Are Dark Matter and Dark Energy the biggest lies of science?

If it's so obvious to you than you can go ahead and work on an alternative. What seems to you like turning the whole universe upside down is in theory a minimal correction. The whole rest of the theory works insanely well.

Here's an analogy. Imagine Newton figured out classical mechanics completely. He knows how things move, about momentum and forces etc. Only thing he hasn't figured out yet is gravity. So when he calculates physical systems, he has to magically add a gravitational force into every one of his equations. His peers ask him "What the fuck is 'g'? Are you making this up? It should be evident that such a thing does not exist, your model is flawed!". Yeah, the parameter comes from nowhere, but it is still a very minimal addition to the theory and does not tinker with the intrinsic structure of the theory. After all, it also matches observations, shit just falls down, who knows why.

Replace classical mechanics with cosmology and the gravitational force with dark energy and you are there.

...

>What seems to you like turning the whole universe upside down is in theory a minimal correction
Assuming that the things we can see and detect and had assumed make up 100% of the universe now only make up 3% of our universe is a 'minimal' correction?

>why doesnt 1+1=3?
>better pull another 1 out of my ass to make it work instead of seeing where i went wrong

>Dark energy/matter is basically nothingness
[citation needed]

>you need a tool made of X to measure X
What about things like radio waves? Are radios made of radio waves? We just need an interaction between them, something like, perhaps, a gravitational pull?

>Alchemy..
Oh.

Well, our models work where we expect no dark matter and don't work where we don't expect it.

Simply put - where do you propose is the flaw in the theories? Do you think that gravity works differently across large scales? Tested a million times and doesn't fit the data. Things are simply heavier which is why the galaxies stick together? Gravitational lensing wouldn't work the same way then.

There is no better explanation for the discrepancies. There is nothing magical about dark matter, it's basically a working name for something that we've got a fairly rough grasp on.

Yes, in the context of the theory it absolutely is. Look up cosmology if you are interested in this and stop discussing something you obviously don't understand. It is a very elegant theory with very minimal assumptions.

>Simply put - where do you propose is the flaw in the theories
I propose the flaw is exactly where people feel the need to start inventing mystical substances which we've never detected in any way yet somehow make up the vast majority of the universe. If Galaxies are sticking together and our model says they shouldn't then the model is wrong, you don't just make up some bullshit and fudge the numbers to make it work, and you can't fudge the numbers much more than saying that this special matter is 10 times more common than actual matter.

please ignore this guy
he's clearly trolling

there's no way someone is actually this braindead; there's no one that seriously is going to stand in the way of every contemporary astrophysicist/cosmologist without any actual relevant background

these sweeping misconceptions about why scientists "invented" dark matter and energy is proof this guy is a troll

It's good to know we've got the green light to just make shit up if theories don't match reality. Fire burns 10x hotter than your theory says it should? Fuck it, just say there's an undetectable substance called phlogiston giving it the energy. No fuss no muss. Science sure is easy when you can pull things out of your ass to make reality fit the model.

We know it's there because the universe is expanding, genius.

Dark matter is the assumption that there's matter which is not illuminated and therefore can't be detected with current methods. It's expected that this type of matter exist, but one should still be cautious when making assumptions about how much exist.

Dark energy on the other hand is unironcally made up bullshit to get shitty models to fit the data.

>the flaw is exactly where people feel the need to start inventing mystical substances
No, what is the actual flaw of the model? As in, which part of the maths could hypothetically be wrong? I'm not asking you to solve it, but if you claim that the model is wrong, then there has to be a part of it that it is wrong. Is it the gravitational constant that's wrong? Do gravitrons have the opposite of redshift or something?

It's obvious that the model without dark matter isn't complete. So, the alternative possibilities are one, the dark matter model, which is something we can only observe gravitationally, which is very much still observation. Otherwise, there has to be another thing that explains the gravitational effect. The first ideas were the previously mentioned "gravity acts differently across large distances", which is also what every armchair physicist wants to propose as a new, great idea, but it simply does not fit any math. There is no alternative model to what we have, in the way that Einstein's theory of gravity isn't an alternative to classical mechanics, it's just an improvement over it with more precision.

