Modified gravity theories have been proposed many times but they never fit the evidence. We have some pretty direct evidence of dark matter, like the bullet cluster for example, that’s nearly impossible to explain without some form of dark matter.
It’s possible for there to be less dark matter than we think or multiple types of dark matter that make detection difficult but dark matter must exist in some form.
The thing is, we don't have any evidence for particles that have the properties required for dark matter.
It looks less like modified gravity, and more like a major shift in model, similar to Newtonian gravity to General Relativity.
Remember how planet 9 was proposed to solve the precession of Mercury's orbit?
It's exactly the same (except now much more complex) - add some mystery mass and suddenly equations work. Look in the direction of mystery mass and find nothing. Repeat for a couple hundred years until a new model comes out and explains the disparity without any invisible mass.
I said this in a solo reply, but time itself is the problem. I fully understand the importance of time in our ascent of knowledge and understanding, but I think it’s a placeholder causing more harm than good.
I’ve calculated “space” as a substrate with physical properties that account for what time currently “explains”.
I’ve yet to find an ear willing to hear it. I’ve also yet to find an experimental result that contradicts my hypothesis.
I’m not convinced anything is clear yet for either interpretation. It feels like every few months there is a new paper refuting previous analyses and showing new ways to interpret the data, e.g from like 2 weeks ago:
There are just way too many uncertain steps in these astronomical calculations to call anything definitive at these scales. The crisis in cosmology shows that good scientific explanations can still refute each other when they should be agreeing.
Yes, this is it. Form hypothesis > Test hypothesis > collect and analyze data > form new hypothesis > test hypothesis > continue ad nauseum. Science never sleeps.
It took about 50 years for the Higgs boson to go from hypothesis to detection because it took that long for the technology to catch up. And though this isn't a "Eureka!" moment, it may be the first step to confirmation.
Yes. But the difference is that we have ample mathmatical and observational evidence to imply the existence of dark matter. While the evidence for the existence of a god amounts to "Trust me bro."
The universe is the evidence for ~~god~~ the universe. Nothing more. If the universe must have had a creator because it exists, then any god must also have had a creator if they exist. One can not apply the existence of the universe itself to logically require that someone, somewhere must have created it.
I hope not. We can already detect dark matter and know it exists because we can see it. To greatly over simplify it scientists are trying to see it in different ways to manipulate it, see it from other angles, and gather for information from it. We can clearly see it bending light for example. I used to be catholic and that religion historically really advanced education and even helped to create the modern university system. I would be incredibly disappointed to see that!
Except that we did find dark matter(edit: ANTIMATTER)? It’s the stuff in between the rest of the matter. We know it exists because it annihilates when it touches matter.
Triggered physicists are not happy so I’ll edit.
We know about antimatter; we know about dark matter. We know about matter. We know about dark-antimatter. Stuff does things, we observed, everything is gonna get torn apart and recompacted back to zero point.
The last part of what he said is antimatter. The 'stuff between the rest of the matter' is empty space. He's either trolling or doesn't know what he's talking about (or both).
Dark Matter and Anti-Matter aren't even close to the same thing and there isn't anti-mayter between matter. In fact, the lack of Anti-Matter in our universe is a question scientists have.
I am no physicists. But what you said is clearly in error.
Your edit... there is a lot we don't know about dark matter and we certainly don't know about dark antimatter. Dark antimatter is purely hypothetical and there is no evidence for it.
What logic says that if matter exists then anti-matter exists? We have to have anti matter because (as it turns out) you have to have anti matter in order for quantum mechanics to work with special relativity. You’re not going to get that from just philosophizing.
So? I have no idea what your angle is. A few other people already highlighted the error a while ago, and nobody cares because it’s inconsequential to the point. Everyone knows that annihilation is matter-antimatter touching.
It’s common knowledge. We all know that. Forgive me for trying to expand on the thought at 9am.
Dark matter is a good name. Do you question the existence of blackholes on the grounds that they have a bad name? If anything, the problem is that dark matter is conflated with dark energy, which are not connected theories.
Dark = doesn’t interact with light (EM radiation). If you can think about matter in an even slightly abstract way, you can realize that matter that does not interact with EM forces could exist.
