In article ,
Phillip Helbig---undress to reply writes:
Unless you have a really, really, really different theory of gravity,
you have to explain the stability of the universe if it is not flying
apart.

Collapsing would be OK, too. Phillip knows that but didn't mention
it because it's contrary to observations. The point is that a static
universe might be in equilibrium, but it is unstable unless one puts
in new physics. Of course we've seen weird physics turn out to be
right in some cases (QM comes to mind!), but GR works so well on
small scales that new physics in that realm looks unlikely.
Nevertheless, if a new model fits the data (and isn't grossly
contrived with a huge number of free parameters), I'd expect people
to consider it.

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