How do you propose we get an improvement of this model that makes the rest of physics still work? Because so far, dark matter simply fits the math, unlike gravitational constants being different, gravity working differently or dark fluid theories (which, while having some traction, have the same problem for you).

We have quite a bit of indirect evidence of Dark Matter existence. The DM hypothesis right now is the strongest one right now explaining a big amount of phenomena ranging several orders of magnitude, from the Bullet Cluster to the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Of course all this is evidence gathered through gravitational interaction. Modified theories of gravity like MOND are still around but mostly they don't work as well as DM, definetly not in all those orders of magnitude.

Dark Matter is pretty much assumed to exist right now, and in Physics conferences it's definetly accepted. We """"""just""""" need to detect it directly.

Dark Energy is a different story. Here there are several alternative solutions, but I don't work in this field so I can't say much more. But we definetly know less about this issue.

I'm actually with you. The arrogance from the scientific community is outstanding occasionally resembling cultists. Thing is people can't accept that they were actually wrong about something. Cognitive dissonance. Dark matter isn't dark matter. It's just a phenomenon that breaks the rules that we don't understand but our hubris is holding us back.

We should go back to the drawing board on the laws of physics but everyone's too much of a pussy

you dont understand anything about the process of physics do you

if they find a better explanation theyll use that instead

And your actual exposure to real physicists working in that field is exactly what? How many have you met, with how many have you discussed that topic? What makes you think that nobody is trying to approach the problem by trying to go back to the drawing board? You don't know anything man.

"Dark" matter and energy aren't a thing you moron, they're just a placeholder until we discover what, exactly, is causing the effect we describe as "dark energy". Before the Higgs boson was discovered, you could have called it "the dark boson" and had morons like you clamouring "HURR HOW CANN BOZUN B DRK DURR SCINTISTS ARE SUCH JOKERS LMAO"

I see what you mean, but that's actually a pretty bad example.

The Higgs boson was predited like 40 years before being discovered, and we had a pretty good idea of what it would look like. So far it looks exactly like what the Standard Model has been predicted for decades. There were alternatives to the Higgs mechanism which didn't involve an elementary scalar, which is ugly due to the Hierarchy problem, such as Technicolor, but by the mid 90s it was quite clear that the Higgs scalar had to be somewhere.

Plus there was a pretty good reason for us to find at least something pretty similar to the Higgs at around those masses: it solves unitarity in the WW scattering cross section.

So the Higgs was never "dark" in this sense. Although I do agree that if somebody had named it "dark", they'd bee like that (implying it was not like that already when people started calling it "the God particle").

Dark Mater is, sadly, more similar to ether. However, unlike that case, we do have know tons of indirect experimental data which the DM fits perfectly. Cold Dark Matter, to be more precise. However, the mass of DM could be anywhere in a range of like 20 order of magnitude or so, and no one has a clue of what it looks like apart from the fact that it interacts gravitationally and that it doesn't interact strongly with light.

Sorry to be autistic about this, but it's a bad example to compare it to the Higgs.

>>why doesnt 1+1=3?
>>better pull another 1 out of my ass to make it work instead of seeing where i went wrong
More like "there has to be an extra 1, I still don't know where, but there has to be one".

>>Dark energy/matter is basically nothingness
>[citation needed]
That's false for dark matter, but it's sort-of-true for dark energy. The density of dark energy don't scale with the universe expansion (for example, matter density has to scale with the cube of the expansion and radiation with the forth power, as you have the dilatation of the
volume and the dilatation of the wave length), so you can understand it as a "vacuum energy density" and, hence "sort-of-a-nothingness".

>I propose the flaw is exactly where people feel the need to start inventing mystical substances which we've never detected in any way yet somehow make up the vast majority of the universe.
Like the positrons or the neutrinos when they first appeared?

>The arrogance from the scientific community is outstanding occasionally resembling cultists.
>We should go back to the drawing board on the laws of physics but everyone's too much of a pussy
"I, who knows nothing about cosmology, have the final answer to the DM problem".

>Are Dark Matter and Dark Energy the biggest lies of science?
Come now my dear user, every intelligent person understands that dark matter interacts electromagnetically with normal matter through an electromagnetic anapole, this interaction is the "elusive" dark energy.

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269313003286

Dark energy is just vacuum energy you wanker.

>Like the positrons or the neutrinos when they first appeared?

