[rpedela]

For me, I have always had a problem with how dark matter was portrayed in the media, even more scientific media. It is only fairly recently that scientists have been communicating dark matter as a problem with several possible solutions to laypeople. Before it went kinda like this: "we are unable to detect 80% (or whatever number) of the mass in the universe and we think it is non-baryonic matter". As someone trained in science, but not physics, that sounds like a huge discrepancy suggesting an incorrect theory. But I all hear until recently is that "our theories are right, our observations are wrong". But usually it is the opposite. I'm oversimplifying but that was the general impression. More recently the media and scientists have been doing a better job admitting that something may be wrong with general relativity but the leading hypothesis is non-baryonic matter.

[Gibbon1]

Maybe it's just me but I remember back in the 1980's the first simulations of galaxies didn't work unless you added a lot more matter than was known even then to exist. That said to me that there is an unknown... of some sort. Because we're not even talking relativistic effects really. I have no dog in all of this because I'm supremely confident I would understand it even if the problem proves tractable. (And it might not be, for instance maybe dark matter just does not interact with normal matter at all)

Getting po'd at the media for not being able to explain stuff that scientists don't understand, might as well yell at a jellyfish.

[rpedela]

Even scientists communicating directly to the public is what I'm talking about rather a journalism major not understanding physics.

[posterboy]

The discrepancy though is that a lot of the "observation" as I'd put it, too, is rather theoretic. It's a false dilemma and that's the problem. It's not just better measurements that are needed, but knowing where to look. If one is so far removed from the topic that there is no difference, it doesn't really make sense to speculate, except to show how much one doesn't understand.