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Comment by JBReefer | Hacker News Reader

Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.

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Given how many laymen love to make this comment on every dark matter article, I wish even a few mentioned the opposite historical anecdote: neutrinos were originally postulated as invisible essentially non-interacting particles who's only functional role, at the time, was to conserve momentum and energy in interactions where it seemed to be violated. And that turned out to be correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Pauli's_proposal

Big difference between dark matter and ether: Ether was required conceptually, because people could not conceive of a wave of light without a medium for it to propagate in. Getting rid of ether required a huge conceptual leap, and so the idea of ether hung around longer than it should have. As a mistaken concept, ether is a "sticky" in that it has intuitive appeal and that makes it dangerous.

It wouldn't require the same kind of conceptual leap to get rid of dark matter, though. Either there's stuff there we can't measure as of 2018, or we'll need a better theory of gravity. Many physicists recognize dark matter as a hack and hold on to it only because it's the best guess we currently have. Dark matter isn't "sticky": people would rather get rid of it than keep it!

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-astronomers-wish-...

"Among the general public, people compare it to the aether, phlogiston, or epicycles. Yet almost all astronomers are certain: dark matter and dark energy exist"

"When someone puts forth the hypothesis that “dark matter and/or dark energy doesn’t exist,” the onus is on them to answer the implicit question, “okay, then what replaces General Relativity as your theory of gravity to explain the entire Universe?” As gravitational wave astronomy has further confirmed Einstein’s greatest theory even more spectacularly, even many of the fringe alternatives to General Relativity have fallen away. The way it stands now, there are no theories that exist that successfully do away with dark matter and dark energy and still explain everything that we see. Until there are, there are no real alternatives to the modern picture that deserve to be taken seriously."

For all the details read the rest of the article.

> "Yet almost all astronomers are certain: dark matter and dark energy exist ... [and it explains] everything that we see."

Siegel's cheerleading overstates the case, let's check wikipedia for a more sober assessment on the consensus:

Although the existence of dark matter is generally accepted by the scientific community, some astrophysicists,[15] intrigued by certain observations that do not fit the dark matter theory ...

To be fair, physicists are quite aware of that. I'm no expert but it seems to me that theories that remove the need for dark energy are researched, and welcomed rather than mocked. Nobody is satisfied with this dark matter/energy need (especially when we know for a fact that our current fundamental theories are wrong)

The primary difference between the scientific method and religion / dogma

Even as an atheist this wound me up. Please don't sidetrack the conversation.

> it seems to me that theories that remove the need for dark energy are researched, and welcomed rather than mocked

I don’t think that clarifying this 1) is structural to their process, 2) what the process is and 3) a contrasting example of “knowledge” that also covers the same topics but without this process is a sidetrack.

This isn’t an outlying case and all scientists _should_ have this view of contrasting hypothesis. This is obviously in contrast to religion.

Or like Neptune. They predicted that from orbital perturbations they couldn't explain before they found it. Much better analogy than aether. Aether was trying to fix a theory, not a measurement.

Except we have evidence in favor of dark matter.

Dark matter could turn out to be a new particle or group of particles, which would surely be as satisfying to all of us as anything else.

My instinct says this as well. "My equation isn't balancing, there must be something sitting on the seesaw!"

It's more like, my equations that work for everything else don't match what we observe in a few cases. But if there's something sitting on the seesaw that I can't see then it works everywhere. And there being a particle (or particles) that doesn't interact with the EM force is a testable theory. We've used particle accelerators to continually exclude areas of energy that the particles themselves would exist in, and eventually we're going to detect everything that we've predicted with the standard model or we'll find something new in an area that we didn't predict and start to know where things are actually wrong. Either in the particle side of things, or possibly the gravitational side of things. We know there's something missing or wrong between the two of them but they appear to work correctly for every case that we've found a way to test for so far, even if they don't seem to be possible to merge together.

That's how we discovered that neutrinos oscillate: "missing" neutrinos. Turns out there are three types of them and they swap around.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino_problem

"Early attempts to explain the discrepancy proposed that the models of the Sun were wrong, i.e. the temperature and pressure in the interior of the Sun were substantially different from what was believed" but in fact, it was the Standard Model that was wrong.

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