In the past science told us that there were 3 states of matter. Now we have about 6 and plasma being the most abundant in the universe.
Einstein firmly believed that univers always existed as it is now, but his theory did not say that.
So I wonder if everything we believe now is true.
Science is, and always will be, an approximation of the truth. Scientific models are constantly refined. It's very rare, however, for a scientific model to be completely thrown out.
It's a bit like trying to draw a circle, but you have a limited number of vertices with which to connect the points. You start with three vertices (the minimum number to form a polygon, of course), and connecting them, you have a triangle. Add another vertex, you get a square. Add another one, you have a pentagon, then a hexagon, and so on. Each time you add a vertex, the shape gets closer and closer to a circle, but in order to actually have a perfect circle, you need an infinite number of vertices.
That's what science is. Each addition of a vertex is a another bit of confirmation of a scientific theory, with the absolute truth being the finished circle. In the beginning, the shape you have bears no resemblance to a circle - this is the equivalent of, say, bronze age myths about gods moving the sun and the moon around the sky, but as each bit of knowledge is accumulated, as each bit of evidence is presented, the final picture becomes clearer and clearer. But we know that because there is limited time, there will always be a finite limit to the amount we can know, and therefore we will never actually attain that perfect circle - the absolute truth, only an approximation.
So in your points above about Einstein believing the universe to have existed forever in its present state, and the states of matter, well those are just older approximations based on the evidence at the time (and a bit of ideology, perhaps), but as more and more evidence is accumulated, the picture becomes clearer.
Einstein was a genius, but he was also human, and was therefore just as prone to getting things wrong as anyone else.
I had a scifi idea... Mankind was capable of space travelling in the distant past, during prehistory, but all traces of such great civilization were lost when Alexandria library was burned.
Mankind sent a mission to moon and mars and found strange remnants of past travels (like a prehistoric Apollo) and they believe they found aliens. But they only found the remnants of past trips of humanity. Microorganisms are found to be similar that those on Earth so scientists start to believe we came from that planet and aliens brought us here, while indeed those prehistoric trips exported them from Earth.
After the sinking of Atlantis (where all launch sites were located) space trips were over. Humanity in space got isolated from Earth and they developed their own technology, until they designed UFOs. So UFOs are the descendants of humans from past exploration of solar system. Atlantis existence was secret, and Plato leaked it from government files, and he was discredited to preserve the secret.
Sounds cool?
Nice idea. Certainly sci-fi though.