I think people tends to think along the way that dark matter is one thing, or one type of particle or material, in reality it could be variety of those.
The visible matter (or energy) is just a subset of what we can detect. In future we may expand what we can detect and there'll still be some "dark matter" left from the whole of what universe has that we cant detect.
It means maths is wrong and the dark matter fudge factor is not the answer. Scientists learn to do it properly and learn the truth without fudging maths to fit the theory.
It isn't a fudge factor, nor is the math "wrong". We could spend 1000 years looking and the idea would still hold up, barring any positive evidence the math is wrong. Stop being a pedant.
Dark matter is not a proven physical substance; it is a mathematical placeholder invented to patch a fundamental flaw in our current understanding of gravity. For over forty years, multi million dollar experiments worldwide have utterly failed to directly detect a single dark matter particle, forcing theorists to constantly move the goalposts to keep the hypothesis alive. Furthermore, the fact that a galaxy's rotation speed is perfectly dictated by its visible mass alone, a phenomenon known as the Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation strongly suggests that we do not have a mass problem, but a math problem. Just as 19th century scientists wrongly invented aether' to explain light, modern cosmology is using dark matter as an unprovable fudge factor instead of admitting that Einstein's laws of gravity simply break down on a cosmic scale.
The Bullet Cluster is not 'direct proof' of dark matter; it is just another case of gravitational lensing being used to map invisible mass, which skeptics have completely dismantled. Recent data from the James Webb Space Telescope proved that standard dark matter models drastically undercounted the cluster’s ordinary matter such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. When these real, visible remnants are actually accounted for, the entire lensing effect can be explained naturally using alternative gravity theories like MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) without needing a single gram of imaginary dark matter. Furthermore, the clusters are smashing into each other at speeds far too high for standard dark matter math to explain, meaning the Bullet Cluster actually contradicts the very theory it was invented to save.
I think dark matter is just a parallel dimension interacting with us. We can't really interact with it because we can't perceive it in our 3D space. There's probably a much larger universe of way more dimensions, I think some scientists believe there might be 9 or more above ours. It's like if we were in 2D and someone told us about a 3rd dimension we probably couldn't comprehend what it even looked like.
We only know dark matter is there because it affects the gravitational forces of objects we can observe.
Then we finally understand time is a human construct. It doesn’t belong in our equations. Without “time” there’s no need for dark matter to fill the infinite holes.
Instead of time, when we finally come around to the idea that “space” is a substrate with physical properties, we will truly capture nature.
Change21 | 17 hours ago
Clearly there’s something missing from our understanding of how gravity and space time effects galaxy growth and structure.
Science is often about the sincere pursuit of wrong ideas.
I personally find the idea of dark matter and dark energy unlikely but it is the best current explanation.
We should scrutinize and test our best ideas to death, correct or incorrect we’ll keep moving closer to the truth.
xboxiscrunchy | 17 hours ago
Modified gravity theories have been proposed many times but they never fit the evidence. We have some pretty direct evidence of dark matter, like the bullet cluster for example, that’s nearly impossible to explain without some form of dark matter.
It’s possible for there to be less dark matter than we think or multiple types of dark matter that make detection difficult but dark matter must exist in some form.
fractalife | 16 hours ago
The thing is, we don't have any evidence for particles that have the properties required for dark matter.
It looks less like modified gravity, and more like a major shift in model, similar to Newtonian gravity to General Relativity.
Remember how planet 9 was proposed to solve the precession of Mercury's orbit?
It's exactly the same (except now much more complex) - add some mystery mass and suddenly equations work. Look in the direction of mystery mass and find nothing. Repeat for a couple hundred years until a new model comes out and explains the disparity without any invisible mass.
Feisty-Ring121 | 13 hours ago
I said this in a solo reply, but time itself is the problem. I fully understand the importance of time in our ascent of knowledge and understanding, but I think it’s a placeholder causing more harm than good.
I’ve calculated “space” as a substrate with physical properties that account for what time currently “explains”.
I’ve yet to find an ear willing to hear it. I’ve also yet to find an experimental result that contradicts my hypothesis.
fractalife | 13 hours ago
Submit your paper for peer review.
