this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Futurology
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This headline is pretty dumb. Dark matter is not a myth, it's clearly there in the data, so it exists for sure. Now the name might be completely wrong as it's neither dark and may not be matter, but it still exists. We should have just called it Pete or something, so the name wouldn't imply anything about it's properties. But the press always seem to think dark matter is something thought up to fix something, but that's not the case at all.
The numbers in the data don't match up and the difference is what's labeled as "Dark matter", simply putting another label on it or dismissing it doesn't fix the underlying data not matching up. And it isn't like a fault in the data, we've seen it in ALL the data, no matter what you look at or how you look at it, the signs of dark matter can be seen.
Listened to a dark matter researcher a while back and he said "Dark matter is a name for an observation, not a theory" and I think that's a pretty good description.
They saw something weird with large scale observations and gave it a bad name. It's something that's done on a pretty regular basis in Astronomy. They really need to stop naming things before they're fully described. Of course how do you talk about something before it's named? No idea.
Maybe they just need to be better about letting go of poorly named phenomena.
Or start calling it Ninja Phenomena. Why is the observation not matching with the models and vice versa? It's those Ninja Phenomena at it again, wrecking stuff and hiding away!