No we don’t
Comment on bro pls
FastAndBulbous@lemmy.world 7 months agoWe don’t because we have experimental evidence for it’s existence.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 7 months ago
FastAndBulbous@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We have gravitational evidence. We can only ever infer the existence of anything. An example of this is we didn’t actually see the Higgs Boston we just deduced it’s existence from the cascade of interactions that happens when particles collide. Similarly we can deduce from the gravitational evidence that dark matter.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I would argue that we have evidence for which the theory of dark matter and dark energy is a fairly suitable theory.
FastAndBulbous@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That’s all any theory in physics is. You don’t see an electron, you observe what it does.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Sure, yes, but my point was that we don’t have evidence specifically for the existence of dark matter.
We have evidence that is not explained by visible, detectable mass.
Dark matter is the current favored theory which happens to explain discrepancies between what is observed and what is expected.
But I don’t think we can logically conclude dark matter is the only explanation, which is what your original statement seems to imply. It is the best explanation that we have so far.
If we place objects on the dining table the night before and observed them lying on the floor the next morning, we can’t claim “we have evidence for sleepwalking residents.” There may be another theory that explains it, such as: the cat is knocking the things off the table. We need additional evidence to determine which theory fits or else come up with a new theory.
Hopefully I am making sense here lol
FastAndBulbous@lemmy.world 7 months ago
But it is visible, it’s visible in terms of gravitational effects. We can “see” the effects of dark matter. That is evidence specifically for dark matter, i.e. matter that is very hard or impossible to detect via the electromagnetic spectrum but is observable through gravity.
Dark matter is the explanation, the question is more what form does it take.
It just takes a bit of acknowledgement that actually the EM spectrum is not the only way to view the universe. In fact it’s just one of four (maybe five) fundamental forces. We’re just used to that being the default for seeing because it’s how we physically see. It’s an anthropocentric bias to say something doesn’t exist because we can’t view it via EM radiation despite the fact gravity is clearly showing it to us.