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I suspect the fact that you can't observe dark matter directly, but physicists all seem to promote it, enables a combination of (at least superficially) reasona

I suspect the fact that you can't observe dark matter directly, but physicists all seem to promote it, enables a combination of (at least superficially) reasonable empirical skepticism and conspiracy-minded contrarianism to work together. You have to expend a little bit of actual effort to see through the logic, and if you have any inclination to believe Big Physics is lying to you, then it's easy to just not bother. People forget that the universe does not owe us comprehensibility. Contrary to your linked comment, to this non-physicist, nearly all physicists in public seem to say that, while the details are unknown, dark matter is pretty much definitely a thing. AFAICT they're not wrong about there being multiple lines of evidence for it. But if you mean "no one worth listening to" says even that much, then I don't know any physicists worth listening to.

ashildr 6y ago
> but physicists all seem to promote it It does not seem like it to me (non physicist with some physicist friends from other fields who try to dumb down stuff to me). In my world (SE) it seems like a proprietary binary that must be included for the rest of an open source product describing the observable universe to work very well. Everyone seems to hate it, but nobody wrote something better, yet. Every competing implementation fails to work in other areas that we already are using in production, extensively. And when some professional, who read and understood the source code, starts talking about it, a lot of people voice stupid ideas that they would not have if they passed some lectures on the subject. Edit to add: I envy physicists a little - the best thing for “them” to happen seems to be if something does not work in a very peculiar way.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Ok, but do any of them take seriously the idea that it doesn't exist at all? It was my impression that even theories that try to modify gravity in ways that also explain stuff like the CMB spectrum sort of end up inventing dark matter anyway (IIRC TeVeS was the big one like that).

ashildr 6y ago

> but physicists all seem to promote it It does not seem like it to me (non physicist with some physicist friends from other fields who try to dumb down stuff to me). In my world (SE) it seems like a proprietary binary that must be included for the rest of an open source product describing the observable universe to work very well. Everyone seems to hate it, but nobody wrote something better, yet. Every competing implementation fails to work in other areas that we already are using in production, extensively. And when some professional, who read and understood the source code, starts talking about it, a lot of people voice stupid ideas that they would not have if they passed some lectures on the subject. Edit to add: I envy physicists a little - the best thing for “them” to happen seems to be if something does not work in a very peculiar way.

andrewflnr 6y ago
Ok, but do any of them take seriously the idea that it doesn't exist at all? It was my impression that even theories that try to modify gravity in ways that also explain stuff like the CMB spectrum sort of end up inventing dark matter anyway (IIRC TeVeS was the big one like that).