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by alakep 1056 days ago
Dark matter almost certainly doesn’t exist.

This hunt for it is very parallel to the hunt for the “ether” that Einstein showed didn’t exist. Curiously, the big insight of relativity was getting rid of two bad assumptions: the concept of “simultaneity” and the idea that gravitational acceleration is locally different from other acceleration.

I think the resolution to whatever dark matter is will likely make other fundamental problems in physics simpler as well.

2 comments

What's your alternative hypothesis to explain large scale structure formation?
Boom yes
Boom no. Dark Matter is already known to exist: neutrinos, for instance
No, that article is referring to COLD dark matter, which is responsible for structure formation but does not encompass all possible species of dark matter. There are others. "Warm" dark matter is one of them and neutrinos are an example. It's difficult to explain structure formation with warm dark matter, which prompts the search for cold dark matter. Popular science articles like this one truncated the term, where it's entered the popular lexicon as just "dark matter."