An Argument With Gaping Black Holes

Remember the EQUANT? Remember PHLOGISTON?

Of course not. Unless you are incredibly nerdy, or perhaps attended one of 4 colleges in the world that still has its students read Ptolemy and Lavoisier, you are completely forgiven for your ignorance. You're not a scientist, right? That kind of specific knowledge is something only they have, right? The reality is, even professional physicists have no recollection of such mistakes of logic commited by their forebears.

Equant and phlogiston theory are two great examples of what happens when theorists are trigger happy to conceive of their theories as fact, or are willing to explain away the empirical data with unreasonable logic in order to avoid recognizing that just perhaps the premises they are working from are false.

There are a myriad of articles just like THIS ONE. Dark Matter is the new Phlogiston. Dark Energy is the new Equant.

The theory of Dark Matter arose out of the necessity to deal with obvious emperical data that depicted a gravitational pull that could not be explained by the existing model of the cosmos. In order to save the model, which worked on many other planes, physicists posited the existence of a material that by all stretches of the imagination cannot exist in the way that we know 'existence'. But they'd rather change metaphysics than physics.

The same goes for Dark Energy. They "are even willing to burn down their old sainted Einstein and revise his theory of gravity, general relativity, to make the cosmic discrepancies go away." This is to say, they are not willing to accept that they are viewing acceleration and motion from a different, relative plane of observation, but are willing to discard the reality of relativity in order to deal with obvious logical fallacies that their further theories present when taken to their natural conclusions. Some of them even recognize that they are betting long odds:

“We are placing a large bet,” Dr. Mountain said, “using our credibility as collateral, that we as a community know what we are doing.”

Even so, I fear the physicists of tomorrow will be standing on the shoulders of midgets. Midgets obsessed with darkness are leading us into another dark age.