OK, after seeing this and looking back through this thread I now recognize I need to clarify my stance a bit here. No wonder you guys think I'm a moron. My bad there.
I don't think all science is crap. QED is good. I know Feyman's book on it, which is one of the books I have read, is outdated, but it ruled. It was solid, simple, and mostly correct. QED works here on earth (obviously). And it is not much of a stretch to assume that it probably works in other places in the universe. Science is going in the right direction in the quantum level, for sure.
The problem arises when we say "We have a theory on gravity that works well right before our eyes here on earth, but it breaks down when we start applying it to the universe as a whole. We have a different theory that works well with the universe as a whole. We just can't tie the two theories together."
Now if you tell this to a child, and ask the child what the problem is, what do you think the answer will be? The child would probably say "it's hard to see things that are far away. You probably actually have to be there to understand what is going on in the rest of the universe."
That is the jist of what I am getting at. We can see pretty clearly what is going on here on Earth. But we shouldn't assume that what we are seeing in the sky is actually what is out there. Just like we learned not to assume that apples fall down because everything except fire and helium go down. And we learned not to assume that time everywhere is the same.
There is an incorrect fundamental assumption that we are missing somewhere. I think a lot of scientists would acknowledge that possibility. The problem is that we have labeled this assumption "Dark Matter." The label implies that we know something about it and that it has gravity. I have a real problem with people labeling things they don't understand. It's the reason we have racism, among other bad things.
In short, if scientists would stop using the term "Dark Matter" and start saying "we have some cool ideas but we really don't know what the fuck is going on so if you have any other cool ideas let us know" then I would happily shut the fuck up.
I'm not going to build on what LeSedna said, because it seems like the problems pinpointed there have been covered enough already. What remains now is a matter of cleanup.
First, asking a child what to do is in all honesty a pretty stupid thing to do. It seems wise and 'outside the box' to New-Age pseudointellectual wankatrons who don't have a clue of their own, but when it comes to something that simply requires - not 'suggests', not 'is helped by', simply *requires* - technical prowess that was infeasible to all but maybe a half-dozen people born before 1900, there's not much to say.
What do I mean by that? Let's make sure I'm not just jerking off to how hard some mathematics is, yes? When you have something pseudophilosophical, like 'how to be happy' or 'how to enjoy the sound of poo hitting the toilet bowl' or 'why blue is better than red', there's more subjectivity and touchy-feely stuff than 'symmetrizing the stress-momentum tensor', whether or not one of those is in one way or another objectively harder than the other. In a not-obviously-related way, one of those questions is difficult to solve and the other is even more difficult but still within the realm of thought where we can check our answer. This is a problem with pop-science stuff in general - although a sentence you read out of a Brian Greene book may be as verbose or as computationally demanding as something out of a feng shui book, one of those sentences has deep technological requirements that have been carefully recrafted and reinterpreted for the layman and the other is feng fucking shui and therefore utterly useless cocksweat in the grand scheme of things.
It may seem like "we have some cool ideas but we really don't know what the fuck is going on so if you have any other cool ideas let us know" is a good idea, but consider it from a more forum-related perspective:
You have Dave Mustaine's cellular number (or your other favorite metal legend, I'm not even going to bother guessing more carefully than that), and you tell him that you have this absolutely brilliant idea for a song that could totally revolutionize everything and starts off BOOM bung dung doop WEEDLYWOO dundundunTHWAAAAAARTHPTHBTBTLBTPH chuggachugga and then goes into a bitching-ass chorus about the government not being totally badass. In theory that could go well, but there are some factors preventing that sort of thing from being the canonical songwriting procedure:
(1) You've generally not shown any prowess whatsoever in the general field of writing cool songs, so his motivation for believing you over anyone else with his contact information is shot and therefore his time to spend on you is quite limited to a fraction of the general free time he has to piss about doing what other people have told him to do (which, by the way, is not particularly 'rock star', all things considered)
(2) Although your 'idea' might lead to some revolution in something somewhere somehow, you've left out so much actual detail that there's no way that poor Dave could possibly know whether or not you're on to something without considering all possible songs with that general description in a form that is near the end of the songwriting process and able to survive quite a bit of testing to see if it's better than some other random string of words from some other random guy who told him what he should play, and at the end of the day he could have more easily just smashed the next Hangar 18 together without your help, gotten the best parts of your ideas, possibly hit the same general outline, and not have to spend days trying to reverse-engineer some random crank's inane rambling to get there.
