Over and over again, dark matter has resisted being pinned down, like a fleeting shadow in the woods. Every time physicists have searched for dark matter particles with powerful and sensitive experiments in abandoned mines and in Antarctica, and whenever they’ve tried to produce them in particle accelerators, they’ve come back empty-handed. For a while, physicists hoped to find a theoretical type of matter called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but searches for them have repeatedly turned up nothing.
With the WIMP candidacy all but dead, dark matter is apparently the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found. And as long as it’s not found, it’s still possible that there is no dark matter at all. An alternative remains: instead of huge amounts of hidden matter, some mysterious aspect of gravity could be warping the cosmos instead.
The notion that gravity behaves differently on large scales has been relegated to the fringe since Rubin’s and White’s heyday in the 1970s. But now it’s time to consider the possibility. Scientists and research teams should be encouraged to pursue alternatives to dark matter. Conferences and grant committees should allow physicists to hash out these theories and design new experiments. Regardless of who turns out to be right, such research on alternatives ultimately helps to crystallise the demarcation between what we don’t know and what we do. It will encourage challenging questions, spur reproducibility studies, poke holes in weak spots of the theories, and inspire new thinking about the way forward. And it will force us to decide what kinds of evidence we need to believe in something we cannot see.
David, you seem angry.
David, if you stop the underlined and emboldened emphases, it will definitely help. Nobody likes to read that.
To David;Perhaps I am the only one who noticed it, but when you compared yourself to a gruff "sergeant,"that put me on notice that you consider yourself to have some kind of authority over, and / orsuperiority to, the other participants in this forum.
You further compounded that impression by using the pejorative, "control-freaks,"and 'nail-everything-down-with-conceptual-certainty'-ers.
This is somewhat the equivalent of barging into a room and loudly proclaiming thatyou, rather than just your ideas, have more merit than the other forum participants.
I am an evangelical Christian who also agrees with Bernardo Kastrup on much of hisIdealist philosophy.My specific views are in my self-published book, The God Paradigm,which is described atand discussed eclectically atI make it clear in my book that I claim no authority, no special wisdom,but rely on sources that are available to everyone.The God Paradigm is a worldview, a journey toward better understanding,not a final destination.Well, you asked, and I answered.
Honestly, I dunno -- I'm just lou but I've always been intrigued (since early childhood) about a special kind of darkness from which the light emerges, perhaps a "Cosmic Womb." I believe I saw it once for perhaps a nanosecond. The event for me was transforming. I have no words for it other than, perhaps, "forever and ever, amen."