Most people with a high school education have been taught a minimal amount of skepticism about "fill in the blank" type science, like spontaneous generation or the aether. In this case, skepticism means that our STEM education worked as intended and we should celebrate that IMO.<p>I was pretty skeptical about dark matter until I watched this presentation by Sabine Hossenfelder (she's a great explainer of science, IMO): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4sw3-__pGo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4sw3-__pGo</a><p>I think that she did a better job of explaining why we should be open to the idea of dark matter, than the original article did.
Dark matter skeptics believe, in effect, that everything that interacts with gravity also interacts with electromagnetism. They tend to believe this <i>really strongly</i>, but I've never heard anyone give a reason for it. It's a strangely abstract thing to be so dogmatic about.
Let us imagine the view of a "normal person". Pop open a science textbook, and it will likely suggest the scientific method requires you to state your hypothesis, and test it as best you can.<p>So this normal person looks to see if this has happened, finds there are several rival theories, and no experiment done on Earth had produced results. Naturally, they start to doubt.
They have some equations that never ever match the observed data.<p>They like their equations, so they call the difference dark matter (which varies in space and time, as we expect). It is quite ridiculous if you think about it, and also is the fact, that they can get away with it.<p>I am waiting eagerly how will this turn out. (Well only the "dark matter exist", or the "Einstein equations are so useful that they create a meaningful dark matter concept with properties, even that they are incorrect" cases are interesting, if say MOND wins, that would be less amusing.)
Dark Matter is unintuitive for the layman (which I am), and extremely intuitive for the physicist, which I suspect is where the origins of this problem lie. This article is another in long line of <i>you just don’t get it man</i>, which is true. Sabine Hossenfelder has some great videos that actually explain the concepts in a way that the layman can grasp, while also pointing out a number of problems with the standard orthodoxy.<p>The problems don’t indicate that Dark Matter (the theory) is wrong necessarily. MOND is much better at explaining a number of observations of large scale (better meaning simpler in this case), but Dark Matter is better for other observations at smaller scale. Unfortunately it seems that the physicist community (outside of a small subset) is unwilling to research in the MOND space; it has the <i>taint</i>. So physicists just pile on a bunch of extra variables to make Dark Matter fit certain observations, when MOND describes those observations very simply.<p>Sabine argues long and hard that modern particle physicists have made no fundamental progress for 50 years due to poor scientific method, and she’s acerbic and popular with the plebs (such as me). I’m glad she’s a voice out there, but I’m sure she has put herself offside with a number (maybe most) working particle physicists.<p>It’s unfortunate. The phenomenon that MOND and Dark Matter seek to explain are really interesting, and the depths have clearly not been plumbed. The continual search and failure to find the Dark Matter particle is not doing physics any favours.
For me the main issue with dark matter is that I haven't read that we have produced it or even named properly what is constitute of or is.<p>For us to tell that there must be this amount of something that only affects things gravitationally for observations to work, just seems like pure kludge factor to get everything look right.<p>Then again, I have not studied whole thing deeply.
What about dark energy? Dark matter seems quite solid.<p>But then dark energy does feel like a hack, right? Throwing the whole “dark thing” concept under the bus.
Maybe it is not "cheating" but it certainly casts a dark shadow over the otherwise fairly cooky stance of fundamental physics that "we have figured things out"<p>As an explanatory concept is has very low utility: there is not much else you can do with it except plug what you find missing. You can't say, for example, that because of this and this aspect of dark matter I predict this cool effect and then go search for it and either falsify or strengthen the confidence of your thought framework
The photons of CMB has lost near the same order of magnitude of energy as the postulated dark energy, if I'm not mistaken. This happened via red shift.<p>I wonder where that energy went and how they acquired that much energy in the first place.
> we can map dark matter's location<p>this has always felt circular to me -- someone drops an astronomy paper like 'we found a galaxy with no dark matter' and I wish someone would rewrite it as 'dear non physicist, here are ten critical takes you just thought of and why we discarded each'<p>this is mostly a knock on my own knowledge, and slightly a knock on pop science press, but I don't know the steps between 'mass as inferred from light doesn't explain galactic rotation curves' and '80% of mass is ghosts'
The biggest problem about dark matter:<p>If it is real and supposedly so common, why doesn't it exist here on Earth? What makes our world so uniquely special? Historically scientific models that treat Earth as unique in the universe always turn out to be wrong.<p>Hundreds of years of scientific research of all kinds crawling the planet and to date no one has been able to isolate it.
For a lay person with an interest in cosmology, please check out the History of the Universe YouTube channel. It’s really superb:<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fX_1pM64uUk">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fX_1pM64uUk</a>
> For dark matter, we keep those standards. The evidence for some kind of dark matter, that there is something that can’t be explained by just the Standard Model and Einstein’s gravity, is at this point very strong.<p>Option 1: Do more research on Gravity to see what we might be missing there. The difficulty in measuring G, and the flyby anomaly would be good places to start.<p>Option 2: Make up fully unconstrained variable 'X' that can take any value you want at any location or time in the universe[1]. This is amazing because it can perfectly solve so many difficult problems!<p>Obviously many people will and should be skeptical of throwing full confidence at option 2 in it's current state.<p>[1] Unlike neutrinos or black holes, there is no theory for what dark matter is made of, and how it is created or destroyed. Thus there are no constraints on how much you can have at any given location or time.
The fact that dark matter has never been seen “but it must be there!” is basically the same argument that religious people make. It’s 100% a religious, faith-based argument and non-scientific. There I said it.<p>There’s an explanation for all of this behavior that we are measuring but saying that it’s something we can’t see but it’s there!! is objectively absurd.