I think you have bigger problems if in fact it is true that "For a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth and a 13.8-billion-year-old Big Bang, acceptance was below 30 percent." I can imagine how it works: pupil learned from geology class about strata and tectonic plates and how mountains are formed and the fact that the Earth is 4.5 billion year old. Then the pupil go to the parents and asks about it and gets a reply from the parents that their pastor said the Earth is 6,000 years old and that mountains were formed in Noah's flood. America is really ruled by an oligarchy[1], because poll after poll shows the scientific illiteracy of the general American population.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
These are mathematical constructs that explain differences between our hypothetical starting at a unified point and the differences from the hypothesis that we observe in reality.
I don't get what where you getting with that. Scientific theories are using math to describe nature.
Inflation is a way to reconcile theory with observation.
Yes, and one of the observation is the flatness of the universe.
You only "need" these things to make the Big Bang theory work. That you "need" inflation to make the Big Bang possible is putting the horse before the cart. Normally theory follows observation, not vice versa as in the case with Inflation.
You don't need Inflation for the Big Bang. If the universe would not be flat, then Inflation would not be needed. But observations shows that the universe is flat.
Indeed the Big Bang theory may still be correct even if the Inflationary theory is proven to be incorrect.
We cannot observe the first 10^-31 seconds directly, so we need to deduce in a theory. But we can see the results of the first 10^-31 seconds of the Big Bang, the flatness of the Universe. We need to explain that, hence the Inflation theory.
Inflation theory is not a fact in the same way that we accept gravity or evolution as a fact, and really still stands to be verified. There are several competing theories to Inflation that aim to address the complications that Inflation introduces, which may in time be proven to provide a better explanation.
I never stated that. I wrote that the Big Bang is a fact.
I have news for you: we are in the Big Bang. We can see down in time to the first 380,000 years of the Universe, by a telescope. You do know that the speed of light is a constant and if you look at a star, for example, 30 light years away, you see how the star was 30 years ego. Then we look at a galaxy, say, a billion light years away, that means we see the light that was send a billion years ego. Now we look at the CMBR and we see the Universe like it was when it was just 380,000 years old. We cannot look further back in time because the CMBR is obscuring our view. So we can see the Big Bang from 380,000 years to today (13.7 billion years).
Look at the image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
We can see (with a telescope) everything that is the "Big Bang Expansion". The only thing we cannot see is beyond the CMBR, the first 380,000 years.