This is one of those posts which I started writing a couple of years ago, but did not get around to finishing till recently. Before we go any further, let me clarify a few things. The main point of this post is as follows: belief in anything which is not supported by objective and reproducible evidence is no different from traditional religious belief. The uncritical acceptance of ideas such as "anthropogenic climate change" which is based on computer models or string theory based on a few clever-sounding equations is the equivalent of blaming storms, famines and epidemics on bearded sky dudes or guys with horns and spiky tails- and I have written about my thoughts on what passes for "climate change" in the past, and will do more in the future.
Now let us get back to the topic at hand, namely belief in the existence of dark matter. Some of you might wonder about my reasons for opposing this idea. Do I believe that dark matter cannot exist? Well.. in my opinion, that question is totally irrelevant since my objection to the idea of dark matter comes down to two aspects of that idea which are seldom discussed nowadays. Firstly, scientists invoke dark matter to explain the, often large, discrepancies between predictions made by their theoretical models about how the universe should behave versus how it does as measured experimentally. This is eerily reminiscent of how people living in previous eras used to invoke ‘god’ or ‘the devil’ to explain everything which they could not explain.
Such lazy thinking and attribution has a long history in science. Some of you might have read about how scientists in 1800s believed that all empty space was filled with Luminiferous Aether because their contemporary understanding of electromagnetic wave transmission did not work properly under conditions of a true vacuum. To be clear, I am not implying that every scientist in those times believed the universe was filled with this mysterious substance possessing magical properties. Yet it is also true that their equations about propagation of electromagnetic radiation could not square with contemporary experimental data without invoking this concept. Aether met its final demise with Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity in 1905.
But what does this have to do with belief in the existence of Dark Matter? Well.. let us start by going back in history to see how this idea came into being. To make a long story short, it all started when astronomers and astrophysicists realized that there might be a discrepancy between mass of observable stars in a given galaxy and their movement within that galaxy Of course, these early observations were performed using less than adequate instrumentation. It was only in the 1970s that astronomers were finally able to say with a high degree of certainty that the radial velocity of stars within galaxies (around its center) was much higher than what was calculated using the approximate mass of all stars or even all hydrogen and helium which could be visually observed or measured within each system.
Some other phenomena, discovered later, such as gravitational lensing of background objects by galaxy clusters, temperature distribution of hot gas in galaxies and clusters and pattern of anisotropies (unevenness) in cosmic microwave background have also been attributed to dark matter. There are alternative explanations for these effects, most of which rely on the idea that gravity doesn’t scale like other fundamental forces in the universe. I am not going to go into all of them, suffice to say that the underlying concept holds reasonably well, but derivative 'complete theories' do not. But let us be honest about something.. conventional theories about mass, gravity, relativity etc are also unable to explain certain important classes of astronomical observations unless they invoke this mysterious Dark Matter.
Which brings me to my second objection to Dark Matter. Simply put, we haven’t been able to find clear and unambiguous proof for its existence after searching hard for over 40 years! And this is especially weird since calculations suggest that it should be at least 6-10 times more abundant than ordinary matter. In other words, we somehow cannot find the majority of calculated mass in the universe even after many thousands of academics and their far more numerous slave laborers.. aka postdocs and graduate students spent tens of billions to build new instruments and after spending millions of man-hours on trying to solve this problem. Isn't that odd?
But.. you might say "wasn't experimental evidence for neutrons, neutrinos, antimatter, controlled nuclear fission, nuclear transmutation of elements etc found after their theoretical predictions"? Well.. yes, but with a massive caveat. Experimental evidence for all of them came within a decade or less of the first solid theoretical predictions. Moreover, this occurred in an era when there were far fewer scientists and much less research money. Today we have robust and easy accessible instruments to measure them, not to mention that anti-matter emitting and transmuted radioactive elements are routinely used in areas such as diagnostic medicine and generating electricity.
So far, Dark Matter has only been seen in some FPS video games such as Half Life 2 and on mediocre sci-fi shows such as StarGate. Experimental evidence for existence and composition of Dark Matter is scarcer than for the 'Holy Grail'. But why is this such a bad thing, you might ask? Well.. for one, it has become a respectable dogma which justifies the existence of an entire ecosystem of priests and their apprentices engaged in constant search for proof. Try getting a job in astrophysics without professing your acceptance of this hypothesis. Better still, try getting funded if you somehow manage to land a job in astrophysics without first expressing your sincere and continuing faith in the existence of Dark Matter.
What do you think? Comments?
I know you hate establishment, but you're assuming a bit too much malice in the Dark Matter hypothesis. There's a large amount of mass and volume not accounted for, if there's such a large discrepancy in a near air tight model, it's fair for physicists to consider this as the number one possibility, because other options are much more difficult to fit into the current state of physics, or more difficult to experiment with.
It isn't as strict a belief in the same sense as deities or spirits, because they're constantly seeking a method of measure.
You're bothered by the lack of observation of particles, but it's possible for a kind of mass to exist that doesn't interact with the typical physical forces, just gravity, that's a lack of imagination on your part.