One of the big problems with all the "universe" theories is they really can't explain why gravity isn't stronger. To explain it they've invented something called dark matter that you can't see/measure/etc...
To explain that they've added in multiple universes and/or dimensions. Last time I really gave a shit we could prove something like 11 dimensions with math. Probably they are up to more.
There are a lot of concepts that start out this way and end up being fundamental. Take Energy, for example. It didn't exist as a concept until the late nineteenth century, and now its conservation is one of the few fundamental laws that spans scientific disciplines. You can't "see" it, per-se, but that doesn't mean it lacks ontology.
Fields are another example. In the beginning, Electricity and Magnetism were explained chiefly through forces, then investigators (Faraday, and later Maxwell) realized that there was something more fundamental than the observable forces, and that this field could do a better job explaining what was going on. It wasn't long before they started to realize that these fields carried and stored energy, that even light was in some sense a perturbation in these fields.
These days, Quantum Field Theory views fields as having ultimate primacy, and particles merely as excitations in the fields themselves.
I just did a lab on dark matter and galaxy clusters. A lot of the theories we have right now are just from pure observation from here on earth. I think to figure out what causes cluster's to be hella more massive than they appear, we gotta find a way to actually measure properties in other ways besides the luminosity of stars. Cause I mean not everything shines.
You can observe dark matter concentrations using
Gravitational Lensing. Even though dark matter doesn't interact with light directly, its mass still warps space-time, curving the paths of light in space. This way, you can look for images of clusters and stars in the sky created by dark matter lenses and get a handle on some of the properties these dark matter concentrations might have. There are other experiments looking for dark matter as well, like the Sudan Mine detector in Minnesota.
Observing quantum events changes what they are doing. Same thing that happens when we try to observer animals - our presence changes their behavior.
This is the Copenhagen interpretation which gained widespread traction in the last half of the century, mostly because people like to use it to justify their bullshit mysticism. A new interpretation,
Decoherence, may solve a lot of these problems. It turns out that the interaction of quantum systems with their external environments probably explains why they settle into particular states. It doesn't require some sort of special observation for the states to change.
We should accept that a molecule can be in two places at once.... ie here and across the the other side of earth at the same time. See number one while you try to figure out how the fuck we know that for sure.
Sort of. Localization isn't the same in quantum as it is in classical physics.
We base most of our "theories" on invisible things we can't see, measure, or prove with out making up more invisible things
This is true if you're just talking String Theory, but if you're talking about Quantum Field Theory, or Condensed Matter Theory, or virtually anything else, I don't think its justified.
I need to digest that
