“Meaning?” Vic looked at Marty. … “We’re fresh out of meaning. All we got left is chaos and random disorder.”

Many physicists have spent their whole careers working on [string theory], and some would argue that this is why a theory that should have been thrown out long ago still has currency: there is too much invested in it.

Taken all together, the problems with the Big Bang plus inflation theory are not tiny negligible gaps between observation and theory; they are huge chasms you could drive a cosmological coach and horses through.