I feel like scientists today have forgotten a fundamental truth about science and understanding: We can never _know_ when we are right about our theories. We can only ever _know_ when we are wrong about them. New evidence can arrive at any time, and that evidence will either bolster our theories, or prove one or more theories incorrect. New evidence is always arriving.
I mean do we really believe that we know everything about this? Somehow, we A) know we have large knowledge gaps, AND B) believe that we understand things we have unanswered questions about.
We have a LOT of confidence about dark matter and exactly zero direct evidence.
It seems much more likely to me (I am not a scientist) that we are wrong about things that we assume to be hard facts and those error(s) have artificially produced the need for dark matter in order for things to make sense.
> We can only ever _know_ when we are wrong about them.
I think this is what the OP is saying though: There are many ideas about what dark matter is or could be, but astrophysicists model the early universe using only baryonic matter, the results _are wrong_.
As a theory, it's quite simple: in its absence, the physics doesn't work. If you add matter that behaves in a particular way, simulations align to observation.
What is dark matter? shrug I don't think we can call any answer to that question a theory yet, we don't have any way to falsify it. We have many hypotheses, but those aren't theories.
> There are many ideas about what dark matter is or could be, but astrophysicists model the early universe using only baryonic matter, the results _are wrong_.
That doesn’t make any particular theory correct. It is only proof that our current model is wrong.
Filling the gaps with math, and calling the math “dark matter” does not make dark matter correct; one or more of our existing models is wrong.
The name dark matter is not a specific thing, rather, it's a collection of hypotheses whose characteristics are bounded by results in high energy experiments and astronomical observation.
> As a theory, it's quite simple: in its absence, the physics doesn't work. If you add matter that behaves in a particular way, simulations align to observation.
They actually don't, numerous extra parameters have to be added for DM to account for observations. DM was invented to fix one problem with observation, and 15 more have cropped up which don't fit.
See the paper [1] and the discussions of the times DM has been falsified. Extra parameters were then added to account for the new observations, where MOND makes certain parameter-free predictions that match observations. Clearly neither theory is a perfect fit for observations but the strong preference for DM seems unjustified.
I mean do we really believe that we know everything about this? Somehow, we A) know we have large knowledge gaps, AND B) believe that we understand things we have unanswered questions about.
We have a LOT of confidence about dark matter and exactly zero direct evidence.
It seems much more likely to me (I am not a scientist) that we are wrong about things that we assume to be hard facts and those error(s) have artificially produced the need for dark matter in order for things to make sense.