this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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Anti-acknowlegements (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Like I said, watch her video. She goes into lots of detail and gives a much better explanation than I could ever hope to. But here I go anyway:

The gist of it is that "dark matter" isn't really an attempt to explain anything. Like, theory of gravity, we have some good rules, things accelerate depending on mass and proximity to other things. Theory of dark matter? Not so much.

Dark matter is a problem in the sense that it's an observable phenomenon we can't really explain. When we observe really far away stars and galaxies, they interact in ways that imply far larger amount of matter than what we are actually observing. So where's that matter? We don't know! Dark matter! But unfortunately that nomenclature and the many ideas surrounding what does cause the dark matter phenomenon have deeply clouded the conversation.

Dark matter is not a theory of how things work. It's a problem to be solved.