Essential Sacrifice wrote:
Apologies Doom, but this bothers me. 20 years ago we had no idea that dark matter or energy even existed. Now, though new measurements and ever ongoing hypotheses we have established a new makeup of our universe. To disavow the possibility of a newer, more expansive and encompassing theory because we haven't found it yet seems short-sighted to me.
First of all, the theory of Dark Matter is a lot older than 20 years. The earliest known reference to something that is like the modern theory of Dark Matter is from a speech by Lord Kelvin in 1884. He didn't refer to 'Dark Matter', he referred to 'dark bodies', Lord Kelvin observed in 1884 that there is something wrong the mass of the universe, it didn't add up, he concluded his speech by saying 'many of our stars, perhaps a great majority of them, may be dark bodies.' There were further observations that led to similar theorizing in 192, and 1933. The term 'Dark Matter' itself was coined by Henri Poincare in 1908.
So, you're quite wrong that Dark Matter is a new idea or new concept, it isn't, it's a very old one. It predates all of modern physics and is older than either Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.
it is true that most of the research on Dark Matter has been since the 1960's, but this isn't because that is when the idea was first theorized, but because it has only been since the 1960's that the problem of accounting for the 'missing mass' became serious enough to become a crisis. The more and more accurate than our instruments become, the more apparent it is that there isn't enough matter in the universe for any of the theories developed since the time of Copernicus to make computational sense.
There simply must be something there that we haven't detected yet, nothing else makes sense.