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Originally Posted by VanderL
I disagree Blob,
As long as the candidates that have been proposed haven't been found/detected, the whole idea of dark matter is still "only" a consequence of the extension of local physical laws to the large scale structures.
One of the proposals is a modification of those physical laws (MoND), others are exotic particles as mentioned by Robert A. (MACHO's will undoubtedly form a minor contribution, molecular hydrogen has been proposed, but WIMP's are purely theoretical).
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Hum,
Well yeah, we can tweak the physical laws so that the constants are not, er, constant.
Gravity could vary, or the speed of light increase with time, etc.
That could be possible.
But they bring their own problems. And the knock on effect will basically affect all the science of the last century.
A prospect that not a lot of ppl would want, especially QED.
If we were to assume the standard theory was incomplete (which it is anyway) and that dark matter did not exist. How would you tweak the standard theory to account for the large scale structure so that they match up with observation?
(that tweak would also hopefully also explain away the need for a halo around galaxies yet leave the fine
structure or deuterium levels within the bounds observed today)
Is it not just easier to say that most of the universe is similar to our own local bit of the universe and just create something called `dark matter`?
We did something similar when we invented the `neutrino`, a particle that had to exist to account for observations, yet at the time was thought to be impossible of ever being detected due to its properties.
I’m sure there were people back then who would have proposed that it did not exist and it was better to modify the fundamental laws (which seems silly now with hind sight – though at the time it was a possibility).