The truth is we strive not to understand the universe as it is, we strive to understand it as we think it is.

There was a time when we simply followed the evidence and tried to imagine what it might mean. For hundreds of years through trial and error we followed wherever it went and tried to understand how it pertained to the bigger context that contained it.

The we came to the age of evidence based preconceptions, where instead of imagining what the evidence was telling us we decided we already knew based on our interpretations relating to our newly contrived theories and the job changed from understanding the fundamental universe to proving our theories. Attempting to shoehorn every available observation into our preconceived ideas whether they fit or not.

As an example take the ubiquitous quasar powered by a super massive black hole, often many millions and even billions of time the mass of our sun. It is the result of the black hole consuming matter at astonishing rates of conversion and producing as it’s result one of the most luminous objects in the universe, a beam of energy light years in length.

Naturally we want to know how these massive objects formed and where they come from, but at this point we drop the empirical observations and break out the shoe horn.

Mainstream science would say these objects formed from collisions of massive metal free stars many times the mass of the sun forming in dense, short lived clusters. These massive stars quickly die and form relatively large gravitars in close proximity to one another which, over time, merge into a single massive object, or so the story goes.

Sounds plausible enough, but notice some of the details, like a metal free star. Has science ever observed a single star devoid of metals?

The answer is no. There have been many metal poor stars observed, but none which are metal free. All of the oldest stars we’ve ever seen going back 13 billion years and change and not a sole metal free survivor to be seen.

So where does that idea come from you ask? Why do we cling to it when there is scant or even a dirth of actual evidence? The answer is the Big Bang.

We stopped acting on evidence alone no matter were it led and started acting on faith backed by an abstract interpretation of evidence. That our ideas are correct, that the evidence is still waiting to be found so we can disregard observations which may fly in the face of our ideas because we believe in them and need a shoehorn to make them fit, because we have faith that their accuracy will be born out over time.

Remember this precise scenario of galaxy formation has to play out again and again, hundreds of millions of times, in precisely this order for us to end up with the universe we observe full of swirling galaxies, twinkling stars, and massive gravitars. I’ve never know life to give me those kind of odds in a random distribution.

It’s much like throwing oh I don’t know somewhere around 10 to the 16th nickels in the air and they all land on heads at the same time. Good luck with that.

Were this the only way these objects could have formed then perhaps they would have a strong argument for the collapse/collide model, but there are other ways we ignore because we are busy trying to shoehorn massive gravitars at the heart of each and every galaxy into the big bang, an idea whose genesis occured long before the first super gravitar was even observed. This includes the most logical and obvious possibility there is, single direct collapses from massive nebulae. Do not pass go, no 200 bucks, no metal free stars. In fact maybe, perhaps even likely, no stars at all.

It would be better if science tackles these alternatives to either prove them or rule them out with serious effort and consideration but we don’t. We would rather toe the line and get a few grants to keep looking where we’re already searching rather than jeopardize funding or reputation by following the evidence in a different direction, just to see what happens.

For now, we have to live with the shoehorn, but that in no way means that each of us can’t in our own way can’t learn the science, can’t question the conventional wisdom of our day, as so many, for so very long, have done before…