re: Dark matter and dark energy.

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What do you think of the guys who believe that our big bang was just a collapsing four dimensional star into a black hole from a higher dimensional universe? The math checks out and it explains how the temperature of the universe has been a steady constant everywhere we look. This temperature constant is the biggest driving force for inflation theory by the way.

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Actually, inflation theory explains the temperature constant we see everywhere we look in the Universe. Alan Guth developed the theory at Cornell in 1979.

From Wikipedia:

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As a junior particle physicist, Guth developed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1979 at Cornell and gave his first seminar on the subject in January 1980. Moving on to Stanford University Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1981, the idea that the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion that was driven by a positive vacuum energy density (negative vacuum pressure). The results of the WMAP mission in 2006 made the case for cosmic inflation very compelling.

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I do find these unorthodox theories interesting and you are right in that we will never advance our understanding if we aren't able to think outside the box.

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Unorthodox theories become orthodox very quickly when they stand up to challenges in the scientific community. Of course, the term orthodox doesn't mean the same as it does in religion. Every theory, concept, hypothesis and even every observation remains eternally subject to challenge in science.

I think that's why so many lay people have an aversion to science. They want absolute answers to their questions and science says, "Well, according to the evidence..." That seems to put a lot of people off. It seems to make them regard science as uncertain. That's most unfortunate. They're missing out on so much knowledge.