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

[rigel-p.livejournal.com]

>I find that I don't get hung up too much on theories related to astrophysics, because I know that those theories >are at a different level of solidity than ones found in, say, biology, or regular physics.

Gotta take some exception to that one. Admittedly, astrophysics is a lot harder because it is strictly observational- you can't actually crash two galaxies together to see what happens, you have to wait 'till it happens in nature, you only get one viewing angle, and you only get to view about 0.00001% of the total run of the "experiment". HOWEVER, I don't think that sends scientific rigor out the window. Biology has some well-established, demonstrable tenets. So does Astrophysics. Astrophysics has some rough new ideas that haven't been polished out to reliability yet. So does biology.

Try this: Take a bouquet of red and white pea blossoms (sweet pea will do in a pinch) to your favorite biologist, and ask them this: My mother has blue eyes, my father has blue eyes, my siblings and I, biological children of both, have brown eyes. Why?