Actually positrons and neutrinos are the opposite in the sense of how they were predicted. Diract predicted there existence, which was an unexpeted consequence of trying to make a QM equation relativistically invariant. So it was completely a theoretical prediction, and when it was observed a few years later it the theory was already there.

Neutrinos on the other hand was a hypothesis by Fermi to explain the continous spectrum in double beta decay. You have to actually consider that other people were considering seriously that maybe energy and momentum was not conserved at quantum level in order to explain this, so neutrinos were not such a bad hypothesis. However, Fermi himself recognized that he was making a prediction impossible to test experimentally, which of course proved to be false.

So, with respect to

>I propose the flaw is exactly where people feel the need to start inventing mystical substances which we've never detected in any way yet somehow make up the vast majority of the universe.

this was more or less the case with neutrinos.

It's funny that people talk about Physics being a cult when talking about DM, when I actually think that there are other issues which are by far more based in faith, like the issue of Naturalness. But of course that is not as sexy and crackpots or documentary filmers are not interested on it.

>That's false for dark matter, but it's sort-of-true for dark energy
Well, yeah. Dark energy is much harder to defend, since the effects are still not fully clear, which is why I chose to focus on the dark matter side.

>Dark Mater is, sadly, more similar to ether.

In the sense that it almost certainly refers to something that doesn't exist at all, yes. It's likely that a unified field theory will explain the phenomena of "dark" energy as some subtle interaction of already discovered forces.

>"Congratulations you've played yourself"
It seems I have.

You're right, my own arrogance got the best of me this time. Best study more before making such assumptions.

>defend

There's nothing to "defend" you dunce. There are observed phenomena that don't fit perfectly with our current models of reality, this "error" is called "dark energy" but this is literally just a placeholder name like using "x" in algebra.

>More like "there has to be an extra 1, I still don't know where, but there has to be one".

but that's not how you do science.
That's literally saying that when you form a model, and later you find data that makes your model wrong, you should conclude that your model must be right and assume that there exists invisible and undetected stuff that accounts for the new data.

If people did science the way you did then we'd still be living with newtonian mechanics

>wow newtonian mechanics sure is great
> but look, I've found new evidence that galiean reference frame transformations aren't actually accurate at high speeds
>hmmm this is evidence that there must be some kind of "dark lensing" effect causing these lengths to appear to be contracted because newtonian physics predicts that the lengths in these reference frames must remain the same
>wow this is so exciting! we've showng that dark lensing exists! haha

It's literally the opposite of how science is meant to work.

When evidence contradicts your model, you develop a new model, you don't assume that the model must remain correct and invent things that you have not detected or observed whatsoever in order to keep the model.

If we did that then science would never move forward.
we would assume that we have the correct ,,model and any evidence proving it wrong we would post-hoc say "oh there must be a dark quantity somewhere that makes the eqaution equal".

but newton or his contemporaries did detect gravitational attraction

they found real evidence of it by measuring how a torsional pensulum will very slowly turn to be near another mass because the mases were attracting each other.

compare that with today, we have the evidence detecting that galaxies are accelerating away from each other in a way that is taking up energy so we have clear evidence that conservation of energy is wrong.

but we have no evidence of this "dark energy".

>Dark Energy is a different story. Here there are several alternative solutions, but I don't work in this field so I can't say much more. But we definetly know less about this issue.

Dark energy isn't a solution at all, it is the name given to the group of models which explain the apparent acceleration of the universe. Dark energy isn't a part of the standard model of cosmology, Lambda is. Lambda is the simplest model for accelerated expansion and it is a natural part of GR. There are many classes of dark energy models, people use the term dark energy to not bias the field towards LCDM.

believe it or not you aren't the first fucking person to wonder whether the galaxy rotation curve means the equations are wrong.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

