Yet there are still no direct observations of dark matter.
How deep can biases run? Could it have poisoned the very foundation of modern science? I think it’s something to investigate, especially considering the vast sums of money that are at stake if some mainstream theories turn out to be wrong or pointless.
Mainstream astronomers’ predictive abilities are shoddy at best. It seems as if every new observation is “surprising,” or “shocking,” or “baffling.”
Tom McCabe, that is not proof.
Black holes, dark matter and dark energy seem to pretty much fit this description. They are, after all, inventions tacked on to calculations, in order to make theory and calculation fit observations.
True.
I don’t have any direct quotes or statistics available at hand, but I think however that it is not disputed that our understanding of the universe is nowhere near complete. And with so many newsworthy observations that don’t fit mainstream theory, then surely that must suggest a problem with the theory.
The shape of galaxies could not be explained with visible matter. As a result, the theory wasn’t scrapped; they instead simply added enough matter to the equation to make it work—hence dark matter (which has to have much more mass than visible matter).
This doesn’t make mainstream science question the validity of gravity being the dominant force in the universe. Instead, they add hypothetical matter to the calculation. I suspect Mr. Yudkowsky’s former statement that dark matter might go the route of epicycles will turn out to be correct (he probably doesn’t subscribe to that anymore, I don’t know).
That doesn’t seem very scientific to me, but perhaps it’s still legitimate since dark matter is still considered just a hypothesis.