When I started off as an astronomy undergrad in 1964, it still was not clear whether there was a big bang, or if the now-discredited "steady-state" theory was where the smart money should be. I bet on the latter, the idea of the Perfect Cosmological Principle, that at any point in time or space the infinitely old and infinitely large universe would always look roughly the same from any point or time within or during it.

The data showed I was wrong. Now we know the Universe is finite, in space or time, and that it is evolving, with an unknowable singularity at one end of the continuum, and a featureless and fully entropic heat death at the other.

So much for Occam's Razor.