDM model, but also to the decades of past and ongoing cosmological and astrophysical research that have been based on it. If, on the other hand, future experiments rule in favor of the standard cosmological model, the long overdue verification would anyhow imply a lack of rigor in the past foundational research in cosmology and astrophysics. In other words, independent of the outcome, astrophysics and cosmology find themselves in a precarious state that could easily have been avoided. This situation can be seen as a canary in a coal mine for science as a whole. If such persistent foundational misconceptions are possible for decades in a multi-billion-dollar Big Science research domain like astrophysics, they cannot be ruled out in any other scientific fields. I moreover predict that future experiments on the CMB will indicate its origin to be Earthly, in line with Robitaille’s work. The results produced by Paris Herouni’s telescope 4 serve as early evidence. The fact that these results, much like Robitaille’s work, have been vastly neglected by the scientific community for a prolonged period in time is a clear warning sign that science in its current institutional organization does not function as it should. I therefore also predict that this realization will generate shock waves through academia, setting in motion a modern scientific revolution.
Patrick Vanraes (2026) studied this question.