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( Non-standard cosmology)
A non-standard cosmology is any physical cosmological model of the universe that has been, or still is, proposed as an alternative to the big bang model of (standard) physical cosmology. In the history of cosmology, various scientists and researchers have disputed parts or all of the big bang due to a rejection or addition of fundamental assumptions needed to develop a theoretical model of the universe. From the 1940s to the 1960s, the astrophysical community was equally divided between supporters of the big bang theory and supporters of a rival steady state universe. It was not until advances in observational cosmology that the big bang would eventually become the dominant theory, and today there are few active researchers who dispute it. The term "non-standard" is applied to any cosmological theory that does not conform to the scientific consensus. Today it is also used to describe theories that accept a "big bang" occurred but differ as to the detailed physics of the origin and evolution of the universe. Before observational evidence was gathered, theorists developed frameworks based on what they understood to be the most general features of physics and philosophical assumptions about the universe. When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1917, this was used as a mathematical starting point for most cosmological theories including the big bang and the steady state theories. In order to arrive at a cosmological model, however, theoreticians needed to make assumptions about the nature of the largest scales of the universe. The assumptions that the Big Bang relied upon are These assumptions when applied to the Einstein equations naturally result in a universe which has the following features These features were derived by numerous individuals over a period of years; indeed it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that accurate predictions of the last feature and observations confirming its existence were made. Non-standard theories developed either by starting from different assumptions or by contradicting the features predicted by the Big Bang.
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