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Paracompactyesterday at 12:43 AM2 repliesview on HN

What about underexplained cosmological epicycles like dark matter (in explaining long-standing divergences of gravitational theory from observation), or the Hubble tension?


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joe_the_useryesterday at 6:25 AM

The dark matter theory broadly is that there is amount of invisible matter that obeys the laws of Einsteinian gravity but isn't otherwise visible. By itself, it has considerable experimental evidence. It doesn't resemble Ptolemaic theories of planetary motion notably in that doesn't and hasn't required regular updating as new data arrives.

It really fits well with the OP comments. Nothing really contradicts the theory but there's no deeper theory beyond it. Another comment mentioned as "nightmare" of dark matter only have gravitational interaction with other matter. That would be very unsatisfying for physicists but wouldn't something that really disprove any given theory.

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XorNotyesterday at 12:45 AM

This is your regular reminder that epicycles were not an incorrect theory addition until an alternative hypothesis could explain the same behavior without requiring them.

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