Why do I love Science Fiction?

      Lots of reasons actually. I love being able to stretch my imagination and explore interesting and esoteric concepts. I like extrapolating political and scientific developments into the future. I like the fact that we can take things from history and manipulate them into a story idea for a different colonial world. I like the idea of starflight and starships and maybe even faster than light travel. I know that last one is a stretch, but I love the idea. I am constantly watching the scientific circles for someone to come up with an idea that will allow for faster than light travel. I like the idea of a future for mankind, spread out among the stars, not just trapped on one world. I like that some of the concepts I've seen writer's come up actually blow my mind!

      Don't get me wrong, I like other genres, but there is something that resonates with me in science fiction. Maybe it's the science. Cosmology has always been fascinating to me. The funny thing is I think science fiction is what fueled my interest in science which went full circle and now the science fuels my interest in science fiction. I was in junior high when Star Wars came out and it changed my view of the world. I wouldn't be in the job I am now if not for that movie.

      However, I have issues with the current state of affairs in the scientific community. I see all over television and the internet how man has solved the problem with explaining why our universe seems to be flying apart faster and faster. Or that they are very close to understanding most of the fundamental laws of physics. Okay, you caught me, this is actually going to be a rant on physics. I have issues specifically with Dark Matter and Dark Energy. I think it's lackadaisical physics. We can't see it or actually find any of something that makes up 70% of our universe? I honestly think there are some fundamental mistakes being made by a lot of really smart people that seem to be jumping onto a bandwagon. It couldn't be that they screwed up the way they measured the bending of light from stuff that is really, really far away. It couldn't be that they have undervaluated the gravitation force.

      I saw someone post a list of different scientific theories that are the current hot topics a few weeks ago and ran a poll on how likely people thought each one was. The results of their unscientific poll were interesting. The views varied as much as the topics, and physicists and engineers and really smart people are far apart on their opinions. Stuff like Supersymmetry, Inflation, String Theory, Dark Matter, Higgs Bosons, and a couple of other things made the list. It just goes to show how far we are from really understanding a lot of these issues. These are hard issues that they are grappling with, no doubt, but what gets me is how they are being presented to the public as solved, when not one single thing on that list was solved to any degree of certainty.


http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/02/07/do-you-think-inflation-probably-happened/

      I'm going on the record to say I don't believe in Dark Matter or Dark Energy, at least not in the way it is being represented. I'm not saying we know every type of matter in the universe, but I don't think we are missing 70% of something. I think it's more likely that we are missing something in how we are measuring gravity. I think the red shifting of some of the black hole distance measurements are wrong. They are basing their entire theory off of a handful of extremely long measurements. These measurements are telling them we are missing an enormous portion of our universe somewhere. It seems much more plausible that they measurements are wrong. I've always been a science geek, and still love it, but come on folks!

      OK, rant over. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. We now return you to your normal blog.

Clear Ether!