re: Somebody explain dark matter to me.

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Somebody explain dark matter to me.

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It's what astrophysicists use to explain their math errors in current theories about the universe.....

I had a friend once explain it to me like this.

The square root of negative one is not able to be shown in real life, but mathematically things require it. Dark matter currently isn't able to be seen, but physics problems require it.

The scientific answer is that it was always there. Always.

The answer is difficult to comprehend in the morning. One might need to take some LSD and sleep on the Indian Mounds overnight to understand.

Geocentrism was, on the surface, a good and simple explanation of the structure of the universe, and accorded well with all the observations that primitive astronomers could make with the tools that they had available, save for one exception: it could not explain the retrograde motion of the planets. This drove those same primitive astronomers crazy, and so they came up with extremely complex models of how the planets moved in orbits inside of orbits around the earth, until finally, through some impressive mental gymnastics, they cobbled together an exceedingly esoteric geocentric system that could be used to make fairly accurate predictions of planetary motions.

Of course, Copernicus came along and, with one simple yet radical idea, blew it all away.

You can make the same point with the Newtonian model of gravitation. For a long time it seemed to work perfectly, but eventually astronomers began working with large enough masses and accurate enough tools that they discovered its predictive powers had limits. They tried to explain these limits through theories like ether and "light tiredness," but it took Einstein to come along and offer a new, radical approach that instantly resolved all of those problems in one elegant swoop.

Now we are working at the limits of Einstein's theory, and once again scientists are proposing "solutions of the gaps," if you will, to explain why the theory doesn't accord with reality. I believe dark matter is one such solution. Any time you make a prediction which doesn't match reality, and your solution is to say, "There must exist a type of mass which cannot be seen, sensed, or interacted with, and yet whose effect exactly matches the error in my predictive model," well... let's just say I find it more likely that your predictive model is not as accurate as you think it is.