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Because it doesn’t exist. Dark matter is a fudge factor to prop-up a theory that astrophysics is too afraid to put to rest.

user812 8y ago
Indeed. Physics is wrong on many fundamental levels, but everytime physicists find fundamental errors, they propose another entirely theoretical layer of complexity, with the "benfit" that no one is able to practically refute it.
- williamdclt 8y ago
  It's not adding a layer of complexity, it's peeling off a layer of abstraction. With the "benefit" that it describes better what we observe and that it allows to successfully make new predictions. What's your alternative to the scientific method exactly?
  - user812 8y ago
    100 or so years ago physics went into the wrong direction, ignoring people like Tesla who argued for the aether model.
- geertj 8y ago
  > Physics is wrong on many fundamental levels Physics, when practiced according to the principles of the scientific method, is never wrong (or right). Physical laws try to explain the world around us using mathematical models. Those models can be tested over a certain domain of experimental parameters D. A physicist, when speaking accurately, would never say that a physical law L is correct. They would say that L correctly describes our experiments on domain D. New or more accurate measurements can expand or shrink D, and in the worst case D can become empty. This constant refining is the essence of physics and the scientific method. Arguing that physics is wrong implies a lack of understanding of what physics actually is.
  - user812 8y ago
    No, it is fundamentally wrong in itself, because it went into the wrong direction 100 or so years ago, when physicists ignored the aether model.
    - dbt00 8y ago
      It wasn’t ignored it was disproven. Come up with experimental evidence or gtfo.
      - user812 8y ago
        It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy. You can't disprove a philosophy though, you can only try to understand different philosophical models next to each other. The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning. It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing, or how nothing (space) can have properties. Funny that you mention experimental evidence, as most of physics is basically theoretical nowadays. (That's why it's called theoretical physics, dark matter included)
        krapp 8y ago
        > It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy. It was disproven based on experimentation[0], no "philosophy" involved. >The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning There is no "Einsteinian philosophy," nor does anything in Einstein's theories relate to "meaning" or any lack thereof, in a philosophical sense. Whether you want to believe in aether, or God, or that the Machine Empire built the universe as a VR simulation, E=MC^2 remains true. It can be tested, has been tested has been proven true. And its probably worth mentioning that the same is true for aether theory, because it also was not a philosophy, but a scientific theory (which was, as mentioned earlier, disproved by experimentation.) The universe is no more or less meaningful or materialistic either way. >It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing. On the contrary, the mental gymnastics were needed to continue supporting aether theory after experiments and observations continually failed to produce any evidence of it, and the properties aether would need to have to conform to the current cutting edge of science started to become ludicrous. [0]https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_e...
stephengillie 8y ago
It worked for neutrinos.
tim333 8y ago
I'm not sure which theory you refer to? Normal physics works pretty well for most stuff and no one claims it knows everything.
- pokemongoaway 8y ago
  Let's not talk about neutonian physics... If that's what you mean by "normal physics." Let's talk about the physics that requires the vast majority to - by definition - be unobservable and unmeasurable. There are other theories that don't require magic and asking the authorities to tell you how to think about existence.
drewg123 8y ago
We know how stars work, and we know how gravity works...These two numbers don’t match, and they don’t match spectacularly. There had to be something more than just stars responsible for the vast majority of mass in the Universe. I think the problem here is that maybe there is something else we don't understand. We also did not understand the propagation of light in a vacuum in the 19th century, and invented a hidden medium called the "aether" to explain it. I think there is some fundamental thing we are missing, and we're inventing dark matter to explain it.
- gbrown 8y ago
  Perhaps we could call that thing: "dark matter" for now. In seriousness, we can observe the effect, and even map the distribution of the stuff.
  - drewg123 8y ago
    That assumes that it is "matter". Maybe there is something we just fundamentally don't understand about gravity.
    - improbable22 8y ago
      This is another possibility, and would be exciting. But it's very very hard to come up with plausible models for such modified gravity. There are lots of people trying, and their ideas tend to break all sorts of other things we know. For example (IIRC) lots of candidates gave a slightly different speed for gravitational waves, and were ruled out by recent detections where we also saw X-rays from the same event.
    - _ph_ 8y ago
      Sure, but all data we have rather points out to some undetected matter than problems with the theory of gravitation. The article shows several measurements which would be well explained with particles we did not detect yet.
    - dTal 8y ago
      They've thought of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics It doesn't really work. Overwhelmingly the evidence points to mass, which is gravitationally affected by other mass, and nothing else. I know the mind rebels against the notion of invisible matter, but is it really so much more implausible than the invisible spookiness of gravity to begin with? If the scientific evidence points that way, your monkey-brain intuitions do not provide a reliable veto.
pokemongoaway 8y ago
Exactly! This has been said for years and they just censor it. They're sharlatans, not scientists. The big bang theory was not nearly as predictive of meaurements like CMB as other theories - but not a problem if you can keep changing it after the fact, and act like you were right all along!
chriswarbo 8y ago
What do you mean by "put to rest"? Do you mean we should switch to using another theory, which reproduces all existing results, also correctly predicts some currently-unexplained observation or experiment, and has also correctly predicted previously-unobserved results (i.e. isn't just a "fudge factor")? If so, I would love to know what that theory is, since I certainly didn't encounter any such thing in the dark matter module of my masters degree (the options were basically MOND or (various possible forms of) dark matter, and the former is certainly much more of a "fudge factor"). If by "put to rest" you mean we just throw away our current theories without having a better replacement, then I don't even understand what that would mean. Would we ground all rocket launches since we don't completely understand gravity?
- pokemongoaway 8y ago
  Many. Plasma physics more closely predicted many variables, including the beloved CMB. Observations of galaxies moving by each other are mirrored experimentally in the lab. Plasma effects scale so they can be studied this way... But no, this is censored because the mainstream insists that the weakest force is the God of their universe.