>The 2006 observation of a pair of colliding galaxy clusters known as the "Bullet Cluster",[43] poses a significant challenge for all theories proposing a modified gravity solution to the missing mass problem, including MOND. Astronomers measured the distribution of stellar and gas mass in the clusters using visible and X-ray light, respectively, and in addition mapped the inferred dark matter density using gravitational lensing. In MOND, one would expect the missing mass (which is only apparent since it results from using Newtonian as opposed to MONDian dynamics) to be centred on the visible mass. In ΛCDM, on the other hand, one would expect the dark matter to be significantly offset from the visible mass because the halos of the two colliding clusters would pass through each other (assuming, as is conventional, that dark matter is collisionless), whilst the cluster gas would interact and end up at the centre. An offset is clearly seen in the observations. It has been suggested, however, that MOND-based models may be able to generate such an offset in strongly non-spherically-symmetric systems, such as the Bullet Cluster.[44]

turns out it doesn't work

>That's literally saying that when you form a model, and later you find data that makes your model wrong, you should conclude that your model must be right and assume that there exists invisible and undetected stuff that accounts for the new data.

But that's not what happened. Over a period of about 70 years evidence mounted that the mass to light ratio of galaxies was much higher than you would expect for a population of stars like that around the Sun. Zwicky who was in some sense the father of dark matter believed these were compact stellar remnants like neutron stars and white dwarfs. Nobody claimed it was invisible. Later it emerged the mass to light ratio increased as a function of radius in spirals, some believed this was evidence the halo was made of lots of dim stars. A few years later a theoretical paper was published showing that a dark halo could make galaxy disks stable. The key paper on dark matter halos wasn't trying to fit the data, it set out to show the model was useful.

>It's literally the opposite of how science is meant to work.

That nor the opposite is science. You missed the only crucial component, that the new model is tested and dark matter was. It predicted the ratios in the peaks in the CMB powerspectrum before it was measured, it predicted the size and amplitude of the baryon acoustic feature in galaxy clustering before it was measured, it predicted the divergence from powerlaw clustering before it was observed and it naturally predicts the bullet cluster.

I'm talking about dark energy not dark matter

>but that's not how you do science.
>It's literally the opposite of how science is meant to work.
How about Fermi proposing the Neutrino? We have on one hand conservation of the energy (we can all it the 3), and in the other hand we have that the beta decay seems to violate conservation of the energy (if you want it, the 1+1). There has to be something there to reconcile both things.

Yes, sometimes you have to take all your model to the garbage, but other times a little "addendum" that you can't detect at the time is the only thing you need.

>When evidence contradicts your model, you develop a new model, you don't assume that the model must remain correct and invent things that you have not detected or observed whatsoever in order to keep the model.
No, what you have to do is to ask "Why my model was giving the correct answer before and why can it be failing in this particular case?"

The story with dark energy begins even earlier. The cosmological constant (lambda) arose in Einstein's GR as a constant of integration. Einstein famously used it to try to build a static universe, after Hubble and his contemporaries it fell out of favour and was assumed to be zero without evidence. In the late 80's Peebles and people who worked on APM started arguing for the presence of a non-zero lambda to explain large scale clustering. Then the supernova data came out and WMAP+BOOMERANG found the universe was flat built the case for lamda. This was later confirmed independently when the 2005 BAO results came out showing that, independently of the supernova there was acceleration.

All this fuss over a term in Einstein's equations that was there all along and just somewhat forgotten about. What's more bullshit, leaving it as a free parameter or asserting it must be zero? I'm going to say the former. It's also the simplest model of dark energy as it has only a single parameter.

People are exploring other options with fifth forces, modified theories of gravity, scalar fields... It's a whole industry which doesn't really have any direction. And not to mention all the experiments like the Dark Energy Survey, KIDS, HSC, PFS, the large synoptic Survey Telescope, ESA's Euclid, NASA's WFIRST. the dark energy spectroscopic instrument, HETDEX, 4MOST, SPT-3G. CMB-S4... all of them looking to break standard cosmology and find evidence that dark energy isn't lambda.

> this interaction is the "elusive" dark energy.
Note the authors don't even attempt to fit observational data to their model. It could be a dark energy candidate but they haven't demonstrated that for shit. You shouldn't be so gullible.

Is dark matter G-d?

He is not, he is just not phrasing his doubt correctly.
There is actually some people who doubt the dark energy model. Most of which are mathematicians btw.
The problem, they argue, is that we use a wrong analogy. We currently use a model called Kepler which is based on fluid dynamics. This model assumes that galaxies are continuous and compressible.
However, galaxies are not fluids, and they are discrete because they are made of discrete elements (stars).

