And my average brain always thought and still thinks that instead of chasing these unicorn entities that still can't be found, maybe we should reconsider some things, as it seems to be the case presented here in this article.
And my average brain always thought and still thinks that instead of chasing these unicorn entities that still can't be found, maybe we should reconsider some things, as it seems to be the case presented here in this article.
That's basically what happened with the neutrino. Neutrinos were originally proposed in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to solve apparent violations of energy and momentum conservation in beta decay. He suggested that the missing energy and momentum were being carried off by some additional -- undetected and mostly undetectable -- particle. For a while, it looked like these proposed ghost particles might never be detectable, but Fred Reines finally managed it... in 1956, 26 years later.
So don't write off unicorn particles. Sometimes they're real, even if you have trouble detecting them.
Somewhat reminds me of aether...
There was a pattern in late-19th- through late-20th-century physics wherein someone noticed something weird, said "hey, if X were true, it'd be kind of weird, but it would explain it all", then people went out and looked for evidence of X. In many, many cases, people did indeed find X, some closely related X', or at least got strong evidence in favor of something else Y, which might have disproved X but at least settled the matter.
This has not happened with dark matter or dark energy. The questions still remain open, with no good evidence for any explanations.
So... what I'm saying is, don't think less of people for trying to explain things, just because they tried and it didn't work out yet. You're seeing the scientific method play out right now: there is a whole lot of wrong. There was a lot of wrong in the old days, too, but we weren't around to see it; only the successes got passed down.
The other problem is that nothing else really fit… until now. Science works, turns out.
I mean obviously not, I just don't understand the thought process behind coming to the conclusion that it's the professional physicists who must be wrong or have failed to reconsider something and not the layperson whose knowledge about the thing is dwarfed in comparison.