February 03, 2026
Dark Matter Between the Ears
Timothy Birdnow
Except Dark Matter is still speculation with no real evidence for it's existence.
Science is becoming increasingly medieval, with fanciful speculations about how fanciful speculations might work being presented as science. It's not. Dark Matter is the ultimate in this regard (if one discounts Climate Change theory, that is). Dark matter is theorized solely as a way to balance the books because the expansion of the Universe doesn't go as the standard model predicted. They had to find something that slowed down universal expansion to the level we see so they postulated a form of matter that is invisible, like a Romulan warbird using a cloaking device Then when they put Dark Matter into the equations they find the universe shouldn't be expanding at all, or more slowly, so they then postulate Dark Energy which drives expansion while Dark Matter slows it.
This is rather like the old legend about the world sitting on the backs of four elephants. When the guru who said that is asked "what do those elephants stand on?" He replies "more elephants". When asked what THEY stand on he grows exasperated "it's elephants all the way". That's what Dark Matter reminds me of.
Actually there is a scientific theory that was all the rage in the late 19th century and well before that, going to classical times. The aether, or fifth element, was a theorized substance that moved through everything and was invisible but which pushed things. Many thought gravity was caused by the aether pushing downward into the Earth, for instance. Newton thought that. This theory was postulated to be what allowed light to move too. At any rate there was an experiment called the Michaelson-Morley Experiment in which a single beam of light was split, bounced off mirrors in different directions, then reconnected to measure the time lag between the two in the hopes of seeing which direction the Earth was moving relative to the aether. The light came back at the exact same time.
So Albert Einstein dismissed the existence of the aether for lack of evidence, and he managed to explain a lot of things in new and strange ways by chucking it. Today it is a quaint remnant of an earlier age, an incorrect exploded theory.
Actually there IS a kind of aether that passes through us all the time - neutrinos. Neutrinos are fermions - they have half integer spin - and not completely massless but nearly so. They pass through our bodies all the time harmlessly because they do not interact with matter. First theorized by Wolfgange Pauli in 1930 neutrinos have actually been detected.
But they do not compromise the aether as it was traditionally envisioned.
I think Dark Matter may well be just another theory like the aether. It sounds good and solves a lot of problems but ultimately is holding science back.
In another Dark Matter story we "learn" that, well, read it for yourself:
Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and densifying their cores in surprising ways. Until now, this crucial middle ground of behavior was nearly impossible to model accurately. The new code makes these simulations faster, more precise, and accessible enough to run on a laptop.
So "physicists" have worked out a whole cosmology with angels dancing on the heads of pins here, when Dark Matter is as yet an unproven hypothesis. How many angels CAN dance on the head of a pin?
This is speculation, but notice the tone of the article; it's treated as "settled science". Much like Global Warming it may or may not have some validity but the people making money off science - the establishment - dare not say "well, we have no proof" so they simply act as if this is settled and they aren't just wasting donor and taxpayer dollars playing games on their laptops.
That's what passes for science these days. It is increasingly flights of fancy and not grounded in fact.
NASA claims to have found proof of Dark Matter; NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope allegedly found direct evidence. But there are still many people who don't believe the NASA data, and given what we know about NASA and their willingness to fudge data when it suits them it is wise to be skeptical.
According to the article:
"We detected gamma rays with a photon energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (or 20 billion electronvolts, an extremely large amount of energy) extending in a halolike structure toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo," said Totani.
The observed energy spectrum, or range of gamma-ray emission intensities, matches the emission predicted from the annihilation of hypothetical WIMPs, with a mass approximately 500 times that of a proton. The frequency of WIMP annihilation estimated from the measured gamma-ray intensity also falls within the range of theoretical predictions.
Importantly, these gamma-ray measurements are not easily explained by other, more common astronomical phenomena or gamma-ray emissions. Therefore, Totani considers these data a strong indication of gamma-ray emission from dark matter, which has been sought for many years.
