From Joseph Silk at Nautilus:
Dark matter is as tangible as stars and planets to most astronomers. We routinely map it out. We conceive of galaxies as lumps of dark matter with dabs of luminous material. We understand the formation of cosmic structure, as well as the evolution of the universe as a whole, in terms of dark matter. Yet a decade of sophisticated searches has failed to detect the material directly. We see the shadow it casts, but are completely unaware of what the dark side of the universe may contain.
It certainly isn’t any ordinary object or particle—that has long since been ruled out. Theoretical prejudice favors a novel type of particle that interacts only weakly with ordinary matter. Vast numbers of these particles should be flowing through our planet all the time, and by rights you’d expect some of them to leave a mark.
Nope.
Eighty-five percent of all matter is unknown. Our greatest fear is that it will always remain so. More.
Silk, like Ellis, seems to be a non-crackpot cosmologist so he does not use expressions like “end of its tether” lightly.
On the other hand, we may not have an answer but we can still have sanity about matters like the importance of evidence. And let’s face it, even knowing the size of what we don’t know is vastly better than imagining we know things we don’t.
See also: 2017 as the Year of Dark Matter
But then there’s this: A theory that challenges Newton’s and Einstein’s gravity and nixes dark matter passed its first test
And what if dark matter doesn’t exist? Aeon writer asks, Has dogma derailed the search for dark matter?
We must all hope some dark matter is found soon. It doesn’t matter that much if intelligent aliens do not exist or even if if life itself doesn’t exist off Earth. But if we can’t make sense of our best theories without dark matter—but cant find it—Houston, we have a problem.
Dark matter: Skeptics wanted
and
How do dark energy and dark matter relate to ID?
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