What If Dark Matter Really Doesn't Exist?

sonar67 writes "According to The Economist: 'It was beautiful, complex and wrong. In 150AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria published his theory of epicycles--the idea that the moon, the sun and the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were moving in circles around the Earth. This theory explained the motion of celestial objects to an astonishing degree of precision. It was, however, what computer programmers call a kludge: a dirty, inelegant solution. Some 1,500 years later, Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, replaced the whole complex edifice with three simple laws. Some people think modern astronomy is based on a kludge similar to Ptolemy's. At the moment, the received wisdom is that the obvious stuff in the universe--stars, planets, gas clouds and so on--is actually only 4% of its total content. About another quarter is so-called cold, dark matter, which is made of different particles from the familiar sort of matter, and can interact with the latter only via gravity. The remaining 70% is even stranger. It is known as dark energy, and acts to push the universe apart. However, the existence of cold, dark matter and dark energy has to be inferred from their effects on the visible, familiar stuff. If something else is actually causing those effects, the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.'"

Comments

Re:The stuff doesn't exist.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

There is some comfort in knowing that we really don't understand the Universe, it's origins, or how it's all going to end.

We really should be working on how to make our little section of the Universe a better place to live. Fixating on the past or the future wastes the present. Fretting the big things comes at the expense of managing the little things. Frankly all that brain matter going into understanding outer space could be better used to fix things up around here.

Last I checked, Fusion still doesn't work, climatology is still a black art, and we still can't get better than a 5 day forecast into the weather. We have a population that is growing at a faster rate that the planet can support, and and economic system that exploits those that do work to enrich the elite while wasting resources and destroying the environment at a predigious rate.

And to top it all off, our modern agriculture techniques are stripping topsoil at the rate of an inch a year.

Any of those problems will have a bigger impact on our lives before we have to worry about the heat death of the Universe, or lack thereof.

Re:No dark matter ?

[Excen]

Just my two cents...

Wow. What currency are you refering to? In real (American) money, that would be like 5 bucks' worth of opinion.

God, by the pigeon-hole principle

[luckyguesser]

Could you atheists / agnostics not believe in God for no other reason than Occam's Razor? All things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one. To me, answering questions such as our existence is most easily answered with a God. Evolution and the big bang are, while equally far-fetched as the idea of a supreme ethereal being, much more silly.

Re:what if theory didn't exist?

[jwthompson2]

But many religions question each other. And there are many religions, at least in the Christian world, that are questioning themselves and whether they are right in their assertions. The Evangelical Theological Society is questioning whether Open Theism is compatible with Biblical Inerrancy. The Episcopal church determined that in their view openly homosexual persons should be allowed as Bishops. The Southern Baptist Convention, of which I am a part, is having some very interesting debates about Calvinism. Religion is actively questioning itself, but unless you're in on it you probably are missing it.