user812 8y ago

Indeed. Physics is wrong on many fundamental levels, but everytime physicists find fundamental errors, they propose another entirely theoretical layer of complexity, with the "benfit" that no one is able to practically refute it.

williamdclt 8y ago
It's not adding a layer of complexity, it's peeling off a layer of abstraction. With the "benefit" that it describes better what we observe and that it allows to successfully make new predictions. What's your alternative to the scientific method exactly?
- user812 8y ago
  100 or so years ago physics went into the wrong direction, ignoring people like Tesla who argued for the aether model.
geertj 8y ago
> Physics is wrong on many fundamental levels Physics, when practiced according to the principles of the scientific method, is never wrong (or right). Physical laws try to explain the world around us using mathematical models. Those models can be tested over a certain domain of experimental parameters D. A physicist, when speaking accurately, would never say that a physical law L is correct. They would say that L correctly describes our experiments on domain D. New or more accurate measurements can expand or shrink D, and in the worst case D can become empty. This constant refining is the essence of physics and the scientific method. Arguing that physics is wrong implies a lack of understanding of what physics actually is.
- user812 8y ago
  No, it is fundamentally wrong in itself, because it went into the wrong direction 100 or so years ago, when physicists ignored the aether model.
  - dbt00 8y ago
    It wasn’t ignored it was disproven. Come up with experimental evidence or gtfo.
    - user812 8y ago
      It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy. You can't disprove a philosophy though, you can only try to understand different philosophical models next to each other. The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning. It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing, or how nothing (space) can have properties. Funny that you mention experimental evidence, as most of physics is basically theoretical nowadays. (That's why it's called theoretical physics, dark matter included)
      - krapp 8y ago
        > It was "disproven" based upon a different philosophy. It was disproven based on experimentation[0], no "philosophy" involved. >The Einsteinian philosophy represents materialism and a world without meaning There is no "Einsteinian philosophy," nor does anything in Einstein's theories relate to "meaning" or any lack thereof, in a philosophical sense. Whether you want to believe in aether, or God, or that the Machine Empire built the universe as a VR simulation, E=MC^2 remains true. It can be tested, has been tested has been proven true. And its probably worth mentioning that the same is true for aether theory, because it also was not a philosophy, but a scientific theory (which was, as mentioned earlier, disproved by experimentation.) The universe is no more or less meaningful or materialistic either way. >It was problematic right from the start when mental gymnastics was needed to explain how energy can move through nothing. On the contrary, the mental gymnastics were needed to continue supporting aether theory after experiments and observations continually failed to produce any evidence of it, and the properties aether would need to have to conform to the current cutting edge of science started to become ludicrous. [0]https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_e...

