>Just admit that they have no idea what's going on, but it looks a lot like missing mass?
The way I see things, the much more prevalent attitude is, "we have a good idea of what's going on, we just haven't been able to confirm our confident assessments with objective data". Very few, if any, prominent people in the field admit, "we don't have any idea what's going on, it is all baseless conjecture that might pan out if 75% of the universe is made of some invisible stuff that we haven't been able to detect in 4 decades despite our best efforts". I'd like to see a paradigm shift from, "we have a good understanding of how things work, now we just need to detect the invisible particles that make all of our formulas work" to "we have really have no idea what is happening, but here is some wild speculation that is the best we can come up with".
A lot of the "dark matter" debate reminds me of the Alzheimers/amyloid situation. Groupthink develops among the establishment in the field, based on very little (if any) objective proof, which ends up discouraging and marginalizing those who pursue other theories.
The way I see things, the much more prevalent attitude is, "we have a good idea of what's going on, we just haven't been able to confirm our confident assessments with objective data". Very few, if any, prominent people in the field admit, "we don't have any idea what's going on, it is all baseless conjecture that might pan out if 75% of the universe is made of some invisible stuff that we haven't been able to detect in 4 decades despite our best efforts". I'd like to see a paradigm shift from, "we have a good understanding of how things work, now we just need to detect the invisible particles that make all of our formulas work" to "we have really have no idea what is happening, but here is some wild speculation that is the best we can come up with".
A lot of the "dark matter" debate reminds me of the Alzheimers/amyloid situation. Groupthink develops among the establishment in the field, based on very little (if any) objective proof, which ends up discouraging and marginalizing those who pursue other theories.