Yeah, that's the whole Dark Matter/Dark Energy theory thing, the basis of which they were doing experiments on at FermiLab. A lot of that got scaled back with budget cuts though. A lot of research budget in high energy physics got cut, and largely on the promise of CERN and the LHC and the results it was supposed to get, but they had troubles getting it online, and I'm not even sure of its status at the moment. So yeah, we've dropped off on working on all that at the moment. The problem with pure science is pure scientists. To them "the answers" are the result. That doesn't sell well though when competing for funding with programs that are trying for a more tangible result. When you need billions of dollars to look for a Higgs bosun which may or may not be there and they who hold the money ask "Why do we need to know this?" they come back with "To help us understand the nature of the Universe, so we understand how it all works...", and that doesn't work well. It leaves it up to the imagination of the person they are asking to invest money to guess at the return. I've never seen a business prospectus written like that. They need to develop scenarios of what can be done with this information in a practical sense once we have it.
