Dark Ages

With Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Inflation, I can't help but think that in 50 years or so that cosmologists and physicists are going to snigger a bit about the lengths we would go to to protect a deep belief in relativity.

Perhaps a few years more than fifty, as doctrine often takes a long old while to shake off.

So you start with the axim that relativity is right - and absolute. Then find a bunch of observations that say that it doesn't seem to fit the whole picture... then rather than look for ways to refine it, start inventing undetectable stuff that makes it all hang together just like Einstein says.

Inflation - the universe looks the same in all directions. So what? Well the universe is too big for light to have traversed it in the time available considering how old it is. So there hasn't been time for all the everything to even out like that.

Dark energy and matter were invented to cater for the fact that there isn't enough gravity to hold galaxies together.

Of course there is no conceivable explanation for inflation, or for what dark energy and matter might be.

So if it was me, I would be saying "yes I know that relativity is excellent and all, but it doesn't work at small scales or high energies so should we seriously be focusing so much time and effort trying to make the universe fit to it (when quite frankly, it doesn't give a damn), instead of trying to find a theory that better matches observation? A theory being something testable remember?"