Dark
I can only shake my head when I hear grown-up physicists talk about "dark matter". The extent to which people in this field will go to avoid dealing head-on with two simple realities-the extraordinarily challenging nature of coupled nonlinear differential equations given our current mathematical tooling, and the inadequacy of the same when it comes to discerning small corrections that, if integrated over large domains, might produce finite results- should be embarassing. As an undergraduate in the eigties, given the lack of agreement between GR and QM at varying scales, the first thing I did was to look at "constants of nature" and come to the conclusion that the term might lead to unfortunate assumptions when dealing with equations that were clearly not of a universal nature. Secondly, the habit of setting arbitrary zeros for potential energy in describing natural systems in QM seemed questionable. At the time, however, talk of non-arbitarry zeros had to be approached with great care for risk of one's being branded an "ether theorist". That said, given the pliability of space and time themselves in GR, it seemed likely that any corrections to QM due to gravity were likely, in part, to result in the need for the introduction of local, non-trivial, contributions to any systems energy. I conjectured that the existence of a non-trivial, "low-interaction vacuum energy" component with a likely non-trivial total value when integrated across the universe seems extremely likely to be a consequence of the simple fact that QM was incomplete as a theory of nature- that the equations we were using were simply wrong. Similarly, given the extraordinary accuracy of GR on "small" scales- such as within the solar system (to at least one part in 10^13), the fact that GR was incomplete as a theory of nature suggested that on very large scales (at the time I remember sharing with many colleagues a wish that I could undertake a detailed measurement of stellar orbits at the edges of galaxies) we should see significant deviations from the predictions of conventional gravitational theory- again, because the equations were necessarily wrong. The search for dark matter, as I see it, is a product of the same kind of mathematical expediency and fear of the humbling nature of fully-nonlinear equations that has led to the waste of billions of dollars in a largely-unrelated field- that of experimental plasma fusion physics- a consequence of scientists' desire to work on problems in a fashion that produces interim results... career-building in a publish-or-perish world where obtaining funding is tied to the description of achievable goals. Like the man who looks for his keys under a streetlamp because that's where the light is, those looking for dark matter might do well to examine their academic motives, fears, and the perils of a lack of intellectual humility, a bit more carefully. A well-known plasma physicist by the name of J.B. Taylor once told one of my undergraduate advisors (much to my advisor's chagrin) that no one who wasn't independently wealthy had any business being a physicist. Over time, I think I've come to understand his point. Playing with a coupling of the ten already-coupled already-nonlinears PDE's of GR and considering nontrivial, fully-nonlinear relationships between a (non-arbitrary) local quantum vacuum-energy, lambda, G, and T is hardly something I would call "productive" in the conventional academic sense of resulting in publishable interim results- it just feels a lot more honest than selling myself and the public on the existence of invisible pink unicorns. The existence of significant "dark matter" and "dark energy" errors seemed likely enough even in the eighties long before the Hubble Telescope studies provided their "surprising" results... all that was required was a little imagination regarding the ways in which the equations we already knew to be wrong, were likely to be on a large scale- no invisible unicorns required.