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Originally Posted by Blob
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). |
I partly agree, but the main question is not what to call it, but if the assumption that our "local" theories are applicable to galaxy rotations is correct. We have only scratched the surface in our own backyard, until we understand what is going on here there is enough reason to doubt that we can make these sweeping assumptions on dark matter (the main one being that it must exist).
About the neutrino analogy, it is true that sometimes a particle or object is postulated long before it is discovered, but in this case it has taken way too long imo, plus additional observations indicate that any dark matter candidate needs to be "coupled" to luminous matter in progressively exotic ways.
Cheers.