I wasn't aware of MOND's successes beyond rotation curves; the author lists three more. It does seem like LDCM and MOND are both feeling different parts of the same elephant and that someone will eventually see the whole critter. This TritonStation fellow is worth reading.
So many sophisticated experiments have failed to detect dark matter particles. So many theories have predicted still unobserved phenomena. On the other hand, many of us side-eyed LIGO for decades but when it worked, it worked. Black holes were unphysical and abominations until they weren't.
> I wasn't aware of MOND's successes beyond rotation curves; the author lists three more
Here's another that he calls the bullet cluster for MOND, something that follows easily from MOND and was predicted in advance, but DM can't really explain even after the fact:
Why were you side-eyeing LIGO? Gravitational waves were a prediction of an extremely well tested theory, and all that was needed was to engineer an instrument sensitive enough to see them.
The Hulse and Taylor results seemed pretty conclusive for gravitational waves.
LIGO: I have some experience in optics. The thought of an interferometer detecting a displacement of a small fraction of a proton in the presence of all that noise was way, way out there. They'd also been working at it for decades with null result after null result. It was like fusion, always around the corner.
And then it worked handing all of us doubters a nice cup of STFU.
That blog is worth a deep dive, it goes into deep and fascinating detail about how this stuff is measured, as well as the sociology of the field, which has continued to add epicycles to dark matter theory to an extent that is starting to make even true believers uncomfortable.
Well. It is hard to tell from the perspective of a person who is a consistent contrarian what exactly the consensus / mainstream viewpoint is, or how much it is perceived to have cracks in it. You would have to survey people who aren't writing from a point of extreme skepticism to get a better sense of it.
>which has continued to add epicycles to dark matter theory to an extent that is starting to make even true believers uncomfortable.
You certainly get this impression from pop-sci, but are there prominent people in the field actually saying this? Obviously sometimes the scientific consensus can be wrong (see the planetary nebula 'debate' for example) but normally contrarians turn out to be incorrect.
From my layman perspective, either cosmologists enjoy lying down in front of buses or the field advances way faster than they could possibly be dying off.
In areas where prevailing theory lines up with reality.
Where it doesn’t, you get situations like dark matter: theoretically consistent extensions with the framework where it intersects with reality or the additions of free variables to make it just so.
So many sophisticated experiments have failed to detect dark matter particles. So many theories have predicted still unobserved phenomena. On the other hand, many of us side-eyed LIGO for decades but when it worked, it worked. Black holes were unphysical and abominations until they weren't.