Dark Matter : supposedly makes up a big amount of the mass of the universe, but cant be seen, does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Also it can 'pass through' other normal matter, and other dark matter.

It's basically magic aka not actually real, just something in vogue to pretend is real at the present moment.

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I mean it's easy to say it's fake, but to counter this, why can a particle that only interacts with gravity not exist?

The neutrino is a good example of a particle that almost doesn't exist. They are produced in solar reactions in spectacular amounts. Trillions of them are flitting through you right now as if you don't exist. You'd need a light year block of lead to ensure you could stop one. Mind-boggling amounts of them have to pass through our detectors to see even a single interaction.

Simply put, the particle physics does not have to behave nice so you can sleep well at night.

	▲	pfortuny 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We are still in the "ether" times of dark matter. We have still not had a Michelson-Morley experiment. That's it. Not that I am saying it does not exist. Only that we do not have the means of falsifying it if it is false.
	▲	dnautics an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean sure nature has no obligation to not have a unfalsifable particle, but you wind up in weird places, like, there exists a distribution of dark matter that explains the poltergeist that knocked over your coffee cup last week.

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njarboe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dark Unknown Matter would be a better name for lay people to understand what's going on. I'm no cosmologist but isn't it just a placeholder for something that gravity interacts with (and not much else) and we don't know what it currently is. When we discover what it is the name will change.

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_ZeD_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or, you know, as aether.

It's a scientific theory. It's the best that we have right now to model the real world and be able to do prediction on its behavior.

Does it seems to be kept together by duct tape? Maybe.

Is it yet useful? Yep.

Will it be discarded if anything more fitting will came up? You can be sure of it.

	▲	Joker_vD 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, pretty much, which is why this adherence to dark matter seems even more puzzling: we already had a mysterious substance with nonsensical mechanical properties (perfectly solid, but has zero collision) that turned out to be completely superfluous; the actual answer was the different shape of the physical laws. Now we again have a mysterious substance with nonsensical properties (has gravitational pull, doesn't interact with normal matter in any other way) — could it be that it simply doesn't exist? And it's not like the concept of aether itself was really all that useful for anything. The physicists wanted the light to have some mechanical medium to propagate through instead of being a thing of itself, that actual itself shaped mechanical media, not the other way around (mechanical properties arise from the E-M interaction, not the other way around), simply because all other known waves phenomena existed in mechanical media.