Warp wrote:
>   Says the person who takes expansion of the universe and dark energy
> with a grain of salt, and seriously considers alternative theories...

Or, as an alternate way of saying this, when Sharper Image sells a 
device that lets me park three cars in a two-car garage by using dark 
energy, I'll suspect very strongly the cosmologists have figured it out. :-)

Now, I know very little about cosmology, and that's probably where my 
skepticism comes from. But as far as I know, there's really only one 
major measurement made post-hoc that supports these theories. 
"Inflation" hasn't *predicted* anything, and "dark energy" hasn't 
*predicted* anything. Dark matter hypothesis predicted that we'd see 
colliding galaxies with the dark matter "splashing" off, as was in the 
news recently.

I'd be happy to hear about other things that the hypotheses of 
"inflation" or "dark energy" have predicted that were observed only 
after those hypotheses were proposed. It would greatly reduce my 
skepticism. :-)

> We cannot measure here and now.

We can. We can make predictions of what we'll find based on the theory, 
and then when those predictions come true, it supports the theory. Such 
as using genetics of different whales to figure out what the genetics of 
the first cetacean would have been like, then finding the land animal 
with the closest genetics, then digging around for fossils there and 
finding fossils of cetaceans with feet near the shore.

Kind of like how Young Earth Creationists have a difficult time figuring 
out where the oil is before they start drilling, ya know.

(To be completely clear, I'm not certain that evolution explains 
*everything*. But it clearly (to me) explains the majority of what we're 
seeing going on, with a large variety of correct predictions.)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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