Can We Finally Settle This and Just Move On? Dark Matter Particles Are a Figment of the Imagination
For close on a century, researchers have hypothesized that the Universe appears to contain more matter than can be directly observed. This idea of missing matter was kicked off in 1933 when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky made a discovery that left the scientific world speechless -- There was, claimed Zwicky, substantially more matter in the Universe than we could actually see. Astronomers called this unknown matter "Dark matter," a concept that took on more importance in the 1970s, when the US astronomer Vera Rubin called on this enigmatic matter to explain the movements and speed of the stars. Scientists have subsequently devoted considerable resources to detecting Dark Matter -- in space, on the ground, and even at CERN -- but without success. Clearly, such a discovery, if achieved, would be worthy of a Nobel Prize in Physics. However, new research recently released at the University of Bonn, along with work at many other universities across the world, is concluding that the movement of the stars in galaxies and other anomalies can be explained without drawing on the concept of dark matter... In fact, much of this work is pointing to a very inconvenient conclusion – Dark matter may not actually exist at all. It is a figment of the imagination that has been used to explain away something that we simply do not fully understand. This is not the first time something like this has happened. History provides us with many examples where scientists have simply invented ideas out of thin air to help explain away things that were just not understood at the time. In some ways, dark matter bring to mind another imaginary concept -- the so called "Aether Wind" of the 1800s. Back then, everybody just "knew" that space was filled with an "Aether Wind." The problem was that no one had ever seen it nor measured it. In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set out to prove the existence of Aether Wind once and for all. Their experiment failed spectacularly in its attempt to detect any Aether Wind, but in the process they showed that the whole concept of Aether Wind, which most scientists at the time simply accepted as fact, was flawed -- There was no such thing. Albert Michelson eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1907 for this work and became the first American to do so. Will the concept of dark matter meet the same fate as the Aether Wind of the 19th century? Time will tell.
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Funding Member
"May"?---so that's the equivocation. Let us know when it's a fact...
BTW of course MOND is phenomenology. Most of nuclear physics is phenomenology. That just means there is no organizing principle at base, as with special relativity, on which to base a complete theory.
Also - the ether idea was not abandoned, it disappeared because its main assumption, that light needed a propagation medium, was shown to be false - propagation is built into the geometry of spacetime by the wedding of space to time under the same irreducible transformation group. The end of this dismal era will come when a similar principle for gravitation is not only found, but recognized as fundamentally new. Even when used correctly as Cooperstock did, GR has foundational flaws, such as lack of local energy conservation, that show it to be itself a sort of phenomenology, which violates its own basic principle, the idea that metrical relations are localized in spacetime.
-drl
The Bonn/Portsmouth work argues that the Bullet Cluster lensing can be accounted for under MOND once you properly tally the stellar remnants, neutron stars and black holes, that the JWST data and the cluster's heavy element abundance imply. Kroupa's own words in the piece are that this makes MOND "much more plausible," and the article notes that even in the standard model the required dark matter would drop by roughly half. Half is not zero. "Weaker evidence than we assumed, on this one object" is a very different claim from "figment of the imagination."
The Aether Wind comparison doesn't hold up either. Michelson-Morley was a decisive null result that killed a theory outright. This is a reanalysis showing that a piece of evidence long treated as a knockout blow against MOND may not be one. Genuinely interesting, and Kroupa has been making serious minority-position arguments for decades, but it settles nothing.
mgosar's point above is the right frame. The Bullet Cluster was only ever one line of evidence. Galaxy cluster lensing generally, the CMB power spectrum, and large-scale structure formation are the harder problems for MOND, and none of them are addressed here. A theory that handles rotation curves beautifully and struggles at cosmological scales is exactly what "incomplete phenomenology" means.