What I described is not 'faith', but logic.

Dark Matter isn't a specific 'thing', you seem to be under the impression that Dark Matter is a specific, well defined 'thing', it isn't. No one knows what Dark Matter is, no one is capable of defining what it is. The biggest open question of them all is 'what is Dark Matter?', no one knows what Dark Matter is, that is precisely what makes it 'Dark', we can't see it, we know nothing about it, we can only measure its effects. The effects are real, but what is producing the effects is impossible to explain at this time. There is some kind of matter out there that is not visible to us, something that is invisible to both light and radiation. Until we can develop a test to reveal it, it will remain 'Dark' to us, but there simply MUST be something there. Something is interfering with the results of our measurements, this much is undeniable.

What causes the galaxies to spin the way they do? If Kepler's laws are correct, galaxies should not spin the way they do, therefore, there must be some other form of matter interfering with the results. Since we cannot yet detect it, this matter is called 'Dark' If this matter does not exist, at all then that means that pretty much everything we think we have learned about the universe in the last 500 year is wrong. Relativity is wrong, Newtonian mechanics is wrong, Kepler's laws are wrong. All existing physics textbooks will have to be thrown in the trash and we will have to start over again from scratch the way Newton did, only our task will be much harder.

Where exactly does that come from? The reason that I ask is because the late Stephen Jay Gould once said that we know the Earth is that old because of the many deposited layers, and we know those layers took a long time because of the age of the Earth.

Sounded like a circular argument to me, and I couldn't believe that someone of his position would even say that. Did he think the audience was stupid?

I think they date rocks based on radioactive decay. Certain elements in them decay at a constant rate and their age can be determined by that.

Doom, I've read plenty on this. I know where the dark matter hypothesis comes from and what it entails. I just think it's premature to slam the door on other hypotheses.

Radiocarbon dating is based on the half-life of carbon-14, a radioactive element found in organic matter.

He's talking about much longer timespans, which can be estimated, for example, by the relative proportion of uranium isotopes and their differing decay rates.

I had read that carbon dating becomes less and less accurate as time goes on. IOW, for human history it is accurate, but anything prior to that becomes less accurate.

Also, if I understand correctly, carbon dating is accurate on items like people and the things they created, as well as animal remains, but rocks are less accurate.

Can anyone of you address whether these are true or not?

I get this Anawin, I do more reading on this topic than I care to admit, but I can't, for the life of me understand the intricate details some of the astronomy intelligencia puts forth. I can say this, the "constant rate" they speak of is a time- space continuum that allows for constancy within it's own sphere of space and time frame to exist separately from others ... For instance, a galaxy that is 200 light years away from us as compared to a galaxy that is 100 light years away from us is moving away from us twice as fast as the galaxy that is 100 light years from us ...

It is not the galaxy that is moving twice as fast as it is the "dark matter", or suspension the material universe seems to be enveloped in that allows for the time space continuum to exist and constantly effect both our time and space as well as other worlds time and space hundreds to millions of light years in seperation. The dark matter that envelops all material things in our universe is expanding at a constant rate and the galaxies, et al, are simply going along for the ride... hence it appears, and is so, the farther away something is to us the faster it moves in relation to another thing, that is closer to us.

In rough numbers, 70+ % of the universe is dark matter, 20+% is dark energy and under 10% is the matter we can see from our bedroom windows all the way and including the stars et al.

.

*this !!

What other 'hypothesis' possibly there be? Either there is enough matter in the universe to make the equations work, or there isn't. There is no third option.

And the amount of 'missing matter' is not small, it is enormous, if Dark Matter exists, then it constitutes more than 80% of all the matter in the universe. How do you account for that except by theorizing that there must be another kind of matter out there that accounts for the vast disparity in the actual results vs the results that we should be getting? There is less than 1/5 of the detectable matter that should be there for physics to work. If there is no other matter out there, then the equations are wrong, period. There is no way to make the equations work except by adding more matter to the universe.

Another hypothesis is that it isn't matter that's causing the observed phenomena but some other macro phenomenon, or that the common model is flawed.

Carbon dating has a set range, that is fairly small.

But that is not what is used here, but dating via other elements.

It is a gross misunderstanding that the argument is circular. Relative dating via geological strata establishes only part of dating. We rely on relative dating in history a lot, e.g arguments about when something is written. We can often say it must have been before this or after that, but without some other dating of at least one of those, it remains just relational.

There are many, many dating methods, e.g uranium-lead dating, which is good only for things over a million years old. There is argon/argon dating which can be very precise, but requires the use of another dating method in conjunction, else it is only relative.

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 make up 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.

It reminds me of John 2:19. We don't think in God's depth or terms and to negate even the possibility of a new theory (There is no third option) because it looks like we've exhausted all options is like saying there's nothing new under the sun to theorize ... I am smarter than God, ... and I'm not, and you can ask my wife for confirmation ...

Carbon 14 dating is used for things made of carbon, and it decays relatively quickly, so carbon based items can only be dated back some thousands or tens of thousands of years.

Rocks are not carbon and are not dated using carbon 14. They are dated using whatever uranium isotope was mentioned, or perhaps other similar ones. It has a much longer decay rate and can be dated for much longer time frames. Billions of years I guess.

You're assuming that 'dark matter' is just one theory, and that there isn't many theories concerning that.

Second, if the calculations only make sense if there is more matter than we can currently observe it follows, by the logic of the law of excluded middle, that either the standard model is false or that there is matter that we cannot currently observe (i.e. dark matter). Logically, there is no, and cannot be a, third option.

Precisely. Either there is matter in the universe that we cannot account for, or there isn't, How could there be a third option? Is the third option the theory that there is a wizard wandering the cosmos who makes the equations work?

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.

No third option if and only if the framework used for the calculations actually reflects underlying reality. What if something else, not in the current model, is producing the effects attributed to dark matter and dark energy?

I'm not someone who's anti-science or trying to claim that the Earth occupies a "special position" in the cosmos. I'm only saying that certainty with respect to the existence of dark matter and energy is unwarranted based on the current evidence.

I compare this to the planet Vulcan that was invoked to explain Mercury's orbit. People even claimed to have observed it. But in the end, the orbital problems were found to be described by relativity.

So what if what is needed to explain cosmological problems is a different theoretical framework?