Is dark matter some tangible "stuff," or is it more of an artifact of gaps in our observation?
Why do physicists, when confronted with the lack of observational evidence for the "dark matter" that their models predict, assume that "dark matter must exist?" Couldn't the model be wrong? At what point does the unproven prediction of dark matter call into question the many otherwise proven predictions of the Standard Model? How much of the experimental evidence supporting those predictions has an implicit dependency on the same invalid assumptions leading to the prediction of dark matter?
I remember reading an HN comment that described the Standard Model as a sort of legacy codebase with technical debt and strange abstractions to fix earlier errors. That resonates with me, and in fact seems applicable to the entirety of the human epistemological "tech tree." I sometimes wonder, what secrets might we uncover if we could start fresh, speed running different paths through the tech tree?
"Tangible" might be the wrong word since our regular-matter senses and sensors could not "touch" it. Theories do exist that our model of gravity is just wrong at large scales. This falls under Modified Newtonian Dynamics, but has problems that don't match observation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Ou...
Why do physicists, when confronted with the lack of observational evidence for the "dark matter" that their models predict, assume that "dark matter must exist?" Couldn't the model be wrong? At what point does the unproven prediction of dark matter call into question the many otherwise proven predictions of the Standard Model? How much of the experimental evidence supporting those predictions has an implicit dependency on the same invalid assumptions leading to the prediction of dark matter?
I remember reading an HN comment that described the Standard Model as a sort of legacy codebase with technical debt and strange abstractions to fix earlier errors. That resonates with me, and in fact seems applicable to the entirety of the human epistemological "tech tree." I sometimes wonder, what secrets might we uncover if we could start fresh, speed running different paths through the tech tree?