Dark Matter

[gfish]

I'm not a astrophysicist or anything, but am I the only one who finds the whole dark matter thing rather dubious? It just smells of hand-waving kludge to me. Our observations don't match our calculations, so 95% of the universe must be made of invisible matter that only interacts with the rest of us through gravity? The universe is certainly a very odd place, but I just can't get over the feeling that this is the luminiferous aether all over again.

Comments

[book-addict.livejournal.com]

See, I was going to say something here, but all the points I would have made have been covered already.
So it's left to me to point out just how very little one is expected to question these sorts of entities in the course of an astrophysics B.Sc. "There's this dark matter, because it explains the observations, and it's not your place to ask what it actually is..." or something like is that pretty much sums up my undergraduate third year.

In this case, it could be a particularly nonluminiferous aether.