[dbsmith83]

I admit that I haven't been reading about dark matter lately. Last I checked, it had not been verified via experimental evidence. Is that still the case?

There is a difference between observations and _experimental_ evidence, which I think the GP was referring to.

[ajkjk]

It is heavily verified by experimental evidence, and has been since it was first proposed. That's why people have spent so much time studying it. It's not like it was just a random hair-brained idea someone had.

The only thing we haven't done is figured out what it is in terms of other concepts we know, such as elementary particles.

[dbsmith83]

Sure, the anomolous observations are verified, but there is no experiment that has been conducted to directly detect it as far as I know. What you said about what we don't know is precisely my point. Given that this article mentions the discrepancy between models and observations, I'd say we know hardly much at all about it--whatever it may be given that we can't directly detect it and we can't even make a good model to predict its behavior

[dbsmith83]

Sure, keep down voting me, but read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Detection_of_dark_...

Healthy skepticism is a good thing for science. Until DM is proven, it is worth exploring other avenues--may the best experiment win. If you don't understand this, you are a zealot rather than a scientist.

[ajkjk]

Everyone here agrees that healthy skepticism is good for science. The GP's post was not healthy skepticism:

> Honestly, I'm a little tired of the whole dark matter thing. There's no evidence for it, and physicists keep coming up with more and more complex models to fit the data when they don't actually understand what's going on there.

Reads as:

"I know nothing, but I assume that there's no evidence for this because I haven't done any research, and I assume that physicists are foolishly sticking to the theory because they're desperate".

This couldn't be further from the truth, and it could be dispelled with 5 minutes of googling.

You're being downvoted for the same dismissive cluelessness:

> Last I checked, it had not been verified via experimental evidence. Is that still the case?

In reality, there has been mountains of experimental evidence ever since the theory was first proposed, which is why it has been taken seriously for decades. That's why the "Observational evidence" section on Wikipedia has 11 sections in it, reflecting thousands of papers. We still don't know what it is at an _atomic_ level but we know where it is, what it weighs, how it moves, and what it interacts with.