[yongjik]

Honestly I'm not sure why some people oppose "dark matter" so much. We know there's something out of ordinary, it behaves like matter, and it doesn't interact with light (hence "dark"). Given that, "dark matter" is as inoffensive a name as possible. People are acting like we named it "quasiflavored eleven-dimensional supersymmetry carriers."

[daxfohl]

I think it's a natural reaction after Einstein. The whole physics world was certain about this Aether thing, and it turned out to be wrong and much more beautifully solved by plain geometry. "Dark matter", taken at surface level, sounds like going down the exact same rabbit hole.

There's a fundamental difference though. With dark matter, the evidence of the stuff is much more direct and precise. We can determine the shape and concentration of it. Aether on the other hand was a hand-wavy metaphysical concept from the beginning. There was never any experimental evidence that aether was a real thing; it was just a concept invented to patch up the inherent inconsistencies in electromagnetic theory near the speed of light.

[duutfhhh]

Or spacetime is that aether. This is like some dusty books have been claiming that there's an invisible fluid substance around us that supports life, then when science discovers oxygen, it says "See? There is no invisible ether or anything like that around us, only atoms."

[ifdefdebug]

> Honestly I'm not sure why some people oppose "dark matter" so much

But I think you might be after something:

> Given that, "dark matter" is as inoffensive a name as possible.

Precisely. Dark matter is boring. People want Klingons.

[StanislavPetrov]

Its not the name "dark matter" have an objection too, its misleading and/or confused attitudes like the one you yourself exhibit in your comment!

> We know there's something out of ordinary, it behaves like matter, and it doesn't interact with light

That's wrong, and presupposes the existence of dark matter, rather than treating it as a possibility. What we know is that our formulas don't match up with our observations. We don't know why that is. One suggestion is that there is some sort of invisible stuff out there that we cannot detect, but would make our formulas add up, so it could exist. Its perfectly legitimate to speculate about the existence of dark matter, and to set up different experiments to try to detect it, but its not fine to pretend that its "settled science" that dark matter is out there and its only a matter of finding it. Unless and until someone detects "dark matter" or figures out another reason why our calculations don't add up its existence will remain an open question.

[svachalek]

Years ago, vaguely describing it as “formulas not adding up” would have been fair enough but there are quite a few studies now giving a much more detailed picture than that. Some galaxies seem to have quite a lot of it, some galaxies not much at all, so it’s harder and harder to just tweak formulas for the visible matter in a way that explains all the evidence.