The Nature of Fact

The Nature of Fact

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Winning a Nobel Prize or the appearance of noise “snow” on a CRT
is not conclusive of anything.
Nobel Prizes are given based on opinions of people. Having opinions
of any sort, even if every person on Earth were to have the same
opinion on a matter, does not preclude that the expressed opinion is
a fact. It becomes a “fact” in terminology or name only based on
dominant opinion only.

To know for certain that the Big Bang is the source of the “cosmic
background noise/radiation” one would have to have been present
at the event and had several other people witness the event and
its effects on the cosmic environment and then track that several
billions of years to confirm that the cosmic background noise was
indeed the result of a so-called “big bang”.
Then, with common agreement, the witnesses could call their experience
a fact (for them at least). 

Therefore, all of this can be truly, and CORRECTLY called THEORY.
Physics, in the main, deals with theoretical proposals of how the universe
APPEARS to work. When an anomoly contradicts a theory years later,
then theory is often CHANGED to accommodate the understanding
which is current at the time. (e.g. “The Flat Earth Theory”,
or the “Earth Centric Theory”, or the thoery of what an atom looks like -
atomic model, etc.)

We must be careful about jumping to conclusions which we call “fact”.
We often assume that we know so much, but in actuality we know much
less than we assume. Formal education is a source of information and
the honing of skills to apply information usefully. However, education by
itself does not lead to true knowledge. To KNOW something – anything,
one must be free of opinion, or conditioning about that thing. We have
often seen throughout history how assumed ideas in any area of life have
led to enormous miscalculations, dogma (including scientific dogma), and
sometimes shameful results.