Forget dark matter

If I were to give you some data on an inside leg measurement and various other figures and angles taken from the drawing below then you would probably be able to come up quite easily with the conclusion that what you are dealing with is a pair of trousers. It would be easy because thats the perspective that we have on trousers.


However as I was seated
this morning I observed my trousers in a heap around my ankles and it occurred to me that the measurements and angles of the same pair of trousers but collapsed and seen from the top would make it no easy thing for some one to identify a pair of strides from the mathematical data only. Suppose that data of this type was the latest data on background radiation in the universe fresh in from Hubble. I imagined the best scientific brains being totally stumped by the mysterious figures and what it could mean for cosmology. Then somewhere, perhaps in an observatory high up in the Andes, a spectacled geek pouring over a computer print out of the data, his jaw dropped exclaims in wonder. "My God - its a pair of trousers!"