…may the ‘dark’ force be with you

Have you seen a ray of sunlight falling from window to across the room? In this beam of sunlight you can sometimes see floating particles of dust, even though the room is clean, and with out this bright concentrated beam of light the suspended particals are invisibe to the naked eye.
I propose that dark matter is simply space dust, unlit for whatever reason, maybe in shadow, between the planets /stars. It would be super fine similar to graphite or talc, and enough of it could block out light or obscure vision.
Then again it could be Gods shadow if you lean thataway, or a cosmic invisibility field put on by UFOs/alien species, to blind us to their presence. LOL. ;)

If you’d read the article, you’d know that there are quite a few people out there doing exactly that.

It’s difficult, though, since Einstein’s theory of gravity is a very simple, coherent, whole based on just a couple of mathematical ideas, and it tests out very well in the great majority of cases it’s been applied to. It’s extremely difficult to tweak it a little bit without breaking it in a way that blatantly contradicts old observations. But still, people are trying, because nobody is satisfied with the current situation in which we have little more than a label for our ignorance.

We have our theories and our observations, and there’s a glitch where the former don’t seem to account for the latter. There are several ways of fixing the glitch, and the most obvious one is to guess that there’s mass that our telescopes are missing. People are pursuing that (and some very recent evidence, which was reported in both Science and Nature news, suggests that it may be for real), but it’s frustrating, because we don’t know what that stuff is and may not know for some time. Other ways of fixing the glitch exist, and people are pursuing those, too. It’s an active area of research, and the debate among physicists is far, far more involved than could possibly be described in an article like this. Keep that in mind when you’re reading popular articles about complex issues. 99% of the information has been filtered out in order to give you a good read.

The difference between the way science deals with such things and the way religion deals with them is that, in science, just having a label for our ignorance is considered the beginning of understanding, while in religion it often seems like it’s the end. The term “Dark matter” is like a huge flag for physicists that says, “Look here! Something cool we haven’t figured out! First one to get it has a shot at a Nobel prize!” And, predictably, people are scrambling to figure it out, and there’s a whole pile of possible solutions that need to be investigated.

A lot of comments seem to make the assumption that scientists saw something they didn’t understand, labelled it “dark matter,” and then went on, pretending to understand it. The real situation is nothing of the kind.

I think you’re disregarding whole branches of science… I don’t think you’ll find too many experimental geologists, paleontologists, or astronomers. The nature of these disciplines does not allow for much repetition or laboratory conditions. For the things that geologists study, the time scale is hard to deal with in a laboratory as they are dealing with time periods greater than the entire existance of human civilization to date. It is also very hard to duplicate fossil creation under lab conditions, as that takes thousands of years as well. Astronomy is also difficult to reproduce in the laboratory as any laboratory that could hold the universe would probably create enough gravity to skew the results. The fastest space probe we could possibly construct using today’s technology would take more than 50 years to reach the nearest star, then we would have to wait almost a year for the results of any test to reach us. And the rest are much farther away by many orders of magnitude. For our galaxy alone the distance between ours and the nearest star is smaller by comparison than two hairs on your little finger’s knuckle as compared to your extended family having dinner in a restaurant.

When dealing with these kinds of things, we have to make do with the portions of physical evidence we can lay our hands on (probes landing on nearby planets, comets and asteroids; fossils we find and can only date and preserve; rocks we can date by radioactive decay), and lots of observations of what we can see. We can create models (computer and otherwise) to try and verify to a point the theories we come up with – we think the ones we come up with are the most likely, but there may be more than one equation that will fit a data curve.

I thought WIMPs was a term used for television… (Weekly Insipid Moronic Programming)

Then there’s the old final exam question: 3) Define the Universe, give three examples.