Indeed we are, we don't even have a good idea of what constitutes most of the mass in the Universe since dark matter does not interact with baryonic nor leptonic matter, and as to the nature of dark energy we are still essentially clueless.
Well, we can make negative energy now. However, it's an issue of power to make a sufficient amount. I am far from an expert, mind you. But I do know that we are centuries, at our current technological growth rate, of even beginning to understand how to do it.
As far as dark energy, all I know is that it exists....lol. I am not a particle physicist. And while we don't know the "meat" of dark matter, simply knowing it exists allows mathmetaical equations to account for unkowns, which opens up different avenues of theory and research.
The hints from the LHC are promising for a Higgs boson at ~130 GeV and if these observations are real then at least we are on the right path to the next level of understanding of particle physics, but I don't know enough to say what this would mean for cosmology. As far as I know we still don't have a way of testing string or brane theories so while they are theoretically eloquent they are not yet verified. But even if these theories are better understood in the future I don't know that this will translate into new technologies.
Higgs theory is VERY mixed in reception. They are trying to prove it out in particle accelerators, but are finding out they lack the power to generate enough velocity to match the mass needed to break it down to look for evidence of it. I'm not sure how much I personally agree with it either. It's akin to saying "The rain is the gods blessing us for killing our enemies" kind of theory. We know dark matter exists, because it's observable. We just don't know what it is comprised of. Kind of like we know gravity exists, but can't really explain it. Higgs basically said there must be some kind of unknown force at the sub atomic level. Although admittedly, it at least allows for math to move forward with different approaches to prove it out.
Recent observations of putative faster-than-light neutrinos are certainly interesting, but my understanding is that the observations are not strongly constrained and could still be explained by statistical error, so I reserve judgement on this.
Anything else you are familiar with? I certainly don't claim to have a comprehensive knowledge of the subject.
LOL....dude, I'm a robotics engineer. Most of what I know about physics (which is VERY minute), is from reading. For all I know, everything I've said was disproven yesterday.
