Problems with the Big Bang theory

The Big Bang model says the universe today can be traced back to a state of a quark-gluon-lepton plasma existing about 13.7 billion years into the past from our perspective.It does not and never has said "Nothing exploded creating something".

What explosion?
There used to be a quark-gluon-lepton plasma existing in a rapidly expanding background. That's all the theory says.

Although given that it works at all and how accurately it works, would lead me to say that at the cosmological scale the difference between what space and time really are and what they are according to GR is negligible. So at that scale I'm perfectly comfortable in calling space and time a 4-D manifold with a Lorentzian metric.
Just like I'm comfortable in calling a cardboard box a cuboid, even though it really isn't if you scale down far enough.In the range 0.000006 meters to 7.3x10^26 meters time acts exactly as if it was another dimension, so I don't think it's too great an error to think of it like that, even though it may ultimately be wrong.Edited by Son Goku, : Minor spelling.

Just past Andromeda? Is there something wierd I've missed at the sub-local cluster level?
It's entirely possible that I have.

That'd be a very difficult topic to explain, since virtual particles only appear if you do QFT a certain way (perturbatively). If we had the ability to do the kind of super-integrals that pop up in QFT, virtual particles would never have even been that big of an idea.
Basically they're tied to a specific method of analysis, plus there is the subtlety that the virtual particles are virtual free-particles.I'll try to come up with my own explanation, if I get round to it.

First of all 2.3 billion years has never been a estimate of the age of the universe.Anyway, there is hard evidence that the universe is around 13.7 +- 0.2 billion years old. This isn't guessing or anything of the sort. The age isn't exact, but we do know the universe is within the upper 13 billion year age bracket.

It has never been an estimate in cosmology outside possible unrecorded private conversations and therefore certainly not one of the community at large and thus not considerable as an actual estimate haven not been given wide enough support to reach the point of testing and comparison.
See:
# Edward R. Harrison, Cosmology, the Science of the Universe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981.
# M. Berry, Cosmology and Gravitation, Adam Hilger, Bristol, 1986.
# John A. Peacock, Cosmological Physics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
# Robert P. Crease, Charles C. Mann, The Second Creation, Rutgers University Press, Reprint edition 1996 As recent as I could obtain:
No webpage found at provided URL: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0105/0105384.pdfEdited by Son Goku, : Seperation of author name from title.

Then you would be incorrect, because they have in fact lowered over the last fifty years. That is because that estimate never occured or was confined to such a small group of people that it was never recorded, making it functionally never. More importantly it never got to the point where it was tested or even considered in a paper which is a much stronger functional never.

Right, as I said before, the Big Bang predicts a Redshift based on the fact that the universe is expanding.
Most of the quantitative predictions come from the Friedmann-Walker metric.Using the Friedmann-Walker metric and expanding to first order we get the following equation:S = c/H(dv/v)Where
c = speed of light
H = Hubble's constant.
S = the distance to the object we are looking at.
(dv/v) = the fractional red-shiftThis is a linear relation, which should hold out to a certain distance. At this distance we introduce quadratic and cubic terms.
(And eventually Quartic, but that's rarely needed)Not only does the linear term hold as far as we predict, the quadratic and cubic terms also modify it to give the curve we observe past the point of linearity.Here is a few observational graphs, the best probably being the Supernova cosmology observations. Now does anybody have a genuine criticism of this actually based on evidential grounds?