Apr 11, 2018 08:03 PM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...rk-energy/
EXCERPT: If you go by what's often reported in the news, you'd be under the impression that dark matter and dark energy are houses of cards just waiting to be blown down. [...] Given that we've made mistaken assumptions in the past by presuming that the unseen Universe contained substances that simply weren't there, from the aether to phlogiston, isn't it a greater leap-of-faith to assume that 95% of the Universe is some invisible, unseen form of energy than it is to assume there's just a flaw in the law of gravity?
The answer is a resounding, absolute no, according to almost all astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists who study the Universe. Here's why.
[...]
So you have all these independent lines of evidence, all pointing towards the same picture: General Relativity is our theory of gravity, and our Universe is 13.8 billion years old, with ~70% dark energy, ~30% total matter, where about 5% is normal matter and 25% is dark matter. There are photons and neutrinos which were important in the past, but they're just a small fraction-of-a-percent by today. As even greater evidence has come in — small-scale fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, the baryon oscillations in the large-scale structure of the Universe, high-redshift quasars and gamma-ray bursts — this picture remains unchanged. Everything we observe on all scales points to it.
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....
MORE: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...rk-energy/
EXCERPT: If you go by what's often reported in the news, you'd be under the impression that dark matter and dark energy are houses of cards just waiting to be blown down. [...] Given that we've made mistaken assumptions in the past by presuming that the unseen Universe contained substances that simply weren't there, from the aether to phlogiston, isn't it a greater leap-of-faith to assume that 95% of the Universe is some invisible, unseen form of energy than it is to assume there's just a flaw in the law of gravity?
The answer is a resounding, absolute no, according to almost all astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists who study the Universe. Here's why.
[...]
So you have all these independent lines of evidence, all pointing towards the same picture: General Relativity is our theory of gravity, and our Universe is 13.8 billion years old, with ~70% dark energy, ~30% total matter, where about 5% is normal matter and 25% is dark matter. There are photons and neutrinos which were important in the past, but they're just a small fraction-of-a-percent by today. As even greater evidence has come in — small-scale fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, the baryon oscillations in the large-scale structure of the Universe, high-redshift quasars and gamma-ray bursts — this picture remains unchanged. Everything we observe on all scales points to it.
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....
MORE: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswitha...rk-energy/