My second belief is that popular science articles are not good at explaining nuance, and tend to focus on human factors. Both of these are fine for lay audiences but should probably not be used to judge the health of the scientific process itself
For Dark Matter we have existence proofs. It MUST exist, in some form, we just don't know what it is. It will take another century before we're at 180 years ...
I agree that science is meant to be challenged, but a worthy challenger must produce a better theory. The consensus is that DM fits the available evidence best. The case about dark energy is way less settled and way less clear due to lack of evidence. The standard model (i.e. a cosmological constant) fits best while having the least number of parameters, but I'd say that most cosmologists agree that it is not the final answer. It is expected that another theory with more free parameters will prevail, but current observations are not precise enough to decide which ones can be ruled out.
DM and MOND are referring to different ideas of matching the anomolous observations, not the observations themselves. And each is really a family of different theories, as opposed to one singular theory each.
As an aside, MOND is not doing so well these days. One of the leading proponents of MOND has published a paper showing a need for substantial revision to the theory following observations of wide binary stars [1].
[1] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/3/4573/7342478
Our current best understanding of gravity is encapsulated by the theory of General Relativity (GR; Einstein 1915). This reduces to Newtonian dynamics in the weak-field non-relativistic limit...
The controversy comes up because it has become pop science to discuss alternative proposals to DM/DE without properly conveying why DM/DE are the leading candidates for their associated measurement abnormalities. So you get a lot of people who functionally know nothing about the topic arguing that DM/DE are illogical because according to them scientists are just fudging the data.
This is a thing even with the more informed/STEM-minded crowd of HN.
its a pretty easy rubric to tell what you're currently doing on any topic
ask yourself what information would alter your belief, is reproducibility a factor in your belief at all, does your belief conveniently exempt itself from reproducibility in some way, such as a reward for maintaining your belief ... perhaps after you die?
Scientific knowledge has a structure, similar to a structure of a math theory where axioms and definitions are used to prove theorems which in their turn are used to prove even more statements and so on. You can trace a path from any statement to axioms and definitions. But empirical sciences have structure more complex than that of math. They rely on empirical evidence which is limited by abilities of instruments, and they are subject to change when instruments become better. Sometimes they reject some hypotheses not due to contradicting evidence, but because there were several competing hypotheses and one of them had more supporting evidence.
If you start asking questions why physics thinks that X is true, and ask a lot of them not accepting any statement without asking such question then you'll get a lot of answers (conditionally on a benevolent physicist willing to answer them all), and you'll get eventually the structure of physics.
But then comes some freak and claims he proved Einstein wrong, while it is clear to physicists that he doesn't understand the structure of the theory. To get a simple example I can resort to a calculus and... Imagine a student that when asked to prove that sin(x)/x -> 1 when x->0, "proved" it with a help of L'Hôpital's rule by taking derivatives of nominator and denominator. L'Hôpital's rule doesn't forbid it explicitly, and it may seem to be ok, but the trouble is the derivative of sin is proved with reference to a limit of sin(x)/x when x->0. So it becomes a circular reasoning and if you see how student does it you know that the student doesn't understand a thing about calculus, his attempts to pretend to know calculus are pathetic. Similar mistakes one can make in any discipline, though in them the structure or reasoning behind the theory is more complex, in math you can rely on pure logic, you need no Occam's Razor or something like. In social sciences you need to know all the history of your chosen domain of knowledge, how it evolved and why so. In physics it is simpler but still you need to understand at least some decisions made in the past (or maybe all of them, I'm not a physicist, so I'm just speculating).
One can propose any insane theory contradicting to Einstein, Newton or anyone else and not to be yelled at, but you need to state your starting position carefully with regard to a structure of a scientific knowledge. Like if you want to derive statement sin(x)/x->1 when x->0 by resorting to L'Hôpital's rule then you need first to build your own calculus with blackjack and hookers from scratch in a way that make it to be a non-circular reasoning. And probably you will need to explain your motivation why are you doing that, because people will be asking about it a lot.
But I know how people work pretty damn well. I will tell you, right now, with 100% certainty: dark matter is modern witch craft. Bunch of nerds got together and convinced themselves of magical forces that can’t be seen, heard, felt, or touched because their models of the universe don’t work without it.
Might be 200 years until we figure it out, but there is an error somewhere and scientists are too proud to admit that they ain’t got a clue. How’d the moon get in the sky? Well I guess someone had to put it up there. How do birds fly? I guess God made them float on account of their lack of sin. Why don’t our models of gravity work? I guess the universe is made up of weird, invisible stuff. Humans don’t like not knowing. So they make wild theories about stuff no one can explain. Someone will come along and figure it out eventually.
Every piece of evidence for hundreds of years proved this point. Every scientist knew it to be true. And yet I ask you today, does an object in motion desire to rest OR does it stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force?
It wasn’t until later that people had the tools to say, hey, wait a minute, this isn’t right. There is more here than we understand.
Which of these scenarios seems more likely: 85% of the matter and 95% of the universe is made up of stuff that we can’t detect, doesn’t interact with anything and doesn’t follow the rules of everything else OR there is something going on that we don’t yet understand?
I guess I have to ask: why do you presume there exists an undetectable force that makes your equations work and not that the equations don’t account for everything?
Seems silly. You would never believe 85% of software bugs were caused by unseen, undetectable stochastic physics errors that only manifested as a system crash. The fact that doing the same thing over and over again produces the same result certainly doesn’t cement that theory in my mind.
FWIW, the standard model already has plenty of particles that don't interact with EM, so you can't act like that's prima facie unreasonable. The story of the discovery of neutrinos is particularly relevant.
Anyway, feel free to read around in this thread for the multiple other lines of evidence that lead to dark matter. Or read the Wikipedia article on it. The information is out there, if you want to know. Or you can keep making up strained analogies involving the number 85%. No one can stop you.
Dark matter, I believe, is one such example. It’s a proxy for lack of knowledge, no different than rain spirits being called to water the crops. It orients and aligns, allows people to continue without the weight of the unknown burdening them.
As I stated above, that doesn’t mean fake, or conspiratorial, any more than taxation is a conspiracy to steal your money. These beliefs are just tools we use as humans to lubricate interaction and establish agreed upon norms. Everything from the Law, to Philosophy, to things like Human Rights are mythological. That doesn’t mean they are wrong or immoral, but it doesn’t make them true either. Humans, objectively, only have the rights we communally grant them.
When you drive your car you choose to follow the rules of the road. To do otherwise is both foolish and dangerous. We all agree on them and act in accordance. At any moment though, someone could swerve and kill you - even while you sit in your office or walk down the street. We just tend to not think about that unfortunate truth because of the burden it would entail. That is mythology working.
It’s doesn’t change reality though.