[theurerjohn3]

Things like this make me want to read Against Method [1]. Like, yeah that seems 'not science' in one serious sense, but also not really? It falls into what I understand of Kuhn's 'normal science'. Slightly adjusting their theories to explain existing data is exactly what you should expect scientists to do, until the gaps get so big no adjustments are sufficiently concise.

For a defense of the 'unicorns in unexplored forests', that was pretty much the approach that led to the discovery of most of the standard model.

Plus, given dark matter and dark energy, we know something must be out there, even if its not unicorns, there's something.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method

[Maursault]

> Plus, given dark matter and dark energy, we know something must be out there, even if its not unicorns, there's something.

Because science is paradigmatic, this is the problem. We do not know something else must be out there because we have no direct evidence of either Dark Matter nor Dark Energy, which, btw, have absolutely nothing to do with one another. We might just not yet have the intuition to understand what is causing our perception of the need for these labels.

I, for one, am absolutely convinced Dark Matter is absolute bunk and will be widely accepted to not exist eventually within the next 50 years. The initial reason for Dark Matter's existence, to explain rotational velocities of spiral galaxies we assume spiral galaxies appear to have more invisible matter, has been explained by the fact that the initial observation was of a galaxy in isolation, and the assumption that it was an isolated inertial frame without considering the cluster of galaxies around it, which perfectly explain spiral galaxy rotational velocities without any need for Dark Matter. But because science is paradigmatic and even in the Space Age the correct information is taking decades to disseminate, many if not most are still are convinced Dark Matter is needed even though no one knows what it is. It's nothing, really, it's a phantom, imagination gone haywire. Also, as other unexplained developments occurred, these too got lumped into Dark Matter, which galaxy clusters can not explain. So the problem becomes the shame of not just saying, "we don't know... we don't understand this," and labelling it something to fake it like we do understand it. This is a flaw of modern science, or at least of cosmology,i.e. the unwillingness to accept that we don't (yet) know the precise reasons for what is observed.

[worrycue]

That said sometime it’s worthwhile to try something completely different. If all we did was “adjust” we would still be using epicycles to describe orbits.