The eldritch truth will reveal all, science without religion is 97% empty

You know there's more than just rotation curves, right? See and his comment chains.

Just because something sounds kinda ridiculous doesn't mean it's "one of the biggest lies of science".

>>Fuck, the universe doesn't behave like our models say it should. Oh well, it works if we just assume 97% of the Universe is made up of stuff we've never seen and have no proof actually exists

Wish they'd named them phlogiston and aether.

>Well I think it's fairly obvious that no such thing as Dark Energy or Matter exist and it's just a consequence of the models being flawed.

I don;t know if it is obvious, but it ought to be considered rather than theory-saving by pulling new types of unobserved matter and energy out of your ass.

First off galaxy kinematics are dark matter not dark energy. Secondly that's wrong, galaxies are not simulated like that. In modern n-body simulations the hydrodynamics is used for the gas, not for the stars which are pressure-less like the dark matter. By their very nature they are discrete.

Alternatives dark energy models are widely being considered, alternatives to CDM were considered but don't come close in it's observational success.

>this hung up over a model
a model isn't a theory, Cletus

>Fuck it, just say there's an undetectable substance called phlogiston giving it the energy.
Well it turned out that, in phlogiston's place was oxygen performing basically that precise role.

So maybe dark matter turns out to be pink matter or dark gravy or something. Whatever it is, it's probably not nothing.

>Nobody claims this is the one and definitive truth
Except plenty of people do that

Brainlet here. It was explained that it doesn't fit observation that gravity would work in a different way in larger scale. But what if it was not gravity that behaved differently, but the fabric of space/vacuum/whatever it is behaved in a different way when there was weaker gravity, like outside of a galaxy?

Is dark matter the same thing as antimatter? Either way, why is none of this mysterious stuff anywhere near us? Seems mighty "convenient" that it's all billions of light years away.

Name a physicist that claims that.

Random musings are not testable. Build a model and test it.

...

I'm 'hung up over it' because it's so dumb to assume the vast majority of the universe is made up of matter we've never seen before just to make your dumb equation match reality

If this was the early 1800's you'd be saying that about atoms.

In all honesty I would say that it's the same thing that happened to classical mechanics. It seemed like it was the right model, it made good predictions, but it turned out we were misunderstanding things and Einstein came up with a different theory of gravity that better fit what we saw in the universe. I would say that the current Eisteinien model is in the same position Classical Mechanics were, where is can seemingly predict and model some things almost perfectly, but we're misinterpreting the results.

No one says it isn't here, but the closer it is the harder it is to detect. It only shows itself in the big picture.

Don't some galaxies have more or less apparent dark matter than others? That would seem to preclude that it's simply a matter of our models being wrong.

That's only because depending on how far the galaxy deviates from the model they need to add more or less dark matter to make it match up

That's only because depending on how far the galaxy deviates from the model they need to add more or less dark matter to make it match up. In other words if a galaxy has x mass and the model predicts it needs to have y mass to have enough gravity to keep it together then scientists assume it must have z dark matter so that x + z = y. Starting to realize why this is so dumb?

Except the dark matter that holds galaxies together is the same dark matter that holds galaxy clusters together. Isn't it a weird coincidence that the amount of dark matter that is "added" to fix the small scale discrepancies is the same amount needed to fix the large scale discrepancies? The theory is consistent, stop pointing out holes that don't exist.

so fucking dumb
go back to flat earth threads

I dunno, I think the fact that Dark Matter doesn't actually exist is a pretty big hole

So it's sparsely distributed among normal matter? I thought dark matter and normal matter neutralised each other into energy when they came into contact. Or is that something else?

Saying you can observe what it does, but have no idea what it is, isn't a lie. There's a reason it's called "dark" energy, and not "The Reiss Field" or some shit.

There's a whole lotta shit we base predictions on without knowing the exact details as to how they work - like, for instance, fucking gravity.

It may even humanly impossible to objectively determine every minute detail as to how the universe operates, but we fill the gaps based on observational evidence, recursively filling them in ever more, until we have a model that works until some other observation crashes that model. Rinse and repeat.

We've been doing this since we came down from the trees, since the first caveman said, "bird fly", his friend said, "how?", he responded by saying "by flapping its wings." - without knowing dick about air resistance or lift, both of which we worked out just over a century ago, well before we had the theories of fluid dynamics, or the higgs field, or adenosine triphosphate, and all the other infinite minutia involved in the macro of that process.

