3 ms·
It's still a nontrivial observation that the equations can be corrected to account for reality most simply by adding a term for unseen matter (rather than some
by laretluval 9y ago
It's still a nontrivial observation that the equations can be corrected to account for reality most simply by adding a term for unseen matter (rather than some factor or some other mathematical operation).
Maybe the term doesn't have a straightforward physical explanation but there's a long history of introducing math without any corresponding mechanistic explanation---this is what gravity itself was until general relativity, nothing more than an inexplicable inverse-square attractive force.
- electrograv 9y agoIf a Newtonian model of gravity doesn't "explain" gravity, then neither does general relativity. These are all different models of reality with different levels of model complexity and predictive accuracy, but there's no fundamentally binary difference between them in their power of "explanation" etc. So new models like "dark matter" or "MOND" are all just different models that model observations better than prior theories but currently have the problem of being difficult to unify with the rest of theoretical physics.