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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

The ideas of dark matter and dark energy seems obviously made-up. If a junior dev came to you with that sort of theory for a weird effect they encountered in a system, you'd tell them to look harder instead of making up new fundamental interactions.

They may turn out to be right, but you have to admit they sound arbitrarily made-up for lack of a better understanding.

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> The ideas of dark matter and dark energy seems obviously made-up. If a junior dev came to you with that sort of theory for a weird effect they encountered in a system, you'd tell them to look harder instead of making up new fundamental interactions.

Well, yeah. Dark matter and dark energy are the bug ticket names, so to speak. Thousands of physicists are coming up with ways to "look harder."

"Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are both names for observed effects. They're not specific theories. E.g. MOND is a theory to explain dark matter without needing a new particle or field. It doesn't explain as much as λCDM, but what it does explain it does without new fields. That's aesthetically pleasing to some people.

That's the totally wrong analogy.

Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder names for something we don't understand and don't know what it is. We didn't make them up. We just observe the effects and conclude that there must be something there that is making the universe behave the way it does.

> Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder names for something we don't understand and don't know what it is.

Mostly, but they have a lot of behaviors attached to them at this point due to various measurements and accompanying assumptions. Not to mention that labeling the sets of interactions each exhibit with a single name creates the appearance to the public that they are created by a single source. Dark Matter could be several different things interacting, likewise for Dark Energy.

The names also suggest that Dark Matter is matter, and Dark Energy is energy, while there are still scientists that try to find other ways to explain the data (tweaking gravity etc).

But you have to name them something to talk about them. There probably would have been better names, but physicists are no better at naming than programmers

Maybe the public shouldn't expect to understand something that takes 8 years of rigorous study to work with, just by reading a news article from someone who also doesn't have 8 years of the necessary math study, and was explained by someone who spends all their time working with these concepts mathematically, and might not have a concrete interpretation at all.

My intent was less "we should name things better" and more "using common words a common way is fine, even if they don't reflect the exact semantics of the word at its inception".

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