Feisty-Ring121 | 12 hours ago
They have been. I have six papers on it from different angles.
Boring_and_sons | 3 hours ago
Just curious, have any been accepted or are they still under review?
mightypup1974 | 2 hours ago
Sounds like they’re willing to hear it then
TacoPi | 16 hours ago
I’m not convinced anything is clear yet for either interpretation. It feels like every few months there is a new paper refuting previous analyses and showing new ways to interpret the data, e.g from like 2 weeks ago:
A Detailed MOND Modelling of the Bullet Cluster
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae9d4c
There are just way too many uncertain steps in these astronomical calculations to call anything definitive at these scales. The crisis in cosmology shows that good scientific explanations can still refute each other when they should be agreeing.
Change21 | 15 hours ago
I think it’s more appropriate to say there’s an action taking place that we can describe and measure but dark matter remains an n in the equation.
It’s a place holder until we measure it or replace it.
Junkman3 | 13 hours ago
Yes, this is it. Form hypothesis > Test hypothesis > collect and analyze data > form new hypothesis > test hypothesis > continue ad nauseum. Science never sleeps.
The_Weekend_Baker | 16 hours ago
It took about 50 years for the Higgs boson to go from hypothesis to detection because it took that long for the technology to catch up. And though this isn't a "Eureka!" moment, it may be the first step to confirmation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01985-9
Other-Comfortable-64 | 18 hours ago
If we don't find it, it does not mean it does not exist.
lordicarus | 17 hours ago
Isn't that the argument theists would make?
edit: i'm not a believer, i'm just saying being unable to prove a negative isn't a proof for the positive.
OpalFanatic | 17 hours ago
Yes. But the difference is that we have ample mathmatical and observational evidence to imply the existence of dark matter. While the evidence for the existence of a god amounts to "Trust me bro."
FormerlyMauchChunk | 16 hours ago
The implication of dark matter is not the discovery of dark matter. Dark matter is an explanation for a phenomenon, but it's the wrong explanation.
iCameToLearnSomeCode | 15 hours ago
>but it's the wrong explanation.
No, it MIGHT be the wrong explanation.
It is a possible explanation that needs to be explored further.
FormerlyMauchChunk | 14 hours ago
It's speculative, and is not unifying the theories.
Brrdock | 14 hours ago
The universe is the evidence for god in a pretty similar way.
Neither are really falsifiable, just "there must be something there for our observations and assumptions to make sense"
OpalFanatic | 13 hours ago
The universe is the evidence for ~~god~~ the universe. Nothing more. If the universe must have had a creator because it exists, then any god must also have had a creator if they exist. One can not apply the existence of the universe itself to logically require that someone, somewhere must have created it.
Brrdock | 13 hours ago
And the universe isn't evidence for dark matter either, more than it's evidence that our description is incomplete
Other-Comfortable-64 | 13 hours ago
No, I'm not claiming it does exist. But unlike religion we have a lot of evidence that there is something.
CookingZombie | 16 hours ago
Yeah we can never prove god isn’t real. So believe away if you want. Just don’t expect everyone should agree.
FormerlyMauchChunk | 16 hours ago
I BELIEVE in dark matter.
Does it exist now?
holdmyspot123 | 14 hours ago
I hope not. We can already detect dark matter and know it exists because we can see it. To greatly over simplify it scientists are trying to see it in different ways to manipulate it, see it from other angles, and gather for information from it. We can clearly see it bending light for example. I used to be catholic and that religion historically really advanced education and even helped to create the modern university system. I would be incredibly disappointed to see that!
Alkemist101 | 14 hours ago
Doesn't mean it does either.
Other-Comfortable-64 | 13 hours ago
Yeah naturally.
Evil-Cun | 17 hours ago
Except that we did find dark matter(edit: ANTIMATTER)? It’s the stuff in between the rest of the matter. We know it exists because it annihilates when it touches matter.
Triggered physicists are not happy so I’ll edit.
