What's gone wrong with the universe lately?

It seems that not too long ago cosmologists had it all sorted out. A few billion years back the universe started from a point, there was a big ol' KABOOM and the universe spread out from that point, continuing to expand to what we see today.

It was simple. It seemed to fit the observations. Case closed. Right?

Lately though we've got all this crap about mysterious dark matter and dark forces--dark energy and whatnot. And now, to top it off we've got "dark flow" seemingly attributable to something outside the universe!

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080923-dark-flows.html

These days cosmologists are sounding less like scientists and more like kids who've watched too many Star Wars episodes. What the hell's gone wrong with the universe and what's it going to take to fix it?

Originally posted by leisurelysloth
It seems that not too long ago cosmologists had it all sorted out. A few billion years back the universe started from a point, there was a big ol' KABOOM and the universe spread out from that point, continuing to expand to what we see today.

It was simple. It seemed to fit the observations. Case closed. Right?

Lately though we've got all this cr ...[text shortened]... What the hell's gone wrong with the universe and what's it going to take to fix it?

String theory.

Originally posted by sonhouse
String theory.

So the solution to the fact that the universe has become incomprehensible is some crazy mathematical mumbo jumbo that nobody in their right mind could possibly ever understand.

Originally posted by leisurelysloth
So the solution to the fact that the universe has become incomprehensible is some crazy mathematical mumbo jumbo that nobody in their right mind could possibly ever understand.

quantum was mumbo jumbo too. until they figured it out.

string theory might or might not be useful. research grants have to be spent someway. so they look into it, they might discover something or not. they are researching.

Originally posted by leisurelysloth
Lately though we've got all this crap about mysterious dark matter ......

In other words you have only recently reached an the necessary education level to find out about dark matter. There is nothing recent about it. The concept is at least as old as 1933.

Alot of quantum theory has been proved by experimentation... but before that it was just theory like all this new stuff... and even if they can't prove the new stuff the theoretical excercise will still be useful.

The difference is it's more advanced than the layperson can understand.

I only recently learned about something I think they called a "lattice". It was in answer to a question: "What is the biggest thing in the universe?" The answer was some sort of structure out there holding space (or is it space-time?) together. It was only on for about 3 1/2 minutes, so I didn't have a lot of time to digest it--but I had never heard of it, even in all the dark matter/dark energy discourse.

Oh, they also mentioned something later about space "foam"...can anyone tell me what that stuff is/was?