Chronos said:
Haisch and Rueda are clowns by my accounting system.
By your accounting system, everybody that explores options to the standard model are clowns.
NASA evidently did not believe that these guys were clowns, since until NASA's funding got slashed by the Bush Administration, they financed work done by California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics to explore the
mechanics of gravitation under the auspices of the Breakthrough Propulsion Project. The GR model of gravitation as "the curvature of space-time induced by the presence of mass" is a
mathematical representation of the
effects of gravitation. It does not speak to the mechanical processes through which gravitation arises, although since stars and planets do not know how to do the math (so they will know how to behave under GR), we should reasonably assume that there is a universal mechanical process that every massive body follows without exception. We cannot find the mechanical process if we limit ourselves to what is already accepted in GR, because the process is
not addressed by GR.
Here's a BIG clue. One thing deliberately left unaddressed by Einstein (as he explained in his 1920 address at Leyden) was the nature of the EM ether. He was absolutely certain that an EM ether had to exist to allow the propagation of EM waves through space, but since he had not managed to incorporate it into GR, he punted, and said that it must have NO sensible properties. He needed a dynamical gravitational ether to mediate gravity, so he modeled that, but he found irresolvable inconstencies with the EM ether, and needed to make the EM ether insensible so he could ignore those inconsistencies. I believe that he either neglected to consider (or found the idea unappealing) that the gravitational ether is
also the EM ether. This simplification (one ether mediates both the gravitational and the EM forces) will remove Einstein's "no sensible properties" problem, and it will allow us to model the differences in the speed of light through the vacuum fields and the refraction of light through those fields using just classical optics. We will be able to determing the amount by which the vacuum fields are polarized by the presence of mass by studying the mass/luminosity of the visible matter of clusters and quantifying the lensing effects produced by that cluster.
Haisch and Rueda haven't gotten to this state yet, although others are closer. A key result from the Athena project at CERN will be the measurement of the gravitational infall rate of antihydrogen. If it differs from that of hydrogen (likely due to matter-antimatter attraction) then we have a natural, universal mechanism by which the virtual particle/antiparticle pairs of the vacuum are polarized and densified. Just with what we already know to exist (matter, virtual particle pairs, and EM waves for the basics) we can model the universe with no DM, DE, gravitons, Higgs bosons etc. I know you're laughing at me, Chronos, and are preparing to write another dismissive (cowpie, crackpot, clown, etc) riposte, but I urge you to step back and take a look at the situation before letting loose. This solution lies at the convergence of too many problems to be ignored.