We know about antimatter; we know about dark matter. We know about matter. We know about dark-antimatter. Stuff does things, we observed, everything is gonna get torn apart and recompacted back to zero point.
tripl35oul | 16 hours ago
I think that's antimatter
EquipLordBritish | 16 hours ago
The last part of what he said is antimatter. The 'stuff between the rest of the matter' is empty space. He's either trolling or doesn't know what he's talking about (or both).
tripl35oul | 16 hours ago
Yeah lol I'm not engaging further with that person
Evil-Cun | 16 hours ago
I’m good on semantics arguments with physicists ok?
MisourFluffyFace | 16 hours ago
says something blatantly wrong
calls it a semantics argument when you get corrected
Evil-Cun | 16 hours ago
your air of superiority is impressive
MisourFluffyFace | 16 hours ago
What did I say that even remotely implied that I was superior
Food_Library333 | 16 hours ago
Dark Matter and Anti-Matter aren't even close to the same thing and there isn't anti-mayter between matter. In fact, the lack of Anti-Matter in our universe is a question scientists have.
HighPoweredSandwich | 16 hours ago
Your last sentence describes anti matter not dark matter. Not the same thing.
Evil-Cun | 16 hours ago
Same diff bro I’m good on semantics
HighPoweredSandwich | 16 hours ago
Same diff??? No, your last sentence does not apply to dark matter. It does not annihilate matter. Anti matter does.
Evil-Cun | 16 hours ago
Oh my god fine ok let’s talk about fucking physics. 4 matters, Matter-Antimatter DarkMatter-DarkAntimatter.
I don’t want to talk about this.
HighPoweredSandwich | 15 hours ago
OK, bud. You are trying to save face.
I am no physicists. But what you said is clearly in error.
Your edit... there is a lot we don't know about dark matter and we certainly don't know about dark antimatter. Dark antimatter is purely hypothetical and there is no evidence for it.
Evil-Cun | 15 hours ago
Logic can dictate some things for us. Such as If matter exists, then Anti-matter exists. If Darkmatter exists ergo then Anti-darkmatter must exist.
This is why I don’t want to start talking to you people. It’s 9in the morning.
Alarming-Customer-89 | 14 hours ago
What logic says that if matter exists then anti-matter exists? We have to have anti matter because (as it turns out) you have to have anti matter in order for quantum mechanics to work with special relativity. You’re not going to get that from just philosophizing.
Evil-Cun | 14 hours ago
Logic would just say “Ok and logically, then there must also be some Anti-darkmatter out there that is also required for Quantum Physics to operate.”
See how logic works? It’s Okhams razor in action.
I wasn’t paid anything to introduce you to logic.
HighPoweredSandwich | 12 hours ago
Not correct and it has no relevance to your error. You clearly were attributing a property of anti matter to dark matter.
Evil-Cun | 12 hours ago
So? I have no idea what your angle is. A few other people already highlighted the error a while ago, and nobody cares because it’s inconsequential to the point. Everyone knows that annihilation is matter-antimatter touching.
It’s common knowledge. We all know that. Forgive me for trying to expand on the thought at 9am.
TedTyro | 17 hours ago
Then it will never get a better, more specific name.
helm | 3 hours ago
Dark matter is a good name. Do you question the existence of blackholes on the grounds that they have a bad name? If anything, the problem is that dark matter is conflated with dark energy, which are not connected theories.
Dark = doesn’t interact with light (EM radiation). If you can think about matter in an even slightly abstract way, you can realize that matter that does not interact with EM forces could exist.
Serkisist | 17 hours ago
What if the dark matter was inside us the whole time?
jsmith_92 | 17 hours ago
I only got that white matter
Physical_Dentist2284 | 16 hours ago
I have some gray matter.
Krinks1 | 16 hours ago
Then it really doesn't matter
thingsinmyhouse | 6 hours ago
What if its the friends we made along the way type shit haha
Sufficient_Loss9301 | 16 hours ago
Didn’t they just make a detection consistent with dark matter to a high sigma like a week ago lol
Butiprovedthem | 16 hours ago
3ish sigma. The bar is generally above 5.
ankitgusai | 16 hours ago
I think people tends to think along the way that dark matter is one thing, or one type of particle or material, in reality it could be variety of those.
The visible matter (or energy) is just a subset of what we can detect. In future we may expand what we can detect and there'll still be some "dark matter" left from the whole of what universe has that we cant detect.
helly1080 | 15 hours ago
Then I guess it was darker than we thought.