>recursively filling them in ever more,
Sort of like a Cantor comb but in reverse.

the truth is that the universe is not deterministic and scientists can't accept that because of their little god complex

That's anti-matter, not the same thing.

Dark matter is non-baryonic matter that doesn't react to the electromagnetic field, and thus only has gravimetric effects and can only be observed indirectly.

*shrug* Well something causing that and the resulting gravitational lensing. I mean you can say "Dark Matter" doesn't exist, but then something else does. You can call it "Pink Matter" if it makes ya feel better, but something with a whole lotta mass, a wide irregular distribution, and a whole lotta not reacting with anything otherwise is clearly there.

how dense do you have to be not to realize that a model with an extra feature is exactly the new model you're asking for?

>scientists assume it must have z dark matter so that x + z = y
This isn't like a cosmological constant. This is a widely randomly distributed phenomenon that you can't correct simply by adjusting numbers (and as others have pointed out, many have tried).

It's not simply the mass of galaxies, it's the distribution not only of the matter in the galaxies, but of the galaxies themselves, and the CMB.

Now, we don't know exactly what causes that phenomenon, hence "dark" matter, but the current non-baryonic model of dark matter fits the profile better than anything else we've come up with.

We can see the effects quite clearly, but it's difficult to detect stuff so widely dispersed that doesn't react to anything you could throw at it. Under some circumstances, it should self-annihilate, so you should be able to catch the resulting gamma rays, maybe you can catch a reaction via a detector, but even if you manage to generate it in a collider, in the end, it's all more about the presence of a gap that follows those rules than direct detection.

It does sound a bit like trying to detect an invisible monster in the room - but in this case, said invisible monster is moving the furniture around.

Legit ignorant on this topic, but I just want to ask something simple.

Can we make an analogy of this situation with XIXth century ether (before Michelson and Morley) ?

Aether was the core mechanic to well, everything, and following that theory from the ground up, most things failed to work, once you actually followed the mathematical causality - and often before.

If you'd compare the theory of aether to anything, it'd be the higgs-boson field, which gives all matter mass, and turned out to actually be a thing.

Dark matter, on the other hand, is an explanation for an observable phenomenon, doing things to varying degrees in various distant locations, otherwise in isolation to the understood rules of the system, all of which work for most all other interactions (and which various functioning technological devices are built and adjusted by). The system continues to work, if you assume it is the result of gravitational interaction with a non-baryonic source, and further, the existence the matter itself doesn't involve additional physics to explain, merely requiring field disunification during the big bang being uneven, as we already think to be the case.

So far it's the only explanation that doesn't break everything else in the process.

Not that it's perfect, but well, neither is anything else, really. Some of our fundamental physics are probably going to turn out to be wrong, but in this case, it'd mean a whole mess of the ones we depend on are. If Dark Matter isn't it, something really strange is going on - like large regions where the laws of physics are just radically different, or other such things much more fantastical than the idea of dark matter.

Granted, dark *energy*, on the other hand, gets a bit more complicated in that regard.

OK user, since you seem to be the same guy as & and apparently know what the hell you're talking about...

What if the absolute basics are wrong, I don't even mean physics but maths itself. Back in uni, where I was a mere BsC pleb we talked about Fictionalism in maths all the time.

Can you argue that maybe the numbers just don't follow the curve at certain levels, or would models on the observable scale collapse too?

More religious retards, certain they are right.

This doesn't mean that the current model needs to be thrown out, just that it needs to be revised like classical mechanics

Ouch. He got you.

It's weird because somebody from the 1800's probably uttered that exact same sentence, but in the context of atoms. The resemblance is striking.

PBUH

>ctrl F + SMASH

>no results

newscientist.com/article/2110591-physics-tweak-solves-five-of-the-biggest-problems-in-one-go/

Do you even lift?

“The best thing about the theory is that it can be tested or checked within the next 10 years or so,” Ringwald says. “You can always invent new theories, but if they can only be tested in 100 years, or never, then this is not real science but meta-science.”

SMASH predicts that the axion should be about ten billion times lighter than the electron. Particles this small could be probed by the CULTASK experiment running in South Korea, or the proposed ORPHEUS experiment in the US and the planned MADMAX experiment in Germany.

