Why do people in the comments
always ignore that dark matter has way more evidence for it than just galaxy rotation curves (something very well explained in the article)? It's quite tiresome to read the same objections as if physicists somehow hadn't thought of them.
Reading this I realized that dark matter is starting to sound somewhat like the idea of the "ether". It's everywhere, it affects everything, but we can't see it or interact with it easily. It's somewhat different than the idea of the ether in that it is not thought to be a homogenous, pervasive field; instead it clumps around gravity. But it has some very ether-like aspects, maybe some we have not discovered yet. I always thought we abandoned the idea of an ether too soon. Why does it have to be evenly spread? Why does it have to respond to things like direction or EM waves? Maybe there are some simple experiments that could explore the idea of an ether/dark matter further. Pure speculation but that is my intuition.
Dark matter and dark energy are like what if there was no Einstein to discover relativity in early 1900s. We later continue to discover that gravity can't explain planetary motions correctly and therefore search for any explanation.<p>There are more laws of Physics waiting to be discovered. At least two big ones from what we currently observe.
My intuitive objection against dark matter is that it's basically an infinite amount of additional parameters to be fitted to the observations. Galaxy behaves weirdly? Add dark matter! It behaves as expected? It obviously has lost its dark matter! It stands to reason that for every possible observation, a particular DM configuration can be calculated.<p>I fail to see how dark matter could ever be falsified. The best potential replacement would be a theory that's simpler, but even then dark matter would probably explain the same observations.<p>The second question is: Is dark matter even matter if it only interacts via gravity? Wouldn't it be better named a property of space-time? That is, dark matter is a name for a recursive property of gravity?
I’m sure physicists have already thought about this but…<p>Has anyone considered modeling the effect currently explained via dark matter as a new kind of force or field? Like a distinct force generated by mass and its relationship to space time?<p>This wouldn’t be modified gravity but a proposal for an entirely new force whose effect is what we currently explain with the “fudge factor” of dark matter.<p>From the rough picture I do have of dark matter this force would be one whose relationship to distance is different from the usual inverse square law that governs forces. That would be weird but maybe no weirder than particles that can never be detected or MOND.
“Gravitationally only interacting dark matter” is sort of synonymous with “non-homogeneous spacetime”, or am I missing something?<p>Ah, yes, we also need to have some sort of bound energy, to balance Einstein’s equations. So, geons! <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geon_(physics)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geon_(physics)</a>
Am I right in thinking no one has been able to detect dark matter despite decades of attempts and research?<p>My understanding is that based on observations of what can be seen galaxies move as if there's move stuff in them??<p>If you hypothesis that this extra stuff is dark matter but can't detect it, how do you know it's real?<p>How have you ruled out all the normal stuff that doesn't give off light or stuff we can't see at the distances we're looking over? Like planets, rocks, dust, etc. Couldn't that stuff, which to my mind there would be vastly more of than stars, make up the extra gravity?<p>I'm aware I might be talking complete shit because I'm completely ignorant of the detail here. I would love an understandable explanation as to why that's wrong.
Always been interested in physics since I was a kid, so seeing this kind of stuff with dark matter and being able to understand how it'd be used in practical applications is fascinating to me.
Honestly, I hope so. The universe isn't totally amenable to our inspection, and it'd be nice to have an example that just stared us in the face all the time.
> This isn't evidence against dark matter's existence,<p>If the repeated failure to find tangible evidence of something in the physical universe isn't evidence against its existence, then you're no longer doing science, but rather playing some religious game
There's a chance dark matter is black holes created in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Some of these then merged into the supermassive black holes we see in the center of galaxies today.<p><a href="https://news.yale.edu/2021/12/16/black-holes-and-dark-matter-are-they-one-and-same" rel="nofollow">https://news.yale.edu/2021/12/16/black-holes-and-dark-matter...</a>
The only real nightmare is that a couple of Jesuits, the same guys who imprisoned Galileo for daring to suggest that the Earth revolves around the sun, came up with the Big Bang theory to explain cosmological redshift, thereby carving out another century of confusion and creationist psychosis under the psychological rule of their lawful-evil overlords in the vatican.
Ugh..this writing style, so unreadable.<p>I think the first paragraph could be rewritten better as:<p><i>"Dark matter puzzles us. Einstein's theory of gravity, plus known matter and radiation in the Universe, including particles and antiparticles described by the Standard Model, cannot explain cosmic observations. We need an additional gravity source - dark matter."</i>
I find it very interesting that every time Dark Matter, a theory that actual physicists largely find very convincing, comes up a bunch of non-physicist HNers come out to explain why it doesn't make sense.
I've been wondering for a while if light could be the thing that pushes away the boundaries of the universe and that's the reason for the expansion, if u can push a solar sail... anyways, I don't understand enough about this.
Nightmare for who? How hard it is to admit that their equations are incorrect? Even amateur like myself can see that the dark matter is adhoc value that was calculated in order to patch the standard model. There are several better alternatives but do we need to wait until these stubborn believers have passed away until the world can move forward?