Thanks, a bit of fresh air...

Every time I hear "dark matter" (ok, I can accept that in exchange for a beer), or "dark energy" (holy s**t), I really think that cosmologist & co. are under-appreciating how embarrassing it is for the rest of the Physicists community. Seriously, name it "the mistery of cosmic expansion" or whatever, but Energy??

Simple read against the term "dark energy":

https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.396...

Active quantum physicist here. "Dark matter and dark energy are the two leading explanations so far" Absolutely not!! " Dark matter and dark energy have specific definitions" I call bullshit: They are placeholders for some "cosmic substance" (in some equation of state) for which you have no explanation . Dark energy is even more flagrant a name than dark matter (see arXiv:1002.3966 for a recognized expert's opinion)

Researcher in Spain, founder and stock-holder of a spin-off: this is how it's done here, the patents belong to CSIC (national science organization, state owned), and/or the university (most of them state owned). When the spin-off works and starts making money, they give researchers (inventors) like 30% of royalties (through CSIC's licensing of its patents to the spin-off). CSIC can also become (minority) stock-holder, but it does not happen often. Still, most of the money goes to stock-holder researchers when the spin-off is bought by a major player, being royalties a really small part of the benefit produced by the publicly funded research.

evidence please?

LOL. Playing adult games with baby toys? Sure you do not even begin to grasp the computational tasks that are to be done in order to make a 5 sigma discovery of such heavy particle. You probably have a desktop-level knowledge of OSes, dont you? you could check the numbers, like data flow, amount of storage, flops etc which are needed in CERN...

sorry to wake you up from your nice dreams, Linux is the only tool used in serious science, unless propietary hardware suffers from the windows lock-down. That's why you'll see more windows boxes in labs than in theory departments (in fact it is rather hard to see a theorist using anything but linux)

religion does not need any other nail...the only place left for god right now is just as a designer of the Lagrangian of the standard model, don't you agree?

(senior quantum physicist)
"may be one of the most important scientific discoveries ever"
BS. Science does not evolve by critical jumps made by one person in one tiny micro-region of science space. It evolves by hordes of scientists opening new fronts all over. (comment: it might well be the most expensive and publicised in the whole history of science, though)

"Is the particle's discovery just on the fringe of common scientific knowledge"
Isn't that 100% redundant? every discovery is at the fringe by definition.

Some days ago I was telling a friend that every time my parents come with a "hey, have you heard about (...) scientific discovery?" it takes me at least 10 minutes to relate the newspaper's title to the real news, even if the news belong to my field of research. Even if journalists were not interested in sensationalizing the news, and even if they were not complete idiots, which I am sorry to know they are, they could NEVER post reasonable scientific news, because they do not understand the content. No matter how much you try to explain the Higgs mechanism, lay people are never going to understand it, you need the maths for that, no way around. They could grasp some fairy-tale-ishly drawn picture of an approximate explanation, but never the reality. This is such an obvious concept to people who are expert at a given field: you can only understand what you know about, in other fields you are just like a little baby wandering in the dark.

But, hey, let's keep with the false illusion that being mediocre and ignorant is no problem at all.

when energy ceases to be the problem, entropy will. You just cannot process infinite energy in a given volume. There is space left to wonder what the next major disaster will be.

those that are left unresearched because some bigots have decided it is not a good investment

"...nutter branches on *both* the left and..."

Lol. Left in the US? that's so much fun....even in Europe you have a hard time to find the left. We are so used that capitalism 'works well' during the last decades that we forgot what the Left is.

from what I know, all that is based on heavy numerical simulations (prone to errors in the assumptions, lack of more thorough numerics, etc). The simulations are based on parameters determined from measurements made from distances longer than those that will be reached with this new probe, and on assumptions also extrapolated from everything observed "from here". Summed up, that explanation could be right or completely wrong. We have to measure more and from smaller distances.

LOL. You only read that book in your whole life, didn't you?

yes, and keep also a class for explaining things about santa claus, etc.

It's funny that you feel this way about conspiracy theories (I mean US people), because the subject transforms into either not believing *at all* in conspiracies, or believing *all* of them. Don't you think the world is more complicated? Don't you think that with your attitude you'll be missing real complots when they happen? Oddly enough, this attitude is only present in the US, any idea why?