If there’s something wrong with some theory, isn’t it quite odd that looking around at different parts of the universe seems to produce such a striking level of agreement on how much missing mass there is? If there was some out-of-left-field thing, I’d expect it to have confusing manifestations in many different areas and astronomers angsting about dramatically inconsistent measurements, I would not expect the CMB to end up explained away (and the error bars on those measurements are really really small) by the same 5:1 mix of non-baryonic matter vs baryonic matter the astronomers were postulating for everything else.
In other words, if you were starting out blind, the “something else will be found for a theory” bucket would not start out with most of its probability mass on “and in every respect, including the data that hasn’t come in yet since it’s the 1980′s now, it’s gonna look exactly like the invisible mass scenario”. It’s certainly not ruled out, but it has taken a bit of a beating.
Also, physics is not obligated to make things easy to find. Like how making a particle accelerator capable of reaching the GUT scale to test Grand Unified Theories takes a particle accelerator the size of a solar system.
If there’s something wrong with some theory, isn’t it quite odd that looking around at different parts of the universe seems to produce such a striking level of agreement on how much missing mass there is? If there was some out-of-left-field thing, I’d expect it to have confusing manifestations in many different areas and astronomers angsting about dramatically inconsistent measurements, I would not expect the CMB to end up explained away (and the error bars on those measurements are really really small) by the same 5:1 mix of non-baryonic matter vs baryonic matter the astronomers were postulating for everything else.
In other words, if you were starting out blind, the “something else will be found for a theory” bucket would not start out with most of its probability mass on “and in every respect, including the data that hasn’t come in yet since it’s the 1980′s now, it’s gonna look exactly like the invisible mass scenario”. It’s certainly not ruled out, but it has taken a bit of a beating.
Also, physics is not obligated to make things easy to find. Like how making a particle accelerator capable of reaching the GUT scale to test Grand Unified Theories takes a particle accelerator the size of a solar system.