I like this quote especially:
“When someone puts forth the hypothesis that “dark matter and/or dark energy doesn’t exist,” the onus is on them to answer the implicit question, “okay, then what replaces General Relativity as your theory of gravity to explain the entire Universe?” As gravitational wave astronomy has further confirmed Einstein’s greatest theory even more spectacularly, even many of the fringe alternatives to General Relativity have fallen away. The way it stands now, there are no theories that exist that successfully do away with dark matter and dark energy and still explain everything that we see. Until there are, there are no real alternatives to the modern picture that deserve to be taken seriously.”
Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
“It wasn’t always apparent that this would be the solution, but this one solution works for literally all the observations. When someone puts forth the hypothesis that “dark matter and/or dark energy doesn’t exist,” the onus is on them to answer the implicit question, “okay, then what replaces General Relativity as your theory of gravity to explain the entire Universe?” As gravitational wave astronomy has further confirmed Einstein’s greatest theory even more spectacularly, even many of the fringe alternatives to General Relativity have fallen away. The way it stands now, there are no theories that exist that successfully do away with dark matter and dark energy and still explain everything that we see. Until there are, there are no real alternatives to the modern picture that deserve to be taken seriously.”
If you yourself are not a professional astronomer or astrophysicist, you might feel in your gut that dark matter and dark energy just can’t be right. How could we possibly conclude that only 5% of our Universe is made out of the matter that everything we know of is composed of, and that 95% of the Universe is made of some dark substance we’ve never successfully detected. It sounds crazy, and therefore, you wonder, isn’t there some simpler explanation that’s likely correct? It’s not just you: the professionals have wondered this, too. And if there is, it means we have to throw out all of the successes we’ve achieved so far. So goodbye, General Relativity. Goodbye to the Big Bang, to astrophysics, to structure formation, to what we know about stars and galaxies, to gravitational lensing, to gravitational waves, and so much more. To get rid of dark matter and dark energy, we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
There are countless lines of evidence that support the dark matter and dark energy picture, and astronomers wish the public (and some of their contrarian colleagues) knew about this. Now, you can know for yourself.