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To be even more clear, "dark matter" isn't a theory. It is a name for something we need theories about. I wish the article had made that apparent.
by slowmovintarget 8y ago
To be even more clear, "dark matter" isn't a theory. It is a name for something we need theories about.
I wish the article had made that apparent.
- eaim 8y agoSorry but that’s an intellectual dodge. A verbal fiddle. Saying it is a “name for something” doesn’t make the fact that it’s a hypothesis disappear. One is simply positing the need for more “Russian dolls” inside the Russian doll one has hypothesised to begin with.
- astrophysician 8y agoWhy is this a dodge? We have observations that need an explanation; for example: rotation velocities of stars in our galaxy imply a large amount of mass that if it were visible would certainly be detected. There are several competing hypotheses, one being a cold, weakly-interacting (i.e. it interacts via the weak force) type of new matter but all of them are claiming to explain the same observations, and the collection of observations connected to this phenomenon have a place-holder name until the problem is conclusively resolved. There’s no dodge here...
- hannasanarion 8y agoDark matter is a hypothesis, and one that makes pretty strong predictions, several of which have come true, so it's not inappropriate to call it theory. The phenomenon of galaxies demonstrating significanty more mass than their sum of normal matter is the observation that is explained by dark matter.