[efitz]

Most people with a high school education have been taught a minimal amount of skepticism about "fill in the blank" type science, like spontaneous generation or the aether. In this case, skepticism means that our STEM education worked as intended and we should celebrate that IMO.

I was pretty skeptical about dark matter until I watched this presentation by Sabine Hossenfelder (she's a great explainer of science, IMO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4sw3-__pGo

I think that she did a better job of explaining why we should be open to the idea of dark matter, than the original article did.

[rolenthedeep]

Sabine's explanation is the most compelling I've ever seen, but I still can't get past the very obvious and much simpler explanation that we just don't understand gravity.

We very famously don't have a model of gravity that works at quantum scales, and our current model clearly doesn't work at galactic scales.

So our solution to this problem is... Invisible pixie dust. We've just reinvented the aether, and we're even still doing the same experiments to detect dark matter as we tried to detect aether.

I really just don't buy it. Dark matter would require reworking everything from particle physics up to cosmological interactions. How is this more acceptable than our model of gravity being more wrong than it is now?

We're very clearly missing something fundamental in our understanding of gravity. We know that, and we've known it for a long time. The absense of dark matter would mean that our understanding of gravity is still wrong. Having a more incorrect model of gravity involves far fewer variables than an entirely new type of matter, so why is everyone on the dark matter bandwagon?

[x-complexity]

> So our solution to this problem is... Invisible pixie dust.

As stated before, it satisfies the following conditions:

A) It fills in the holes of existing formulas/models

B) It prevents MASSIVE retooling of everything we know

Until a better model comes along to explain the area filled in by dark matter, this is the best solution we have right now. It's the physics equivalent of strcpy() but without any available replacement: It works until the edge case.

Right now the (big J) Job is finding physics' strlcpy(): Something that can be used in place of strcpy().