This doesn’t mean it’s game over. It’s more like game on. Physicists will continue to compete to find experimental evidence or a better model.

“The battle is open,” Ringwald says.

That's interesting... Although...
>Some models, like supersymmetry, add hundreds of particles – none of which have been spotted at colliders like the LHC. But SMASH adds only six: three neutrinos, a fermion and a field that includes two particles.
Dark matter requires neither supersymmetry nor any new particles, only that a portion of the matter in the universe formed in a way that fails to link it with the EMF.

If one of these new particles or an interaction between them replaces it (clumps together and generates gravity the way it does), then yes, that would work, but you would actually be adding something new, rather than declaring some matter just doesn't interact with the EMF, which is a much larger leap, at least, until you can detect them.

Might be less of a jump in the case of dark energy though.

Eh, no that's not me, but... Like I said yonder dark matter can't be fixed by a cosmological constant, or any change in the maths. Dark energy, maybe, but not dark matter. (But I won't ask how you got through BsC without working on convergence.)

In this case, it's more like... Imagine some evil teacher gave you a series of dots representing an inkblot flow on a grid, and asked you to use a series of established fluid dynamic equations to calculate a flow point in reverse.

So you're going through it, and you find that, in some places on the grid, the established formulas predict the flow just fine - but on some other points in the grid, everything goes to hell, and you can't figure out why regardless of your angle of attack or what established formula you throw at it. But slowly, a possibility dawns upon you, and perhaps, in this case, you get to verify it when you see the original paper the blot was on, instead of just the data points: The paper was crumpled up before the ink was applied.

Dark matter, is kind of like that. Unlike dark energy, it isn't more or less uniformly present throughout the universe, but instead, like most matter, it appears in irregular clumps and only exerts gravitational force over very large areas.

The gravity is there as if something was there, but whatever it is, isn't interacting in any other way nor uniformly like a black hole nor radially like a cosmic superstring (those being defunct for other reasons anyways). It's just acting as if there was a clump of invisible matter in its place. Physics allows for the possibility for matter to exist that doesn't interact with EMF, and this maybe it - just that property, coupled with its inherent rarity when compressed by other gravitational forces, makes it really hard to verify.

>Dark energy/matter is basically nothingness

Atoms were theorized and used in models long before we had the technology or method to observe them, how is this any different?

>I'm 'hung up over it' because it's so dumb
No, that is not why.
>your dumb equation
... which you do not understand,
and that is why you are hung up.

You know, I'd understand this sort of thinking, if all the science was being done by one guy in a basement somewhere... But holy shit, do you any idea of how many fucking physicists there are working on how many different approaches to this shit - OF COURSE WE TRIED THAT! Hell, ten seconds on Google will get you a thousand failed attempts, and those are just the ones people published before they realized they were wrong. (And people are even exploring the shit they know is wrong - just for fun!)

Yeesh... Creationists...

And shit you use every day depends on the current models working. The standard model and GR handles all the basic shit right, the quantum model handles nearly all the tiny shit right, SR handles all the speedy shit right. Everything built with them in mind works right and as expected, from satellites to cell phones, from transistors to nukes.

Change the fundamental equations, and none that is true anymore. So with observations this wide reaching and fundamental, your only option is to add new phenomena or systems, as adjustments on that scale ain't gonna work. All dark matter does is assume the existence of something those models already predicted could exist, save in greater abundance. As for dark energy, well...

We don't yet have a verifiably working GUT or TOE, so we don't know everything. We don't have access to everything from where we are in the universe and the scale at which we can see - and in some cases, we, by definition, never will. In this case, we call it dark because we cannot directly observe it, we can only observe the effects and infer what properties such phenomena would need to create those effects in the existing models. (And this is true of a hell of a lot of other much more established things.)

So while it's depressing to discover you can't confirm how 95% of the universe works, and only what you can see it is doing, it's hardly surprising, given that we just worked out flight about a century ago.

>You know, I'd understand this sort of thinking
It's called self-affirming self-righteousness. "I can't be wrong, therefore the world is."

Which I'm currently demonstrating the inverse of, by assuming everyone else is also getting the damned "Error: Upload Failed" message.