Scientific Explanation

My friend Zephir asks what I find wrong with his physics. Let me give some examples of what I consider good scientific explanations and what I don't like about his.

What makes a good scientific explanation? The cosmos, and particularly the motion of the planets, has provided us with a couple of thousand year’s worth of explanations. Consider three:

(1)Copernicus. His explanation of planetary motion exemplifies some crucial features of a good scientific explanation. (a) It starts with two simple explanatory principles – the Earth and planets move around the Sun and the follow circular paths. It also has another crucial feature that will set the standard for all physics to come: it makes specific, quantitatively testable predictions. This last feature proved that the Copernican theory could not be quite correct and set the stage for

(2)Kepler. Kepler kept heliocentricity, replaced the circular paths with ellipses, and found specific laws relating the rates of motion of a planet along different portions of its path and relating the periods of the orbits to their semi-major axes. Kepler’s magnificent work set the stage for

(3)Newton, who showed that Kepler’s laws, and their counterparts for the newly discovered moons of Jupiter, could be understood as the manifestation of universal gravitation, the same force that makes an apple fall from a tree (and holds galaxies together).

Every one of these explanations embodied the following principles: (a) A clear geometric and quantitative model and (b) quantitative testability. The same principles, by the way, characterize Einstein’s model which refined and superseded that of Newton. When string theory (or some other quantum theory of gravitation) supersedes Einstein, it will be expected to pass the same tests.

Zephir has offered several (to me mutually incoherent) "explanations" of dark matter. http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2009/07/awt-approach-to-dark-matter.html

Here is one:

But we can use even more illustrative explanation, linked to dispersion of energy by background field of CMB photons formed by gravitational waves (GWs), which manifests like weak deceleration equivalent to product of Hubble constant and speed of light. This dispersion is direct manifestation of hidden dimensions on both large scales, both small scales, because it manifests as a shielding effect of these photons at Casimir force distance scale. We can say, Casimir force is a shielding effect of GWs, whereas the Pioneer anomaly is subtle deceleration effect caused by dispersion by GWs. Both these forces are result in violation of Newton law at small scales, which manifests itself by anomalous deceleration at large scales and as such it violates the equivalence principle of general relativity - it's as easy, as it is.

To me this looks like a word salad of phrases taken from currently popular articles on cosmology and physics. Does anybody have any idea what it means? Where are the principles upon which the explanation is based, and how are they woven into a coherent expanation? They aren't. What about "dark matter" is it trying to explain? And where is there any specific capable of quantitative test? In short, I don't think this "explanation" explains anything, not even what it is that it's trying to explain.

I would consider this an extreme example, but some of the same traits exist in the so-called explanations the evolution doubters.