Couldn’t help thinking of theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s question, “Could the problem with dark matter come down to using wrong equations?”
What if, for some, it’s an act of faith?
“My sense,” I say to Christopher, “is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.”
“I grew up as a very serious Christian,” Christopher says. “Then I lost my faith almost entirely when I found physics. Now that faith has returned, but in a much-changed form. It’s true that we dark-matter researchers have less proof than other scientists in terms of what we seek to discover and what we believe we know. As to God? Well, if there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing.” …
“No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence.” He gestures at the data read-out. “If there is a god, we should not be able to find it. If I detected proof of a deity, I would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that.”
Robert MacFarlane, “Is the Search for Dark Matter an Act of Faith?” at Nautilus
With the dark matter project, it may be difficult to separate the science from the religion.
Note: Sabine Hossenfelder is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.
Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling
Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.
Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists
Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter
What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?
A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion
and
Proposed dark matter solution: “Gravity is not a fundamental governance of our universe, but a reaction to the makeup of a given environment.”