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Comment by 02020202 | Hacker News Reader

02020202

just fyi, "dark matter" is not a matter at all. it is just a label for the leftovers in the mathematical equations that we use today to calculate "space stuff". scientists have made this up so they can keep using the math, even if the numbers don't add up. it's the same thing when large corporations use "good will" for differences in assets and liabilities in their accounting.

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That is being willfully ignorant.

Yes, "dark matter" is a kind of catch all term for a bunch of phenomenon / experimental measurements we don't properly understand. There's a large number of different models trying to describe the seen behavior and make predictions to be able to detect it. And in most of those models, dark matter is indeed matter!

This is a view which is increasingly disfavoured by scientists. Theories which attempt to modify the mathmatics to explain dark matter have failed to hold up to observation, and more and more evidence is mounting that dark matter does in fact act like matter.

> mounting that dark matter does in fact act like matter.

Apart from that the only way it interacts with anything else is via gravity...

There's nothing inconsistent with a form of matter which only interacts through gravity (plenty of matter does not interact with e.g. electromagnetism), especially if you weaken the statement to a form of matter which we can only currently detect through the gravitation effects it seems to have.

Although it's always interesting to ask if there might be multiple kinds, which interact with each other in much the same way our own matter does.

Not all that likely, I know, but good for an SF story.

My theory is that it IS gravity.

well, anything interacts with anything via gravity

This is a bad comment, to learn more read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve

I do not understand how something without any direct evidence whatsoever became lodged in the paradigm of science. Dark matter is not necessary to explain galactic rotation curves.[1] The original observation that spawned the idea of dark matter was of a galaxy's rotation in isolation. But galaxies are not gravitationally isolated. I am unsure about the other stuffed lumped in that dark matter is supposed to explain. But the problem of galactic rotation curves has been elegantly solved without the need for dark matter.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL0ewiwqoTw

I kind of like the term "error matter". It emphasizes that we're talking about error terms in the equations, yet admits that much of that error would be resolved by the existence of matter.

"Dark" is descriptive, but it requires that there actually be relatively normal matter involved, which is going forward an unwarranted step. And then it gets reused for "dark energy", which is... what, energy you can't see or interacts weakly with existing sensors? That's not novel or even unusual. The phrase is bogus. "Error energy" would work.

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