FaceDeer | 15 hours ago
What do you mean by "never find it?" We've already found it, we just haven't characterized it.
dan_jeffers | 14 hours ago
Buy some new dark matter and the old dark matter will immediately show up.
kinkycarbon | 13 hours ago
What if dark matter was the dark regions of space?
Robot_Alchemist | 12 hours ago
What does that even mean?
carterartist | 9 hours ago
Then we find a better answer or it continues to be the most likely answer
CJPrinter | 5 hours ago
“Dark Matter” is just this century’s aether.
27Elephantballoons | 5 hours ago
What of it rains green eggs and ham? Life will go on
Alkemist101 | 18 hours ago
It means maths is wrong and the dark matter fudge factor is not the answer. Scientists learn to do it properly and learn the truth without fudging maths to fit the theory.
LeonTrollski1 | 17 hours ago
It isn't a fudge factor, nor is the math "wrong". We could spend 1000 years looking and the idea would still hold up, barring any positive evidence the math is wrong. Stop being a pedant.
Alkemist101 | 14 hours ago
Dark matter is not a proven physical substance; it is a mathematical placeholder invented to patch a fundamental flaw in our current understanding of gravity. For over forty years, multi million dollar experiments worldwide have utterly failed to directly detect a single dark matter particle, forcing theorists to constantly move the goalposts to keep the hypothesis alive. Furthermore, the fact that a galaxy's rotation speed is perfectly dictated by its visible mass alone, a phenomenon known as the Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation strongly suggests that we do not have a mass problem, but a math problem. Just as 19th century scientists wrongly invented aether' to explain light, modern cosmology is using dark matter as an unprovable fudge factor instead of admitting that Einstein's laws of gravity simply break down on a cosmic scale.
Alkemist101 | 14 hours ago
Devils in the detail, detail doesn't hold up.
Dark matter functions as an unproven invisible placeholder invented to rescue standard gravity equations when visible stars move faster than expected.
If you don't like it, prove it.
AnAttemptReason | 16 hours ago
We have direct evidence of dark matter from the studies on various colliding galaxies, i.e the bullet cluster.
Alkemist101 | 14 hours ago
The Bullet Cluster is not 'direct proof' of dark matter; it is just another case of gravitational lensing being used to map invisible mass, which skeptics have completely dismantled. Recent data from the James Webb Space Telescope proved that standard dark matter models drastically undercounted the cluster’s ordinary matter such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. When these real, visible remnants are actually accounted for, the entire lensing effect can be explained naturally using alternative gravity theories like MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) without needing a single gram of imaginary dark matter. Furthermore, the clusters are smashing into each other at speeds far too high for standard dark matter math to explain, meaning the Bullet Cluster actually contradicts the very theory it was invented to save.
AnAttemptReason | 11 hours ago
I have read papers on this, and none supporting your comment, links please, would be happy to read them.
No-Language6720 | 16 hours ago
I think dark matter is just a parallel dimension interacting with us. We can't really interact with it because we can't perceive it in our 3D space. There's probably a much larger universe of way more dimensions, I think some scientists believe there might be 9 or more above ours. It's like if we were in 2D and someone told us about a 3rd dimension we probably couldn't comprehend what it even looked like.
We only know dark matter is there because it affects the gravitational forces of objects we can observe.
tequalspitimese | 17 hours ago
I know what it is
Memory_Less | 16 hours ago
Well, we will truly be in the dark. Just saying.
costafilh0 | 14 hours ago
At this point? Good. So we can move on to other stuff and move all this money invested in it to other stuff as well.
Feisty-Ring121 | 13 hours ago
Then we finally understand time is a human construct. It doesn’t belong in our equations. Without “time” there’s no need for dark matter to fill the infinite holes.
Instead of time, when we finally come around to the idea that “space” is a substrate with physical properties, we will truly capture nature.
griff_the_unholy | 17 hours ago
how do you "find" a rounding error in an equation?
jkurratt | 17 hours ago
You don't know that.
FormerlyMauchChunk | 16 hours ago
We won't. It IS a goose chase. Dark matter is a fudge factor to make up for not acknowledging the luminiferous aether.