Aristote, the founder of epistemic thinking, said that "the demonstration of an affirmative proposition is preferable to that of a negative; the demonstration of a universal to that of a particular; and direct demonstration to a reductio ad absurdum."
Dark matter has not been affirmatively proven; it is a universal yet no direct demo has ever been close.
We have a number of searches showing that a negative proposition is also close to being proven.
Non of the prevailing ideas, in fundamental physics, has been proven!!
There has just been an exchange between quarks, gluons virtual particles... and the angles of the medieval times. It's a question of faith.
JES
No, experiments indicate that dark matter exists by how ordinary matter moves in its presence: If it weren't there, ordinary matter would move differently than it's measured as moving. This shows that dark matter is, indeed, matter: It has gravitational interactions with ordinary matter. What it doesn't seem to have is any of the other three known interactions.
No, dark matter doesn't exist. It's the gravitation that is modified when the source is not point form and the mass is enormous.
JES
"Yes, experiments indicate that dark matter exists" and "No, dark matter doesn't exist, and nothing can be experimentally proven"
This about summarizes the extent of the state of current research in mainstream on this issue.
Philippos Afxentiou, This is an interesting question that I will be following. May I ask you, and others, if indeed Dark Matter exists, and has the features attached to it such as interacting mostly gravitationally, and not electromagnetically, by what experiments conducted using apparatuses made from baryonic matter, do you suggest or think, it can be affirmatively proven? It is my opinion that it has been proven by negative proposition. I may have more to say later.
As long as the powers that be hold onto the current "accepted" paradigm, the search for something called "dark matter" to explain the observations (that should serve to reject that paradigm) will continue.
What is needed is a new paradigm.
Axiom: The refractive index of vacuum devoid of all matter is n = 1. It is a non-refracting medium.
Proposition: Thinking like Aristotle, it follows that if after baryonic matter has been excluded in terrestrial experiments, vacuum still exercises the properties of a refracting medium with n > 1, then such residual refracting property must be an affirmative proof that other matter type is present. Such must cause the bending of light grazing the surface of celestial bodies like the Sun and Earth, due to the gravitational enhancement above the background galactic halo density, if indeed dark matter exists. Such must also cause a reduction of light speed when descending and an increase of light speed when ascending from Earth surface.
It would appear that these findings have been observed and attributed to General relativity.
In a recent paper, Article Modified general relativity and dark matter
, an observation not dependent on refractive index or light, the perihelion precession of Mercury has been explained with dark matter.Query: What other type of affirmations are we looking for?
There is no doubt that dark matter exists, at least in some form (though not necessarily any form that any published paper is willing to write about (see Dark Matter In Galaxies at https://cseligman.com/text/galaxies/dark.htm ). But even if it didn't exist, it is impossible to prove the nonexistence of something that doesn't exist, so unless/until it can be proven what is out there that we currently call dark matter, there will be endless experiments trying to detect whether any kind of dark matter that doesn't exist really does. Odds are that no one currently living will still be alive when the topic is more or less settled, and even after the vast majority of cosmologists are convinced that the correct answer has been found there will still be many who feel that we still need to keep looking for whatever hasn't been proven to exist. (If nothing else, it gives them papers to list in their resumes.)
Courtney Seligman, I read your linked article on ‘Dark Matter’ with interest. A few weeks ago, I asked the author of the paper I referred to some questions and he gave answers to Query 1 and 2, while refraining from answering others. Perhaps, I try my luck with you, and maybe others...
Query 1: Given its speculated properties, and its abundance, is it possible for the atmosphere of a tiny blue dot (i.e. Earth) to escape sharing in this abundance and have only baryonic matter constituting it?
Query 2: If it is logical that this abundance must extend to the Earth’s atmosphere, will the presence of dark matter not affect the theoretical physics experiments that we conduct on this tiny blue dot, which we assume are being conducted in "vacuum", especially given that “dark matter persists when ordinary matter is absent...”?
Query 3. Suppose the dark matter at the Earth is very small, but not that very small as to be theoretically immeasurable, as attempted by other speculators in [1],[2], and not that small as to be incapable of producing gravitational effects on Mercury’s orbit, as suggested by you in 5.1.1, given a vertical column of “vacuum” on Earth surface, and the Proposition that “dark matter persists when ordinary matter is absent...”, assuming that vacuum that is completely free of both dark and baryonic matter, as may speculatively exist in intergalactic space has refractive index, n = 1, are we not to expect that the refractive index n of vacuum will depart slightly and gradually from unity, increasing as we descend this vertical column of “vacuum” due to the enhancing effect that gravity has on matter densities, both dark and baryonic?
[1] Xu, X. and Siegel, E.R., Dark Matter in the Solar System, (2008). (Preprint arXiv:0806.3767).
[2] Adler, S.L., Placing Direct Limits on the Mass of Earth-Bound Dark Matter, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 41, 412002, (2008). (Preprint arXiv:0808.0899).
Query 4: Light experiments are conducted in “vacuum” without recognizing the possibilities raised in Query 3. Given the likely attendant effect of dark matter on refractive index of vacuum (n = 1), what will be the influence on light experiments such as the Michelson-Morley, Gravitational lensing, Gravitational redshift, Shapiro delay, Pound-Rebka, Fizeau, etc which are conducted and interpreted under the assumption that they are being conducted in “vacuum with n = 1, without any influence from dark matter”, whereas they may have been conducted in space with n > 1 (slightly above unity) due to dark matter of varying density due to the effect of gravity?
Regards
Philippos Afxentiou, you can never prove a negative of that form, see "Russell's Teapot" for the famous example of that.
The best you might do would be to prove the existence of some other phenomenon which explains all or most of the evidence currently taken to support its existence but in a way that doesn't require dark matter per se.
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