Well put, thanks for sharing! Never saw it phrased in such a clear narrative. As a novice, it seems like there's one big difference between those anecdotes and the current situation, though: sample size. Sure, if we were observing Andromeda spinning too slowly I'd be open to our instruments not capturing some massive objects/clouds, but we're actively observing, what, ~1E5-6 galaxies? In the case of a missing planet there were accidents of history/solar system makeup that led to our otherwise solid frameworks missing a key piece of information. But that clearly couldn't happen millions of times; whatever explains the inconsistencies we're seeing has to be a fundamental misunderstanding.
Once we've arrived at this point, we can compare the two theoretical re-workings on their own terms: one is that we're glossing over some important detail of how gravitational relations in spacetime work, and the other is that we're failing to observe some new class of matter. I mean, right? There's no way this conundrum will be solved by "whoops turns out there was more plain ol' dust than we thought" at this point, right?
In those terms, I feel parsimony clearly favors one possibility over the other. Every hypothesis is worth exploring (I mean, QM and GR are dumb as hell, yet nonetheless turned out to be correct), but when funding is on the line it's also not out of line to favor one explanation explicitly. That's already happening anyway, just in the other direction.
But also I'm just some kid who's awed and grateful to be living in times of such profound mystery and discovery. Could be totally off base -- I barely passed physics I!
What we have learned so far is that our theories and models are only correct up to our ability to precisely observe and measure.
In that sense, Newtonian physics is still very much correct under a very wide set of circumstances, and as such amazingly useful.
GR improves on that (adds precision) on what would be extreme cases for NP, but it is likely as correct as Newtonian laws are: up to a point.
All this to say that "correct" is not the right term to use: many of the theories are simultaneously "correct" with sufficient constraints and a particular error range. What matters more is if they are useful in predicting behaviour, and that's where I like using "correct" instead (as above).
Thanks. I'm also no expert - I'm just learning general relativity - but that's also my rough understanding: either there needs to be a modification of the theory, or there's a new form of matter. It might seem more parsimonious to modify the theory, but then how do you do that in a way that retains all the successful predictions of GR while explaining the recalcitrant observations? That's the hard part.
It seems at the moment that the minimal and most elegant adjustment to the worldview required is to postulate the new form of matter. But I think it's safe to say it's a genuine problem in our knowledge: we don't know how to solve it
Once we've arrived at this point, we can compare the two theoretical re-workings on their own terms: one is that we're glossing over some important detail of how gravitational relations in spacetime work, and the other is that we're failing to observe some new class of matter. I mean, right? There's no way this conundrum will be solved by "whoops turns out there was more plain ol' dust than we thought" at this point, right?
In those terms, I feel parsimony clearly favors one possibility over the other. Every hypothesis is worth exploring (I mean, QM and GR are dumb as hell, yet nonetheless turned out to be correct), but when funding is on the line it's also not out of line to favor one explanation explicitly. That's already happening anyway, just in the other direction.
But also I'm just some kid who's awed and grateful to be living in times of such profound mystery and discovery. Could be totally off base -- I barely passed physics I!