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Comment by vectorEQ | Hacker News Reader

so, a failure in measurement sparked a mystery which went on for decades. i wonder how often that happens in science ;P

All the time! People propose hypotheses, supported by some preliminary data, and then they need to be tested. Some problems are easy, some take years or decades to be overturned. It's messy sometimes, but that's how science is supposed to work!

I think the parent was being sarcastic, hence the ;P emoji at the end of the post.

However, I wanted to commend your reply. It seeks to educate without judgement. Cheers.

op here, i was sarcastic. the whole of science is based on best hypothesis is accepted as the ruling one. not as a fact of nature or reality ,but the best hypothesis. people take it often as fact though ,which led me to post a sarcastic comment just to point that out. sorry if it confused or offended someone :')

You're really stretching that 'supposed'.

I think if we were closer to ideal science, we'd work harder to verify numbers as a first step. More replication means stronger foundations and less wasted work.

There will always be some bad results that stick around for a long time before being overturned. But the median lifetime of bad results can change based on how we prioritize research. That statistic might currently be far from optimal.

Millikan's original oil drop experiment had that problem ...

Worse are the "best explanations" that get adopted as if they were real observations with militant fervor, something we're seeing with Dark Matter and Energy today. It's gotta be difficult to make progress sometimes when most of your field insists that their best theory must be the correct one.

Please. Millions of dollars are spent every year researching alternative theories and modifications to GR that eliminate the need for Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

The problem is, and has always been, that these alternative theories are never as accurate or precise as GR and their observational evidence is never as good as what we have for DM and DE.

It's not a conspiracy that scientific consensus is that they both exists, and no one is preventing research into alternatives being done. Significantly more money goes into research that accepts their existence, yes, but that's because most scientists do as well. What outcome do you want? To force scientists to work on theories they don't put any stock in? There is still plenty of interest in research papers written by people advancing alternate theories. Good ones are widely read by the entirety of the community, but you make it sound like the scientific community is actively suppressing anyone from researching anything that casts doubt on the existence of dark energy and dark matter, and that's just not true.

It's not a conspiracy per se, but it fits into a realm where virtually every single documentary about space these days are making overt or not-so-overt claims that it's absolutely real and we're not even considering other possibilities. Of course we are, but that's not how it gets presented by the vast majority of "television physicists" and I find most documentaries about space completely unwatchable these days. Usually it's presented with unwavering faith that dark matter and energy exist, if only we could detect it. The more humble approach would be "95% of the universe is Dark Matter and Energy, unless one of our assumptions is wrong and we just don't know which one yet". That's honesty you just don't find much in media for public consumption, and if it's wrong (I'm not saying it is), then millions of bright minds are being led down the wrong path. I'm just hoping for more honesty about what we actually observe or what we desperately want to observe in popular (scientific) culture.

DM and DE matching observational data is like a ML model match its training data. Okay sure, that's necessary, but it's not sufficient to actually believing they're a good model.

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