re: Dark matter and dark energy.

Well, from my strict reductionist perspective I see quantum physics as the source of an answer for every question with which we are presently perplexed. Reductionism commands a person to look for the base of everything.

Physics is currently stalled in two areas of study, quantum physics and relativity physics. Roughly speaking, quantum physics is the study of the extremely small and relativity concerns gravity and the macro world.

Frustration abounds in the physics community because these two areas of study can't be united. Of course, String Theory does seamlessly unite them on the blackboard but in the physical world it's a no go. Edward Witten is the leading string theorist and his work will most likely solve this problem.

So, the deeper we go into the micro world the more answers we find for macro world questions. That's why I'm such a strong reductionist. I think of science and reductionism as synonyms. We can't understand anything unless we know and understand its parts.

Of course, there's a limit to what we can see as we go deeper into the micro world. Our ability to detect the very small is currently limited to the Planck Length, or 1.6 x 10 to the -35 m or about 10 to the -20 times the size of a proton.

From Wikipedia: The strings of string theory are unimaginably small. Your average string, if it exists, is about 10 to the -33 centimeters long. That's a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. If an atom were magnified to the size of the solar system, a string would be the size of a tree.

We may never be able to detect something so small. And strings themselves may be composed of even smaller units. However, we may be able to detect their effects. Using Edward Witten's math we may be able to understand their roles in the quantum world and then the quantum world's effects on our classically sized environment.