The Top 40

...so, this Force surrounds us.

But is it sustaining??

Yea, I thought my cell phone was loosing bars way too fast.

Yes but will any of them bring us the judgment we so long for. The great and terrible day of the lord.

Sigh, they are so desperate to find dark matter/dark energy. It has to be out there! There's no evidence, there's no logic for them, but they have to exist! Why?

Because otherwise their theories fall to pieces.

Seriously, that's it. That's the entire reason they cling to this. Its the only hope their theories have of surviving reality. Invisible, undetectable magic stuff that defies physics.

Uh no. They have clear undisputed observational evidence that something that looks and act like matter, lots of it, great huge gobs of it, much more matter than we can count up by looking at the visible light from galaxies, is affecting the rotations of galaxies. So on the parsimony principle, if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, but it's an invisible duck ... geez, you gotta start somewhere. Theorizing it's invisible matter at least provides a starting point for investigation, but it also runs the risk of being unable to figure it out at all, because it's not really a duck but something else entirely. So what to do? Observe a little, theorize a little, observe some more, observations falsify your theories, keep trying new theories. Eventually (hopefully not that long!) you get to Sherlock Holmes territory, where once everything else is eliminated, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the correct explanation.

The evidence for dark energy is more equivocal. It looks like galaxies farther away are receding faster than if there wasn't some excess energy lying around pushing on everything.

All of which is intellectually interesting, but has no use for us right now. But some day, a thousand years from now, a bunch of folks are going to be d*** glad we kept incrementally plodding away all those years. Think of it as a gift we give to our children, and we tell them, if they can't use it, pass it on their own children, but they have to keep improving it.

Earth may be crashing through dark matter walls:

I was explaining this to my dog this but he kept looking at me like I had no idea what I was talking about.

I am uncomfortable with the significance given to the red shift observations in explaining the universes supposed expansion rates. It would seem that the light shift should not be constant in all directions, unless we are back to being the center of God's universe. Science has made great strides, but perhaps some of the hypotheses need reevaluation before universal acceptance as facts. I am also uncomfortable with Prof. Hawking's turning away from belief in God, but that's a whole other ball of (dark) matter.