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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

> Researchers are hard at work trying to find ways to test the CCC+TL model.

It’s not a scientific theory unless it’s testable. I’m going to withhold judgement on this and take it for what it is: an interesting idea, and nothing more.

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Although the Big Bang is widely referred to as a theory, cosmologists actually categorize it as a model not a theory. Does that mean it's not scientific? No. It's just that a lot of cosmology isn't testable, per se. The same is true for the historical sciences in general (evolutionary biology, geology). Given the time scales involved, there's no way to design tests or experiments.

Testable hypotheses are at the core of the scientific method, yes. But that's not just limited to the actual testing of hypotheses. All the work that goes into formulating hypotheses is also explicitly part of the scientific method.

Worth noting, too, that the paper outlines several possible experiments. It also specifically mentions some relative shortcomings of the model, and lists existing observations that they haven't tried to reconcile with it yet.

This is how theoretical physics has worked for quite some time - someone figures out a hypothesis that works mathematically, and the experimentalists then prove or disprove it.

Is there a plausible experiment that can falsify dark matter? The study here used observational data and it didn't do that. (Deducing that non-existence of dark matter is plausible given what else was observed isn't the same thing.)

> “There are several papers that question the existence of dark matter, but mine is the first one, to my knowledge, that eliminates its cosmological existence while being consistent with key cosmological observations that we have had time to confirm,” Gupta confidently concludes.

I am not an expert but is the dark matter theory testable?

Dark matter is not a theory, per se. There are many, many theories that attempt to explain dark matter. Some of them have yet to produce testable hypotheses, others have already been tested.

Thank you. Dark matter is the issue in cosmology that "it appears as though undetectable matter is present in the universe causing X, Y, Z phenomenon."

The issue that I have with people calling dark matter a theory is that they think it requires matter to solve. It doesn't. MOND is a dark matter theory. It explains(in part) why it appears as though undetectable matter is present in galaxies causing disc velocity to not match expectations.

It's not, but it's accepted as it is the theory that best fits the observations. It has holes, but not as much as others. It will continue to be the accepted model until another one is an even better fit to the data or we can prove/disprove the existence of dark matter.

Of course it is. It already passed many tests (for example gravitational lensing) while some dark matter candidates (WIMPS, primordial black holes) have effectively been ruled out through tests.

Just like string theory?

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