I could talk to Carl about theoretical things. He would patiently listen as I went on about monoids and their relationship to simple iteration problems, standing with a smile on his face, nodding supportively as I waved my hands and got all excited at the whiteboard that was (conventiently?) hidden from the rest of the software team.
And we would talk about physics, which he studied in school and evidently missed.
One day I mumbled something under my breath about dark matter — how I thought it was a bit hokey. How in my (amateur!) opinion the term was not so much a theory of the universe as it exists but rather elegant hand-waving to explain something that no one knows quite how to explain. Like, oh … say … epicycles. Carl smiled and nodded politely, betraying no opinion on the matter one way or the other.
…
So today I’m reading this article interpreting Kuhn’s revolutions and paradigm shifts as applied to dark matter. And feast your eyes on this:
This is not a recipe for a scientific revolution, but for a thousand years of dark epicycles.
Huzzah!