stephengillie 8y ago

It worked for neutrinos.

tim333 8y ago

I'm not sure which theory you refer to? Normal physics works pretty well for most stuff and no one claims it knows everything.

pokemongoaway 8y ago
Let's not talk about neutonian physics... If that's what you mean by "normal physics." Let's talk about the physics that requires the vast majority to - by definition - be unobservable and unmeasurable. There are other theories that don't require magic and asking the authorities to tell you how to think about existence.

drewg123 8y ago

We know how stars work, and we know how gravity works...These two numbers don’t match, and they don’t match spectacularly. There had to be something more than just stars responsible for the vast majority of mass in the Universe. I think the problem here is that maybe there is something else we don't understand. We also did not understand the propagation of light in a vacuum in the 19th century, and invented a hidden medium called the "aether" to explain it. I think there is some fundamental thing we are missing, and we're inventing dark matter to explain it.

gbrown 8y ago
Perhaps we could call that thing: "dark matter" for now. In seriousness, we can observe the effect, and even map the distribution of the stuff.
- drewg123 8y ago
  That assumes that it is "matter". Maybe there is something we just fundamentally don't understand about gravity.
  - improbable22 8y ago
    This is another possibility, and would be exciting. But it's very very hard to come up with plausible models for such modified gravity. There are lots of people trying, and their ideas tend to break all sorts of other things we know. For example (IIRC) lots of candidates gave a slightly different speed for gravitational waves, and were ruled out by recent detections where we also saw X-rays from the same event.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    Sure, but all data we have rather points out to some undetected matter than problems with the theory of gravitation. The article shows several measurements which would be well explained with particles we did not detect yet.
  - dTal 8y ago
    They've thought of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics It doesn't really work. Overwhelmingly the evidence points to mass, which is gravitationally affected by other mass, and nothing else. I know the mind rebels against the notion of invisible matter, but is it really so much more implausible than the invisible spookiness of gravity to begin with? If the scientific evidence points that way, your monkey-brain intuitions do not provide a reliable veto.

pokemongoaway 8y ago

Exactly! This has been said for years and they just censor it. They're sharlatans, not scientists. The big bang theory was not nearly as predictive of meaurements like CMB as other theories - but not a problem if you can keep changing it after the fact, and act like you were right all along!

chriswarbo 8y ago

What do you mean by "put to rest"? Do you mean we should switch to using another theory, which reproduces all existing results, also correctly predicts some currently-unexplained observation or experiment, and has also correctly predicted previously-unobserved results (i.e. isn't just a "fudge factor")? If so, I would love to know what that theory is, since I certainly didn't encounter any such thing in the dark matter module of my masters degree (the options were basically MOND or (various possible forms of) dark matter, and the former is certainly much more of a "fudge factor"). If by "put to rest" you mean we just throw away our current theories without having a better replacement, then I don't even understand what that would mean. Would we ground all rocket launches since we don't completely understand gravity?

pokemongoaway 8y ago
Many. Plasma physics more closely predicted many variables, including the beloved CMB. Observations of galaxies moving by each other are mirrored experimentally in the lab. Plasma effects scale so they can be studied this way... But no, this is censored because the mainstream insists that the weakest force is the God of their universe.