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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 6641703" data-attributes="member: 1">Dark matter *is* the application of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is dark matter; "all our years of math about gravity, despite a million things and a century of solid empirical evidence except this one thing which show it to be right, is wrong" is a less simple explanation. Sure, it *might* be the latter. Nobody has ever claimed otherwise. But Occam's Razor says it's the former. There's some matter we can't see. It's a far more likely explanation.And, even so, scientists don't take it as read even remotely.  Nobody is stating absolutes. They are devoting vast amounts of time and resources to detecting dark matter.Planets have been discovered that way. Motion of other bodies suggests a planet must be there, but we haven't seen it yet. Lo and behold, we find Neptune exists! This is not shoddy science, it's exactly how it's supposed to work. Evidence - hypothesis - theory. We're at the hypothesis stage. But it's a good hypothesis.It's easy to post on the Internet that scientists are "foolish" and inventing "magic". It's also pretty unfair. Especially coming from those of us - like myself - who wouldn't even know where to begin pointing out the flaws in current theories to support such accusations.I mean, you declare that the methodology is poor. We're talking hundreds of complex papers filled with intricate maths and observations and carefully honed computer models, from hundreds of scientists who approach the problem in different ways, and come to the same conclusion. Plus scientists would be delighted to discover that there's a new law of gravity. That's far more exciting than dark matter! They'd *love* that. Discovering that the universe doesn't work the way we think it does is what they like doing. That would be their equivalent of 1000 Christmasses rolled into one.Remeber the higgs boson? It was just like this. It was theorized to exist because evidence suggested it must do, or our models of the universe are all wrong. So they made a giant particular collider in CERN and looked for it. And they found it. I remember Prof. Brian Cox saying that they best result would be to not find it. Finding it is just confirmation that the maths is right. If it didn't exist - now THAT would be exciting, because it would mean a whole new area of physics would open up. Our theories would be all wrong; we'd have so much to discover. Sadly, they found it. The boring result! The universe worked the way the maths said it would.</blockquote>

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