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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

I mean it's easy to say it's fake, but to counter this, why can a particle that only interacts with gravity not exist?

The neutrino is a good example of a particle that almost doesn't exist. They are produced in solar reactions in spectacular amounts. Trillions of them are flitting through you right now as if you don't exist. You'd need a light year block of lead to ensure you could stop one. Mind-boggling amounts of them have to pass through our detectors to see even a single interaction.

Simply put, the particle physics does not have to behave nice so you can sleep well at night.

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We are still in the "ether" times of dark matter. We have still not had a Michelson-Morley experiment. That's it.

Not that I am saying it does not exist. Only that we do not have the means of falsifying it if it is false.

I mean sure nature has no obligation to not have a unfalsifable particle, but you wind up in weird places, like, there exists a distribution of dark matter that explains the poltergeist that knocked over your coffee cup last week.

If there would be a distribution of dark matter that explains the poltergeist, we could measure that distribution of dark matter.

We can measure the mass distribution on astronomical scales. We "see" the dark matter. Just not with light.

We don't measure dark matter, we measure some anomaly and then we say "it must've been dark matter".

It's not crazy different from saying the same about that poltergeist.

We measure the matter distribution by its affect on light (strong/weak lensing). We also measure the matter distribution by the amount of light coming from it. The results are not the same. The simplest explanation is that there is matter which does not produce or reflect light via e/m, i.e. it is dark. Dark Matter.

We know of particles which behave the same way. Neutrinos for example.

You're saying the same thing, we see some anomaly in measured light and we say "the simplest explanation is dark matter".

We are not measuring dark matter, we are measuring something that is not what we expect and we decided it's dark matter.

I mean I don't believe a particle that only reacts with gravity is unfalseifiable , it's that gravity just demands the use of unimaginable energies that we've not accomplished at this time.

You act like we've managed to probe the depths of physics with certainty when in reality you find any means to reject that which offends your sensibilities.

> You act like we've managed to probe the depths of physics with certainty when in reality you find any means to reject that which offends your sensibilities.

At the root of science is "sensibilities", like occam's razor, even "what counts as experimental reproduction", etc.

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