The arrogance and the ignorance...

I've just been watching a rather interesting edition of Horizon on BBC2, "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?". It details how little cosmologists actually know, and how so many conjectures, without any explanation or proof, have been assimilated into the "standard model" which purports to explain the universe. This gives me the perfect opportunity to show off my own insights in a poem I wrote a few years ago. It may be completely off the mark (I am not an astrophysicist), but maybe not...

Through a bottle, darkly

When we look back in time into the sky,
How do we know our lines of sight are ‘straight’?
Perhaps, through all our telescopes, we scry
A cosmos bending under its own weight.

Klein’s bottle is a never-ending loop
Where 3-D space curves inside-outside-in,
A four-dimension ‘Möbius hula-hoop’
With all points sitting on a single skin.

When we look back in time into the black,
Do we re-see the self-same points in space?
Does substance reappear along the track,
Back-formed and in its former time and place?

Dark energy and matter need not be
If all there is is less than we can see!

© Chris Young

Everything clearer now? Now all I have to do is explain why galaxies spin with near-uniform velocity despite relative distance from the centre and what exactly gravity is...