Comment Re:Dark matter and the sniff test (Score 5, Insightful) 85
I'm just a lowly engineer, but for me "dark matter" has never passed the sniff test.
And yet it seems like most physicists - of whom I am not one - seem to think it is the simplest explanation for what we see.
The quote in the summary sums up, for me, the somewhat churlish attitude some people adopt when faced with dark matter:
There seems to be a formula for this very specific extraordinary claim: point your high-energy telescope at the center of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies, discover an X-ray or gamma ray signal that you can't account for through conventional, known astrophysics, and claim you've detected dark matter! Only, these results never pan out;
Of course they have never panned out - so far. If one of them had panned out, we would have stopped looking. Your keys are always in the last place you look.
Photons started out their theoretical life as a kludge factor to solve the ultraviolet catastrophe (great band), and people were appalled by the idea.