I'm old enough to remember Pons-Fleischmann. But not so old as to forget the more recent faster than light neutrinos social media storm. I've been thinking about the nature of scientific claims for more than twenty years. Few people are intentionally wrong: that doesn't mean astronomers as men of science didn't sware by the Ptolemaic cosmology.
To be clear, I am not denying the possibility of the earth expanding in and contracting in what passes for space time. I am skeptical of the proposition that the instruments are measuring the collisions of black holes is methodologically sound.
The careful preparation and engineering that occurred before LIGO was constructed resulted in an instrument that ran from 2002 to 2010 without detecting gravitational waves. The consequence of this $400 million experiment was not reexamining the theory, but sinking another $200 million into an instrument that created good tweetable data. That's the way careers and politics and human nature works.
There are three components to the theory. Spatial change, gravitational waves, and colliding massive bodies. The reason I am skeptical is that the scientists are inferring two of them: gravitational waves and colliding black holes from the component most likely to have other causes. If I had the mountaintop shells and the flood, god would be more plausible. If I have the shells and god, the flood is. Two outta three is my threshold for reasonable scientific inference in this case.
