No Big Bang?

It hasn't been a good month for the Big Bang Theory.  First, a much-ballyhooed interpretation of data that was supposed, in March of this year, to demonstrate left-over gravity waves from the primordial explosion now turns out to have been premature.  Now, a respectable mathematician claims to have demonstrated that the usual explanation for the formation of a black hole is internally inconsistent, thus potentially calling into question another assumption critical to standard Big Bang mechanisms.

It's not at all clear I'll live long enough to see results from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), whose "projected" 2034 launch date can't inspire much confidence, but that's the sort of detection device that may be needed before we can clarify the business of whether gravity waves can be detected and, if so, what they show about events almost impossibly distant in space and time.  Work proceeds apace, but the project presents some staggering challenges.  For one thing, the interferometer array is intended to follow a trailing-Earth solar orbit, which means it will be seriously out there, and not amenable to casual repair like the Hubble telescope.

As for black holes and "Hawking radiation," I've never known what to think; it's another area in which I'm curious whether things will get cleared up in my lifetime.  By "cleared up," of course, I mean nailed down to the point where the explanations can penetrate even to laymen such as myself.  In the meantime, the events of this month are generating spirited discussions about the human temptation to cling to elegant theories when, as one commenter put it, sometimes Nature makes us erase the blackboard.