Got no objections to inventing particles to take up and carry off whatever bit of stuff has to conserved: neutrinos, virtual particles, gluons, what-have-you.
I don't really even object to inventing five times the mass of the known universe.
It just feels, as I said, un-parsimonious. It feels quite a lot like inventing God to patch a "missing link" in your evolutionary succession. Maybe you'll find God there somewhere, but it doesn't seem like the first thing to try.
So, maybe dark matter really will turn out to be an ordinary axion or something detectable only if you manage to squint just right, and God just loved those so much that almost everything is them, and we are all made out of just leftover scraps. Maybe there are dozens of elementary axions, with relationships and exciting interactions we can never figure out because we can't touch them in any way but gravitationally.
I don’t think you’re giving enough credit to physicists.
Dark matter isn’t just adding a fudge/“God” parameter to the equations to make the numbers work. The “stuff” that’s thought to be missing is described with very precise properties… the fact that it’s “dark” means something, the fact that it’s “matter” means something.
Well, in this case they're not just inventing nonsense to fix one little thing. There are a lot of various pieces of evidence, all pointing to this fix. If you want to patch up a lot of little pieces of evidence, each with it's own magic, that would be even more "un-parsimonious".
The evidence for dark matter is pretty solid.
As this [1] article states, while giving 5 independent reasons scientists think dark matter exists, "No other idea explains even two of these".
Wikipedia lists eleven different places it shows up.
The research literature has more. And AFAIK there is no other unified (or even close to unified) explanation for all these observational pieces of evidence.
On the flip side, why would you expect us to be equipped to observe more than 20% of matter give the narrow range of our vision and hearing?
Anything that doesn't interact strongly at our scale wouldn't be useful evolutionarily.
I don't really even object to inventing five times the mass of the known universe.
It just feels, as I said, un-parsimonious. It feels quite a lot like inventing God to patch a "missing link" in your evolutionary succession. Maybe you'll find God there somewhere, but it doesn't seem like the first thing to try.
So, maybe dark matter really will turn out to be an ordinary axion or something detectable only if you manage to squint just right, and God just loved those so much that almost everything is them, and we are all made out of just leftover scraps. Maybe there are dozens of elementary axions, with relationships and exciting interactions we can never figure out because we can't touch them in any way but gravitationally.
But I still want to know how they cool.