[anon6_]

I love theoretical physics - I do get tired of all the fluff articles churned out. It's like medical research. You'd think they've cured cancer by now.

If you google around for dark matter, you'll find sources, including nasa.gov saying "direct proof" of dark matter has been found already. This was back in 2006.

Theoretical physicists: disprove MOND, TeVeS, Mass in other dimensions, Scale relativity, or better yet, get better data before throwing around theoretical speculation with such confidence?

[qrendel]

These types of questions seem to come up a lot, and while I'm not an expert, here are some typical responses, from one of the last dark matter threads (in particular, the two top replies): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550732

I assume the tendency for the general public to give higher consideration to "other explanations," relative to professional physicists who seem to lean heavily towards the "matter" hypothesis, is lack of expertise in the current state of research. If you don't have a lot of good evidence one way or the other, all options seem about equally likely, so why take WIMPs more seriously than MOND or other hypotheses? Not that considering those alternatives is silly, but I think this might explain why this question keeps coming up even though the physics community seems pretty focused on the dark-matter-as-matter hypothesis.

Though whatever the answer should turn out to be, it will certainly be an interesting development.