Margaret Wertheim on Fringe Physics

Margaret seems to have fooled herself into believing she respects non scientists, but the truth rings loudly with her choice of wording. Repeatedly stating that only a small elite group of people are capable of understanding modern science. That 99.9 something percent of people cannot understand the theories scientists are grappling with. That is false and insulting. I may not have the education to produce new theoretical works, but I sure as hell have the intellect to understand the general implications of just about any theory put forward. Be it general relativity or string theory. It doesn't take a world class education to understand that gravity behaves as a warping of space or that strings help overcome the problems arising with point particles at planck distances because of the turbulent nature of space at such small scales. I would need such an education to formulate such theories. Which is what the trailer park scientist doesn't get. That beautiful abstract contemplation of the universe has to be compared constantly with the all of the measurements and mathematics that were laid down by previous scientists. Thats what you get from education. Not the ability to understand theory, but the knowledge and framework to build your own solid theories. That being said I also find it annoying that you imply that none of the ametuer scientists will contribute anything to the scientific community. I agree a smoke ring theory of the universe is probably useless from a scientific standpoint, but ametuer astronomers regularly make observations that are useful to the scientific world I'm sure they're not the only ametuers punching above their weight compared some of these people you pretend to admire.

I'm not sure where I fit on your ladder of educated or ignorant; but I do have a degree, with a minor in physics, and have kept up with the latest in magazines like "Scientific American" and Science News"
Maybe that makes me too educated to be interesting in my speculations.
But, one thing I'd like to point out to people who are discussing the great issues such as the origins or the universe is that time slows down in the presence of mass. That means that, running the expansion of the universe movie backwards, time goes more an more slowly around the time of the Big Bang. It would completely slow to zero at the point of infinite mass. So, it is absurd to ask what came before. There is no before. Not only space and mass/energy, but time were born at that juncture.
Or, one could speculate that, since, from the point of view of something in that high-density state, time is going along at its normal rate, there is no beginning point, but a continuous movement. Where is the beginning point on a sphere? Either there is none, or it doesn't matter.
Then, there is the idea that, rather than the universe always expanding, one might suppose that all the matter is shrinking. Perhaps some experiment can be formulated to test this, but who knows what?
Personally, I don't accept the existence of dark matter, because it is just another hypothesis to explain the behavior of galactic rotations. It is an example of our being befuddled by the language we use, and tripping over our own tongues, so to speak.. I would prefer to accept the notion that, slight modifications of our theories could account for this without resorting to exotic matter or energy.. Perhaps the force of gravity does not work as the inverse of the square of the distance. Why the square? perhaps it is the 1.999 something. that would explain the rotations.
So, there is no time before time, and there need be no oddball undetectable particles.
I like symmetry. the E8 theory puts it all int a nice chart, like a periodic table of the particles and the energy quanta. . .