Bill,
I think that is an objective statement and a reasonable belief.
My only objection is when somebody claims that it is truth, even if just by leaving out the "if" when saying what the underlying theory says to logically support the conclusion.
Personally, I am agnostic about different theories for things like this. I try to understand all of them and check to see if they are internally consistent as well as whether they would require things inconsistent with other "laws of nature", which may also not be fully correct (they are just "theories" too, at some level).
The problem I have with thinking about many of these things is that I have to accept that there is a duality of characteristics for photons (waves and particles) which we can demonstrate with experiments, but cannot really understand adequately. So, I am left with the proven situation that photons sometimes fit one of our theories and not the other, while at other times not fitting the first theory and fitting the other one.
Bringing that realization forward to questions like photons gravitationally attracting each other slams me directly into the realization that I have no idea which theory to use to answer that question, but I know that the different theories produce differing conclusions.
The only way I can see to have an objective scientific discussion about such things is to keep the "ifs" in mind and talk about those explicitly. That properly acknowledges the uncertainty and provides for rational discussions. What troubles me most in discussions about physics and cosmology is the way most people who are proponents of specific theories speak (and post) as if those theories are the truth, and anybody who does not understand that (and believe it) is not just wrong, but inferior. That type of smugness tends to suppress potentially useful discussions (which may actually be the intent of some of those who are behaving so smugly).
So, when we go searching for links to support various conclusions, we need to be careful to not just grab somebody's too-smug website or post and think of it as surely correct. There is all sorts of misinformation on the Internet. And, looking back at some of my 50 year olld college textbooks, there is even a bit of misinfo in those, too.
My only recourse is to keep asking "How do we know that?" and trace it back to the experimental evidence. For instance, Michelson and Morley did not actually show that the is no '"ether" in which light propagates as waves - what they did show is that we cannot measure any speed through something in which light propagates. So, when quantum theorists talk about light being waves in "fields" that "permeate all of space", I don't claim that Michelson and Morely showed that such fields cannot exist.
But, I do ask questions about how such fields behave when others postulate that "space" expanded and somehow expanded the fields with it. Do photons get larger when space expands? We seem to believe that they get stretched in the direction of travel, but how about in the perpedicular directions? And what is a photon, anyway? If you take a gamma ray and stretch the space that it is in so that the gamma ray ends up with a wavelength of say, 1 meter, how wide (perpendicular to its direction of travel) is that gamma ray photon after being stretched that amount?
Too many people who can't answer questions like that try to dodge them by criticizing the question and questioner . Which is a strong indication to me that they don't understand their own theories well enough to answer it logically.
One of the things I like about this forum is that it is not dogmatic for discussions like this. The moderators seem to accept expressions of a variety of theories.
So, we can keep having discussions like this one without being shut off because of conflicts with the moderator's preferred theory.
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