So based on a minute gamma ray emission 33,000 light years away we are to believe we have "proven" Dark Matter. I remember many other "discoveries" like the one saying neutrinos move faster than light, which wound up being measurement errors. Color me skeptical.
This is an old problem I might add - scientists pretending to more knowledge than they have. The problem the Pope had with Galileo, for instance,, was he was teaching Copernicanism as a fact, not a theory, and the Pope told him to just teach it as a theory, something the stubborn jackass Galileo refused to do (in fact he insulted Pope Urban VIII, who had been a friend to the old Gal and who was very favorably inclined towards Copernicanism by putting the Pope's arguments in the mouth of his character "Simplicio" aka the fool, in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Urban was said to be furious when learning about this. Urban was not just Galileo's boss (Galileo worked at a Catholic university) but was also his sovereign. Old Gal was arrested and tried, found guilty, and sentenced to house arrest - a very light sentence for the times. He could pretty much come and go as he pleased and even left town on at least one occasion.
The point is Galileo got lucky and was right, and ever since the assumption is always that any scientific idea is correct, lest we be accused of being like the Pope (who was not what they accused him of being at all). It's now at a point in science when the weirder and wackier a theory is the better. All the trans research is proof positive of that.
I think it is entirely possible in a hundred years scientists will shake their heads in befuddled amusement at the obsession with Dark Matter. But of course they will also have climate change and the dozens of "genders" and other stupidities that infect our modern era to laugh at.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:44 AM
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There's one theoreticist who posits that the universe is not expanding at all, and that therefor we don't need the fiction of dark matter, but rather that distance changes the nature of light in some way that we don't understand. He calls it the "tired light" theory. It sounds as likely as the conventional one to me, actually more likely since it requires us simply to not understand something rather than to make some shit up to compensate for what we don't understand.
Posted by: Bill H at February 03, 2026 10:39 AM (FRG6e)
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Agreed Bill. Until we have enough knowledge we should just say "we don't know". But science has become the new religion and priests are not supposed to say "we don't have the answer for you".
You may remember the whole fight over the position of the Earth relative to everything. I touched on Galileo above, but to flesh it out the standard model at the time with the Earth at the center of the universe had a real problem; the planets seemed to move backwards from time to time in what were called epicycles. Nobody could explain that. Copernicus' theory reduced the number of epicycles and explained some of them were illusions, but they were still there (which is why Copernicanism wasn't universally accepted at first). It was only accepted when Kepler discovered the planets move in ellipses. Elliptical orbits eliminated ALL epicycles and thus restored balance to the theory. The point is there were those on both sides who argued their case but neither side was declared definitive and they were open to new information leading to changes in their worldview. Now we slavishly follow dogma because a "concensus" of scientists say it is so.
When one multiplies errors the end result is more errors, and more, exotic ways to fix the system. The principle of Occham's Razor is ignored in favor of an ever-more-complex system that becomes more theological than scientific. I fear many of the things we now believe are at that point.
You may remember the whole fight over the position of the Earth relative to everything. I touched on Galileo above, but to flesh it out the standard model at the time with the Earth at the center of the universe had a real problem; the planets seemed to move backwards from time to time in what were called epicycles. Nobody could explain that. Copernicus' theory reduced the number of epicycles and explained some of them were illusions, but they were still there (which is why Copernicanism wasn't universally accepted at first). It was only accepted when Kepler discovered the planets move in ellipses. Elliptical orbits eliminated ALL epicycles and thus restored balance to the theory. The point is there were those on both sides who argued their case but neither side was declared definitive and they were open to new information leading to changes in their worldview. Now we slavishly follow dogma because a "concensus" of scientists say it is so.
When one multiplies errors the end result is more errors, and more, exotic ways to fix the system. The principle of Occham's Razor is ignored in favor of an ever-more-complex system that becomes more theological than scientific. I fear many of the things we now believe are at that point.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at February 04, 2026 09:47 AM (umJ+Y)
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