Hacker News Reader

> I find it very arrogant to believe that our current model is _the_ model.

I think it would be arrogant, but I've never met anyone who studies physics and believes this (though I wouldn't be surprised if some exist). It's not arrogant, however, to be dogmatic when faced with ideas that are incompatible with established models. It's unreasonable to claim someone must be using a broken model, because dark matter and dark energy looks wrong.

Scientific models are good when they are predictive, and powerful when they are simple.

It's incredibly rare for a model-in-use to be wrong - we would never use something that has no predictive power - but every day scientific models are tested, refined, expanded, and simplified in order to make them either more predictive (better accuracy) or more powerful (describe more things).

Sometimes this does manifest as being 'broken at the edges' but not always. Sometimes a model is just fuzzy, and improvements add resolution to every prediction.

I generally agree with all of your points.

> Scientific models are good when they are predictive, and powerful when they are simple. [...] every day scientific models are tested, refined, expanded, and simplified [...]

It seems to me that dark matter goes directly against this. The current model of gravity can't explain certain observations, so we come up with a form of matter and energy that we can't observe in any way, and doesn't interact with anything, except with precisely the one thing we need for our observations to match the theory. A theory that hasn't even been reconciled with quantum mechanics yet!

Smells super fishy to me. But as I say, my knowledge of physics and astrophysics is super basic, and I wouldn't call myself "someone who studies physics" in any meaningful way. I understand your feeling that it's unreasonable for me to criticise the status quo because dark energy looks wrong, as I have no idea about the underlying math.

> so we come up with a form of matter and energy

The current top comment by superqd[0] probably deals with this best. Maybe there is a literal dark energy and dark matter, but the thing that is manifested is a 'correction' term in the way we use these equations, and it so happens that using those correction terms makes these equations more accurate.

I'd almost go so far as to say the uncorrected equations are a model that is broken at the edges, and dark energy and dark matter are simply a quantification of how broken they are (with the added benefit that adding them to the equations makes the model better).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21279200

That makes a lot of sense, thanks!

I'm sort the opposite (re dark matter and dark energy looking wrong)- although I agree that too many scientific theories are inherently arrogant. I mean, yes we certainly could be wrong and they could be a hacky solution. But...

I look at some of the more fundamental discoveries of the past, especially things like radiation, electricity, molecular structure, etc, and wonder what it must have been like to not have a basic understanding of those principles. "Those people were such primitive idiots, they didn't even understand that water is h2o!" Or something like that. Then I look at stuff like dark matter, and it all of sudden makes sense. We're idiots, too. That's what it feels like.

Einstein never really got comfortable with the real world implications of relativity, outside of the math. And of course he straight up hated quantum probability.

It's really intriguing to me that of the the fundamental forces, we've been able to do so little to manipulate gravity. Hell, we can barely even measure it precisely. The most we've done with it is figure out how to sling satellites with flybys. I'd say we're Ben Franklin in the lighting storm, but I don't know that we're even at that level of understanding. He at least had a testable idea.

> To my entirely untrained eye, dark matter and dark energy always looked wrong.

Wouldn't things like "gravity", "light", "magnetism", "electricity" look wrong if you weren't experiencing it daily ?

Science is moving all the time, see "dark matter" as a placeholder word for something we don't understand, it might be one things, or multiple things, or nothing and we just got something wrong before, it doesn't matter, what matters is that we're observing something we can't fully explain and we're trying to find a solution to the problem. Most high level science look "wrong", there is no intuition for these kind of things, that's why the scientific method was developed after all.

Dark matter sounds super intuitive as for me.

Let's assume we observe a system of planets and we have a good theory to describe its behavior. Then with better tools and more observation we found an orbit deviation. Patch it by assuming additional yet unobserved planet? Or patch it with much more sophisticated mathematics?

Dark matter explains both the gravitational pull of the galaxies and the orbits of the stars in it and the large-scale structure of the Universe – we live in the LambdaCDM universe. Dark energy is the energy of the vacuum space itself. We can’t yet find a theory to calculate it without measuring correctly, but that’s the best explanation.

Aether was more a question of esthetics. It didn’t really help to explain anything and was quite easy to debunk. Dark matter and dark energy are quite different. It might not be the endgame, but these are the best theories we have so far and they work pretty damn good.