Survey Shows that 51% of Americans Question the 'Big Bang Theory'

[muon2]

I would guess that the lack of confidence in the big bang question may be due as much to the other part of the question involving a time scale of 13.8 billion years. Consider the statement that the universe was created in an instant out of nothing and the earth and life on it came later. That's consistent with both the big bang and most creationist views. But the time scale of 13.8 billion years for the age of the universe and 4.5 billion years for the age of the earth are unfathomably large for most people, and that's the point when I observe skepticism emerge.

[muon2]

While scientists are extremely confident about the 13.8 billion figure...

I would dispute that.

EDIT: By which I mean, sure, 13.8 billion has got to be pretty close to being right if the Lambda-CDM model is correct, but Lambda-CDM being correct isn't something I would bet my life on.  There could be some complicating wrinkles.

There is plenty of debate over the nature of the cold dark matter in the standard Lambda-CDM model. But most competing models that would result in a substantially different age of the universe (t₀) have failed to match all the known observational data, particularly data from gravitational lensing and colliding galaxies. Other extensions of Lambda-CDM typically involve parameters that leave t₀ largely untouched. So I would say that most scientists are extremely confident in the value of t₀ within a reasonable experimental and theoretical error.

[muon2]

While scientists are extremely confident about the 13.8 billion figure...

I would dispute that.

EDIT: By which I mean, sure, 13.8 billion has got to be pretty close to being right if the Lambda-CDM model is correct, but Lambda-CDM being correct isn't something I would bet my life on.  There could be some complicating wrinkles.

There is plenty of debate over the nature of the cold dark matter in the standard Lambda-CDM model. But most competing models that would result in a substantially different age of the universe (t₀) have failed to match all the known observational data, particularly data from gravitational lensing and colliding galaxies. Other extensions of Lambda-CDM typically involve parameters that leave t₀ largely untouched. So I would say that most scientists are extremely confident in the value of t₀ within a reasonable experimental and theoretical error.

I don't know, Muon.  Dark energy still feels something like a late 20th / early 21st century version of "the ether" to me.  I still feel like there's a decent chance that we'll learn something that will change our understanding of GR enough that it won't quite be vanilla Lambda-CDM.  Perhaps Lambda-CDM with some interesting wrinkles that mean that it's not quite 13.8 billion years old.

What do you think of folks like David Wiltshire, who claim that the conventional shortcuts that people take in averaging the spacetime metric in a way that kind of ignores large scale structure is leading them astray ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/0912.4563.pdf )?  Wiltshire goes so far as to say that this can explain away dark energy, which puts him outside the mainstream consensus.  But I think there are others (though still a minority, I think, though I'm no GR specialist) who would support some milder version of this, which would still mean that you could have a universe without a single unique age, because of the differential in time dilation between an observer who's in the middle of a void and an observer who's in the middle of a huge galaxy cluster.

It seems Wiltshire would like to restore Einstein's greatest blunder (the cosmological constant and its attendant dark energy) back to blunder status. I guess I'm not bothered by the concept of dark energy, though I don't really like the name as it isn't really the energy equivalent of dark matter. We already deal with vacuum energy in quantum physics so having a term in general relativity to describe a pervasive energy throughout the universe doesn't seem out of place to me. In any case, there have been a lot of refined measurements of the Hubble constant and redshift parameters in recent years, and I don't know if they've had any impact on Wiltshire's model.