If dark energy actually exists. I have a problem with making up something which has no experimental basis, simply to make the equations fit. I know it worked with neutrinos, but that doesn't make it good science.
Cosmologists should make an active effort to tone it down. It's a speculative field, and shouldn't be represented as anything else. If journalists are blowing it out of proportion, cosmologists should speak out against it. Meanwhile, it gives the rest of science a bad name.
Agreed, but it's the science popularizers who are really at fault. Scientists are human beings, too, subject to all the ego temptations and failings of the average Joe Sixpack.
I'm sure others will have views that contradict mine but I've watched for years as this situation has evolved. I was a long-time subscriber to National Geographic until I finally cancelled due to the magazine's pimping of the latest and most sensational theory as Absolute Fact, complete with "artists conceptions" and sleazy melodramatic writing.
There may have been others earlier (Isaac Asimov's politically-tinged rigidly atheistic science popularizations come to mind) but one of the great abusers was Carl Sagan and his coterie of Lefties. He parlayed his own political views into massive media hype via his PBS series, appearances on the Johnny Carson Show, his books and doomsday theories like Nuclear Winter. I was a charter member of the Planetary Society but opted out when I realized I was helping fund what was essentially a left-wing political "front" group.
The phenomenon has spilled over into most scientific fields. It's particularly noticeable to me in my special interest in paleontology/archaeology where most professional publications have a "political correctness" test for publication. Many tenured lefties have textbook royalties and academic reputations that depend on killing off or blocking any competing theories. We even have such travesties as Kennewick Man where government and a protected minority join forces to sabotage free scientific inquiry.
Again the mass media, the left-wing bureaucracy and academic Marxism have co-opted the search for objective researchd and intellectual inquiry.
I understand that dark energy is a construct invented to explain the unexplained...that there is no observational evidence for dark matter. Have you heard this as well?
But dark energy was an observational result, not some theoretical flyer.
The equations are well understood: the Einstein field equations from General Relativity. The observations are simple: how do the galaxies move, and how does that change with distance. Careful observations showed that those didn't line up. That leaves three possibilities: either the observations are wrong, the equations are wrong, or something else is out there.
The observations weren't wrong. They were reproduced by other groups. They were tested by different types of observational measurements. The effect is real.
Are the equations wrong? Perhaps, but, other than this one ugly fact, there was no theoretical basis for rewriting the theory. Nobody had any new approach that would fit all of the old data, and account for the cosmological observations.
There was an out, however. Preciently, Einstein included a free parameter in his equations: the Cosmological Constant. It was always assumed to be zero, and Einstein died thinking that it was a mistake to include it. However, the observational anomaly simply goes away if this is set to a certain non-zero value. This is what has been given the name "dark energy".
Dark energy is an independently testable hypothesis. It has already survived a number of observational tests, and others are planned. There are several models describing the nature of dark energy, and these are testable, too. Experiments are under construction or taking data as we speak.
It seems you object to some part of this approach. How should it have been handled differently?
It's a speculative field, and shouldn't be represented as anything else.
It's fundamentally an observational field.