The tone of the headline makes it sound like 26.7B is now accepted, but the article indicates it’s mostly just a theory that has a little additional evidence. Is the later a correct reading of the situation?
It's all just theories. But yes the article is basically summarizing a new paper/model. Most likely: the model is incorrect in some ways. But maybe useful in others.
Do you mean hypothesis? A theory is a well-substantiated explanation based on evidence...and has undergone some kind of rigorous testing/verification. A hypothesis, on the other hand, is "just" a proposed explanation/prediction based on little (or no?) evidence...which is then tested through experiments, etc.
A hypothesis is a proposition. A theory is a model. The two are different concepts but neither implies rigor or lack of rigor. It’s harder to build a complete model from nothing but it happens all the time.
Theories about the universe as a whole (or anything outside the solar system at this point) can't really be tested in the normal sense. You can make a theory and then try to look for more data/make observations about the universe and see if they match, but there's no control and you might never get the data you need to say one theory is better than another. You can get lucky of course, but it's not like you can recruit 40_000 universes for a double blinded placebo controlled clinical trial.
You can at least test some parts of quantum physics and general relativity on and around Earth, with satellites in orbit with very precise clocks and double slit experiments and that sort of thing. For everything outside the solar system you can just observe and hope new data arrives that you are not already unblinded to.
Try to convince a member of science's fan base (which includes many actual scientists) of this during an object level discussion about a particular point of contention and see how well it goes over.
Yes, you are correct that it is not the widely accepted number as of now, and that it is just one theory. It's just that without this tone the headline would have never made it to the front page.
Our upvote tendencies incentivize drastic tones, so it's effectively what we ask for, and what we get as a result.
Had to check Wikipedia[1] just to be sure this was actually an accepted number.
That still says ~13B years right now. The headline is edited to be more sensational than the actual linked article.
Perhaps the title would be more accurate if it were "The way my friends and I prefer to think of it, the age of the universe is nearly twice as old as we used to like to think of it."
Pop science in general doesn't pay enough attention to which theories are solid and believed to be 99,99% true, and which are just accepted as best guess in lieu of good data. Although history (not science, pop version) is a much worse offender than physics in that regard.
Theories without data are just Philosophy in mathematics based drag.
It doesn't make it pointless but one has to treat it for what it is. It was like String theory, it was all well and good but without a meaningful experiment to test it - it could only go so far.
Sure it does. A theory that has little explanatory power due to the lack of available evidence can, in the diminutive sense of "just", be called "just a theory" where the understood context is comparative to a theory with a high level of explanatory power and perhaps a general consensus among experts in the field.
Even something that's just a theory is not to be confused with "mere" conjecture, and somewhere way down in the hierarchy have "pure poppycock". Though even pure poppycock on occasion rises up through the ranks, much to the embarrassment (often post-mortem) of those who pooh-poohed it previously. Of course "pooh-poohed" is not a generally accepted scientific term, I use it here as a mere colloquialism. I'm sure (though not certain) that people already understand that and wouldn't bother being pedantic about it.
