Perhaps with some justification.
“…you can take a sheet of paper [an 'infinite' sheet of paper] and you can roll it up and make a cylinder, and you can roll the cylinder again and make a torus”.
So, how do you role up an infinite sheet of anything? Surely, to do that you would have to bring two edges together, and past each other. How do you find the edges of an infinite sheet? If you could do this, would it still be infinite when you had rolled it up?
That to me is a very weak argument a finite anything can be infinite it's just in the word definition which is what the above plays on. Running on a treadmill can be infinite yet the treadmill is most definitely finite.
What is really happening is Cosmology probably had 40 or 50 years of time when they dominated science and developed lots of theory that was only testable with other cosmology observations. Now with the discovery of the Higgs and the installation of the Standard Model and advances in QM many of those theories are now running into problems with hard lab based results.
Dark matter is a prime example where the moment you install the standard model there really isn't a huge number of ways for Dark Matter to come about and most end in results that look nothing like our actual universe.
Tommaso did another fine report on the latest CMS results showing just how well the standard model is holding.
http://www.science20.com/a_quantum_diaries_survivor/new_cms_results-147752
