Comment on vibes-based astrophysics

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BB84@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

This is a very fair take, but I’d say dark matter is harder to falsify, but not totally unfalsifiable.

You can’t see it, true. But what makes sight so special? We can’t smell stars either. You just need to sense dark matter in some other way. Namely gravity! We have seen the way visible matter orbit, and that points to dark matter. We have seen gravitational lensing due to dark matter. Hopefully soon we’ll observe gravitational waves well enough to sense dark matter around the regions the waves are being emitted from.

Most individual dark matter models are falsifiable (and many have already been falsified) through non-gravitational means too. People have been building all sorts of detectors. The problem with this is that detectors are expensive and there are always more models beyond any detector’s reaches.

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