I'm extremely skeptical of a 'simple test' which proclaims to overturn decades of scientific knowledge. Why did it take until 2022 for someone to think of this, and not a hungry grad student in the 80s looking to make a name for themselves?
It seems like the article has cause-and-effect reversed. Dark matter is a result of noticing some problems with the mathematics according to observations, and trying to introduce extra terms that make the equations balance. Nobody just inserted a lot of extra complexity into the model, then hoped they could twist the experiments to justify it. People have known that this isn't entirely satisfying as a solution.
Otherwise, the article actually seems a surprisingly reasonable complaint about being hard to get funding for trying to develop better alternative models which explain observations better.
the article actually seems a surprisingly reasonable complaint about being hard to get funding for trying to develop better alternative models which explain observations better
But let's be careful to not overgeneralize here. The author is working out of Bonn, Germany. I have no idea how German research gets funded or what their priorities are. More importantly, I have no idea for how that funding model compares with the funding model being used by other countries. All I can reasonably ascertain after reading this article is Germany isn't funding research to develop better alternative models. I have no knowledge for what other countries are funding.
Well think of newtonian physics. For things humans experience, it's generally plenty. Running, walking, flying, shooting bullets, etc work just fine. Sure lasers, satellites, fission/fusion, astronomy, etc start breaking things.
Gravity is damn near perfect on the scale of the solar system. A huge number of zeros of precision, makes great prediction, etc. Even blackholes (which is quite the corner case) seems fine with the current theory of gravity until you get down into the small details and the search for a grand unification of quantum and relativity.
However as the scale of a galaxy things break down. So there's at least 2 possibilities. One that the theory of gravity is wrong at large scales, or there's something else involved, like dark matter.
Seems natural that scientist have a working assumption that the theory of gravity is right, but the problems with it are getting more attention. There's not just one competing theory for the next step for gravity.
Think of it as being more like an anti-crime editorial than a scientific argument. The argument is about budgetary priorities and complaining about other physicists.
The statement "phlogiston doesn't exist", by itself, also doesn't acccount for all observations for which phlogiston adherents require the existence phlogiston.
This is a low-brow dismissal without basis in fact. At the moment, multiple independent lines of evidence suggest that DM is real. There are no observations which contradict DM. Any competing theory must explain the same observations, which means that it will necessarily be a theory of dark matter. Dark matter is a real phenomenon, whether or not you choose to acknowledge its reality.
