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Comment by MAGZine | Hacker News Reader

Just because you cannot detect something does not make you wrong nor does it mean it doesn't exist. What a ridiculous statement.

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> Just because you cannot detect something does not make you wrong nor does it mean it doesn't exist. What a ridiculous statement.

If you cannot detect something, it's can be equally ridiculous to say it exists.

Many discoveries in physics have quite large timespans between being theorised to exist, and being actually detected.

Was it ridiculous to say those might exist?

Well, most of the other theories back then would seem ridiculous and obviously wrong nowadays. That's the nature of theorizing when you have little information.

Obviously we mostly remember those theories that turned out to be right.

And how do you find out if they turn out to be right, if you dismiss them immediately as "ridiculous"?

That is not how science works. There are other ways of judging if a theory is worth exploring than just a "it must be testable right now".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

Not at all relevant, as we can see the effects of dark matter in many places, very clearly.

So you can detect it after all?

We're not sure it's matter, but let's just say 'dark matter' is a useful abstract label (like 'teapot'). We know that SOMETHING is perturbing our models that are useful (to simplify the analogy, let's just posit that newtonian orbits are casually affected, for example) by measurement. As much as an orbiting 'teapot' is ridiculous, it's also provable that something is unaccounted for, 'teapot' or 'dark matter', whatever the label.

This does not mean that it's matter specifically (just a label), but is a phenomena.

Indirectly, yes. Directly, not yet.

Define "directly". The definition of dark matter is that it's electromagnetically non-interacting, therefore observing it's gravitational effect is as direct as it gets.

Since we do not know what exactly it is, defining "directly" is not really something you can do.

But, for instance, electroweak interaction is being looked at, I gather?

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