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Ok, I sort of get your objection, but "if the mechanism is really completely different from invisible matter", that doesn't seem to be true? I'm not a physicis

Ok, I sort of get your objection, but "if the mechanism is really completely different from invisible matter", that doesn't seem to be true? I'm not a physicist, but the explanation I'd heard was that something appears to have mass (due to patterns of gravitational objects seen through telescopes), but we can't see it. So to be completely fair, we don't see any matter, we do see unexplained gravitational phenomena, which is optically invisible, but we do see something. Possibly, our model of gravitation is just completely wrong, and actually there are different forces which modulate the force of gravity. Of the two, it seems dark matter is less controversial (matter that doesn't seem to reflect light) than positing new fundamental forces, as one involves a known set of theories (maybe its something like antimatter, or an alternative configuration of particles to the standard atomic ones at a quantum or particle physics level). I don't think ignoring it as a rounding error is a reasonable approach, unless you have some strong sources arguing that the physicists equipment is just bad (source, please), at least that's my impression.

uoaei 3y ago
Again, I can make anything "appear" to have invisible mass if I ignore the appropriate theories and fit mass in where it "ought to be" to recover the observed dynamics. Theories besides dark matter don't posit new fundamental forces, they posit that our understanding of gravity is incomplete and only applies in the limit of high-mass-density spacetime regions. This kind of elaboration of our physical theories has significant precedent: Newtonian mechanics is recovered when considering general relativity in the limit of distance scales much smaller than light-seconds and time scales much longer than infinitesimal time. It could be as well that our current models are only applicable in the limit of regions of dense mass. When things thin out (say, near the edges of galaxies) the transition to a modified dynamics appears to have significant explanatory power (since the limit no longer applies) with the added benefit that there's actually a model that can be validated or falsified.

uoaei 3y ago

Again, I can make anything "appear" to have invisible mass if I ignore the appropriate theories and fit mass in where it "ought to be" to recover the observed dynamics. Theories besides dark matter don't posit new fundamental forces, they posit that our understanding of gravity is incomplete and only applies in the limit of high-mass-density spacetime regions. This kind of elaboration of our physical theories has significant precedent: Newtonian mechanics is recovered when considering general relativity in the limit of distance scales much smaller than light-seconds and time scales much longer than infinitesimal time. It could be as well that our current models are only applicable in the limit of regions of dense mass. When things thin out (say, near the edges of galaxies) the transition to a modified dynamics appears to have significant explanatory power (since the limit no longer applies) with the added benefit that there's actually a model that can be validated or falsified.