Don't worry -- I take no offense. I am not looking to make another move. What I am looking for is:
"GGI, that was an interesting sort of idea. Scientists considered things like that in the 1950s and got absolutely nowhere with it. Historically speaking, many of the great physics discoveries have come from ideas that would have sounded totally ridiculous at the time (such as what you are saying), but in this case the science world has tried everything and nothing seems to work. For the first time ever, history is not going to repeat itself. This, the next great discovery, is going to be the first one in history that does not completely shatter our current laws of physics. We know this because __Reason xxx__"
Okay... few things. First, the fact that you think that 'sounding ridiculous at the time' is itself a merit and not an accidental byproduct is a problem; second, the fact that you're taking the 'civilian' approach and seeing so little of what's going on before deciding how physics discoveries look means that you're even worse off than someone who goes into studying animals assuming they all saw Bambi and felt exactly like you did.
You have a fundamental gap lying where an *actual* perspective on history should go - at best, you've done a half-arsed job at reading various accounts of the history of physics and taken that massive oversimplification as delivered truth and not gone further into what led to anything going anywhere. You might want to think that you have a broader view of the grand scheme of things than the average person, but as it turns out you're too short-sighted to see how short-sighted you're being with your approach.
People's relentless devotion to the currently accepted laws of physics is like people in the 1600s saying the Law of Falling Bodies is correct because waterfalls go downward. When are people going to realize that it's not working?
Your relentless devotion to the idea that somehow we're not already *throwing everything out* is what's stopping you from being even slightly removed from *absolutely clueless*. As before, you're making some big show involving you and *nothing else in reality whatsoever* where you attack some figment of your imagination and pretend that you've conquered anything but something so stupid that anyone could have seen its faults. Once again, the only conflict is with your own invention, and the fact that you can't invent something of greater substance is far more an indication of your lack of ambition and creativity than anything else.
I have never heard anyone appeal to the 'Law of Falling Bodies'. *Ever*. We're so far past your petty strawmen that even your attempts to make physics sound outdated are themselves outdated!
Everyone agrees that the elusive solution to this Dark Matter issue is going to be a huge physics discovery, one of the greatest ever.
No, not necessarily. It could be absolutely stupid and blindingly obvious. Again, you totally lack any kind of perspective on what's really going on but you pretend to be farther advanced in some way than *the actual physicists*.
We call that 'being stupid', for what that's worth. If you won't put the slightest effort into seeing what you're fighting, how do you expect anything but *being pummeled in the face* to happen? You're fighting a losing battle against reality and all those who study it.
Like Electromagnetism (this is how big discoveries are almost always made):
"In 1820, Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851), Danish physicist and chemist, discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism while preparing a lecture. He noted a compass needle deviated from the magnetic north whenever the electricity generated by the battery was alternately turned on and off."
^That is how great discoveries are made.
That's actually a brief biography that shows nothing whatsoever about how discoveries are made. Dolt.
They are not made by tying together a bunch of theories that don't work. They are made from people who say, "wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. Something is fundamentally wrong with our understanding of how the world works." Historically speaking, this is almost ALWAYS the case. Yet, with dark matter, no one seems to acknowledge that possibility.
First off, when reformulating universal laws of everything we are *always* starting with 'this doesn't making sense' AND THEN THROWING SOMETHING AWAY UNTIL MAYBE - PERHAPS ONLY IN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND SIMPLE OF POSSIBLE WORLDS BUT STILL MAYBE - something makes sense. We then proceed without things that can't be added back in to produce a plausible theory of anything, and see what happens.
From your statement we can conclude that you know almost exactly nothing about how any modern physics is done. This is no news. The troubling thing is that you seem to see yourself as some sort of revolutionary who could lead physics out of some quagmire of your imagination into some promised land that is also entirely of your imagination and save us from our entirely fictitious addiction to not considering enough of the possible ways to understand the universe better.
You have been told this repeatedly, but somehow *despite knowing nothing whatsoever of the material at hand* you speak as if you have intimate knowledge of what every researcher anywhere is doing about the subject at hand! Either you've been playing STUPID so effectively - and yes, the capitalization was ABSOLUTELY necessary - that you could actually be a legitimate expert sparking conversation in the middle of absolutely nowhere, or you're DIM and you haven't been smacked upside the head enough lately. The fact that you haven't seen that 'Dark Matter' is a catch-all for a range of different things that could help us better understand the universe, that you seem to think that we've spent every cent of our mad scientist money on making some Dark-Matter-Detectatronifier and are just trying to mask a negative result, indicates perfectly well your total incompetence in anything within a several-university-degree radius.
Actually, the MOND folks do. They are the only ones in the community who are going the right direction.
Right, and you can say that modified Newtonian methods are 'the right direction' based on the massive experimental evidence in their favor, the fact that Newtonian mechanics have never left us even slightly wronged ever, and that generally everything simple has always been perfect. (Granted, I'm going along the same tracks as your deranged trains of thought, but I figured that since you've inflicted your massive incompetence in the field in my general direction that fair was fair and I'd be all but required to subject you to a little bit of how frustrating it is to handle a clearly fucking useless buffoon who sees himself as a deity in a situation where he actually is about as useful as the average polished pebble.)
Let's just ignore that when it actually comes to predicting behaviors of something simple and straightforward to your dark-matter archnemesis
even the people with whom you're pretending to align yourself are having some dark-matter-related troubles.
That's how science works. Some jackass has a Wikipedia entry dumbed down for him and as a result is magically a goddamn expert who can decide who's actually on the right track in one of the most difficult things humanity has ever done. That all makes perfect sense. Let's go with that, instead of having half a fucking clue what we're talking about, working out the actual calculations around observed facts and seeing what actually predicts things, and generally doing anything that has ever worked ever, because someone was able to name a few letters that happen to refer to a fringe theory that is pushed into increasingly smaller corners by further investigations and insights. That's not stupid.
Jef
