Rebel_Ace, thanks for your explanations of what science is all about. By its very nature it takes wrong turns once in a while, and dark matter might turn out to be one of those wrong turns. But also by its nature it tends to be self-correcting, though sometime only on the scale of generations. I fear that the boondoggle of “global warming” (which really isn’t even science in the first place but politics with a lot of scientists drafted to man the barricades) is one of those wrong turns that will take a generation to correct.
Dark matter could fall much more easily (if it is indeed an incorrect explanation) because there’s a lot less invested in it.
The thing about these scientific uncertainties (and I’m going to except global warming in this, because it is an act of politics and not science) is that they tend to exist at the edges of our understanding. So while they provide a convenient target for the Luddites to point out the supposed failures of science, they do nothing to subtract credibility from the huge body of knowledge we already have and the large number of theories that have stood the test of time.
No one doubts, for example, that the universe is expanding. It wasn’t that long ago when that was one of the uncertainties of science. We’ve moved on. Now we’re dealing with some of the esoterica of that expansion and we’re running into some difficulties. There’s no surprise in that.
Science always runs into difficulties. Solving previously unsolved mysteries of Life, The Universe and Everything is difficult. If it was easy, we wouldn’t need scientists.