I think its an amazingly simplistic theory which has not a shred of evidence. They notice that galaxies seem to move differently from how their theory predicts, so they assume there is mass they cannot see and call it "dark matter". Next they spend millions looking for this matter they cannot see, and speculate what it might be made out of....so completely unscientific it makes me sick.
Like speculating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Did you know that scientists were in virtually 100% agreement that they would discover no mountains on Venus? Geologists figured the temperature would be too hot for mountains to form, and yet after the radar mapping they discovered that Venus has the tallest mountains in our solar system.
Just because something is based on "good science" doesnt make it any better than vague speculation, and it can just as easily turn out to be flat wrong.
My main gripe with "dark matter" is they are treating it like its totally real, and yet there is not a shred of evidence that it exists outside of some phenomena which do not conform to their expected view of the world. What if their expectations are what is wrong? It would not be the first time, is all I am saying.
Not to split hairs, but the tallest mountain in the solar system is on Mars
(Olympus Mons)
Then again, I know you're saying in general, so anyway.
You say there isn't a "shred" of evidence when I have provided you some very good evidence. Why is that? Maybe you don't understand the ramifications of the evidence I've provided you.
You also don't seem to understand why dark matter was postulated in the first place. It does indeed sound ridiculous if scientists predicted dark matter simply because galaxies were behaving differently than theory predicts. I'd agree with you that if that were the case, dark matter would indeed be a "just-so" story invented to lazily avoid reworking theory. But that simply isn't the case, it sounds like you've only read about this from the popular media and so don't really know its history.
I'm a cosmology student, just started grad school. As it turns out, I studied under Dr. Keith Ashman for a while and still hang out with him on a semi-regular basis. He was one of the first to predict large-scale structures in the universe such as globular clusters. Dark matter has often been a subject of discussion because I, too, thought it seemed
ad-hoc back in the day.
The meat of the matter is that there are several factors in why dark matter is postulated. First, it is indeed true that the motions of the galaxies doesn't match theory exactly. So at first, people thought there might be some difference in acceleration on such large scales, and MOND was born (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) to explain it. Dark matter at this time was a possibility but not treated factually.
Next, we started counting the mass in the universe. Adding up the mass from the luminous/baryonic matter was leagues away from the data we were getting from satellites studying the large-scale structure of the universe and its radiation. So we had two problems: galaxies were behaving according to theory as though they had much more mass around them, and when we counted mass we started noticing that most of the mass was unaccounted for. Can you see how things started fitting together like a puzzle?
So, we looked for invisible mass. We found it. Gravitational lensing was some of the first evidence for nonluminous matter around galaxies, ejected dark matter clusters such as in the Bullet Cluster pretty much sealed the deal.
Dark matter isn't some voodoo
ad-hoc lazy explanation for the state of things, and my abridged version of its discovery doesn't really do it justice. However the evidence for dark matter is staggering. It's far from voodoo
ad-hoc "science," it's good science.
