Vindication

     My interest in science and technology began in my youth and has persisted into my declining years. I have been fortunate to live during a period of great discoveries and technological advances. Being able to remember life before television and computers and before relativity and quantum mechanics were widely accepted has given me a before and after perspective.  There has been a dramatic shift in human relations, and our relationship to the Universe around us. Attempting to follow these advances as science and cosmology delved ever deeper into the secrets of nature has been a great adventure, but it has also been humbling.. As great minds introduced concepts and theories that I could only partially understand, presented in mathematical formulas that were beyond my abilities, I felt excluded from the joy of discovery and the true meaning of the secrets that the geniuses of the day were sharing with their peers. But as theory began to reach beyond experiment and experiments began to produce conflicting results, my reverence for the privileged few who understood began to diminish. Could it be that the long chain of theories and discoveries had weak links?. Could it be that my own thought experiments into the nature of space, time and matter might be as valid as those that now fill the text books?
     As great mathematicians and visionaries presented nature's truths as closing arguments to our search for a theory of everything, I wanted to be one of them but I was excluded by my lack of understanding; And then a miraculous thing happened. With the help of new observational tools our nearly perfected theories ran into an old nemesis; "gravity".
     We have been able to describe and measure gravitational effects in detail since Newton and have based most of our cosmological conclusions on an, assumed, understanding of gravity's relationship to visible matter and mass. But when careful measurements of the visible mass and rate of rotation of galaxies revealed that there wasn't enough visible mass to hold them together at observed rates of spin we couldn't, or wouldn't argue with the math. At the rate they were spinning the galaxies could only remain intact if there was much more gravity than the observable mass of the galaxy could provide. Unwilling to give up the dependent connection between mass and gravity scientists have begun a search for invisible matter in the form of ephemeral atomic particles and I feel vindicated.
     The great minds of our time never claimed omnificence but I assumed it, and now that I know it isn't true, I can continue my own thought experiments and continue to blog on such matters with less intimidation.