Dark Matter Found? $2 Billion Orbital Experiment Detects Hints

Unless the responsibility for the discrepancy falls upon incorrect theories / understanding of the observations. In which case dark matter turns out to be an iffy equation. Yes, it still technically exists, but the $2 billion dollar particle detector isn't going to find it.

We can say, with a very high degree of uncertainty, that the discrepancies are not due to bad theories.

If our only line of reasoning for Dark Matter was Newtonian physics (for example, if the only evidence for Dark Matter was from rotation curves of galaxies), your thought would be entirely reasonable. Maybe Newtonian mechanics were just wrong on the scale of galaxies. This is one reason why Modified Newtonian Dynamics theories (MoND) were somewhat popular a while ago.

But the problem is that multiple, *completely independent*, physical theories all show that not only does Dark Matter exist, but all the theories predict consistent amounts of Dark Matter. For example, you can use Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to find out how much Dark Matter there is based on how much light is curved by gravitational effects. Or you can use various areas of Thermodynamics to look at temperatures in galaxy clusters.

These theories are based on completely different principles and laws. Yet they all predict the same thing.

So if you want to claim that we being confused by bad theories, you would have to be able to explain why multiple, completely independent theories are not only all wrong, but all wrong in a way such that they return the same wrong answer. That seems extremely implausible, so Dark Matter is, by far, the best explanation.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/JhRxCJaQYic/story01.htm

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