So... the first seems wibblety-wobbley, because maybe you're the next Stephen Sondheim and anyone ignoring you may be an absolute imbecile. Let's assume the best of all possible worlds for you and consider only the second for now: you have some idea, and put into some phrasing it could be nice, but the technical stuff behind it is not at all worked out.
How is this a problem? Well, physicists don't start a hypothesis by imagining how they'd explain something to a layman before working out the details (and if for a moment you think that this is a fault, I must remind you that this is exactly the kind of thing that seems to have made you distrust a few fundamental things here and there), so you can't just start with the civilian overview and field the rest of the questions earlier - in general, with a good idea you have the technique and the detail pretty well sorted before even thinking about 'dumbing it down' for anyone but the five people in the world who know how to pronounce all of the words you're saying. There's the first immediate problem with making anything 'layman-friendly' - if physics was as easy as football, everyone could contribute... but if you can show me a single football coach whose job involves anywhere near as much pure mathematics, let alone the interaction between mathematics and reality, I will gladly destroy quite a bit of what is considered possible about surfaces in three-dimensional space and smoothly eat my own arsehole from the inside out. It's not happening. Even if you perfectly concocted the exact sentence that a well-spoken physicist would use three decades later to convey the basic idea to nonphysicists, it would be such an absolute bastard to work from that sentence to the ideal physical principle that you might as well have just said 'maybe our balls are actually bluer than they appear' for all the help you've given. Your pipe-dream of theoretical physicists essentially being overglorified telethon phone attendants to any random person who thinks that some sentence he squished together *could be a physics idea somehow* is both completely ignoring the incredible creativity of the experts and the field *and* ignoring the most basic technical considerations needed to even see if something predicts anything but a random explosion of reality as we know it.
In short, you make it sound like there's no real work to come up with strings, dark matter, or whatever else is bothering you... and you still have simply no idea of the magnitude of the idea that you don't have. This is, simply put, serious business, and to pretend that, say, dark matter is a cop-out and not a well-thought-out, seriously-investigated hypothesis concocted by the finest minds that didn't go into pure mathematics is an insult to the best of the entire human race.
Next thing... 'dark matter' and your unwillingness to allow such a concept to have a name. Remember what stupid-sounding word was tossed out the window around the time Einstein was ripping off Poincare and getting mugshots and abundant tail as a result? (The 'aether', in case you don't, where of course the 'a' and first 'e' are actually glued together because fuck typing things easily.) That was a gigantic load of wank, as we see now - A CENTURY LATER - but we still had to name the concept and figure out some ways of studying it before realizing that. Welcome to science! Hindsight only works behind us! In your bizarre worldview everything should be buggered completely, but through the miracle of doing physics somehow it's not!) Even if dark matter is obviously absolute nonsense to second-graders in the next century, we'll still have needed to name it something in order to replace it with better ideas, and it's not like naming it has made it real or stopped people from questioning it - and, all things considered, the 'indirect evidence' is pretty strongly indicating exactly the kind of revolution you're expecting... 'indirect evidence' may seem to you like
"My girlfriend said 'cat', which begins with the letter 'c', which is also the first letter of 'condom', which she'd use if she were cheating on me, and if Satan were real she might cheat on me with him, and then she'd be impregnated with hellspawn if she weren't using a condom OH LOOK PLOT TWIST WATCH OUT CHRISTOPHER NOLAN WE HAVE DEVILBABIES AAAAA, so clearly she only said 'cat' because she's about to shove the apocalypse through her slutty pandemoniophiliac twat!"
but there's more going on than you seem to realize. Either dark matter is a thing of some sort, in which case BOOM!, or it's not, in which case we already have a nice placeholder for a super-simple oversimplification of what's really going on. Is that really so troubling? *THEY'RE JUST WORDS*.
Jef
