From Astrophysics, an excellent study in what happens in science when everyone adheres to the conventional solution because it is, well, conventional: For decades we've accounted for the nearly flat speed vs rotation measurement of galaxies by postulating a massive 90% share of 'Dark Matter' with the billions of stars imbedded inside like the cat's eye in a marble.
What is 'Dark Matter'? we ask. Well, it's dark. We can't see it. It is, in a word, fantastic, the stuff dreams and tenure are made of, and, as it turns out, by simply taking the far less fantastic path of questioning the conventional wisdom of the method, University of Victoria astrophysicists Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu have dared buck the Newtonion model, reframed the problem as a pressureless gas of gravitational participants, and not only do their rotation vs radius charts line up remarkably to observed speeds, but they do so without appealing to any exotic dark matter ...
The success of Newtonian mechanics in situations like our solar system can be traced to the fact that in this case the planets are basically "test particles", which do not contribute significantly to the overall field. However, in a galaxy this approximation is not a good one - all the rotating matter is also the source of the gravitational field in which everything rotates.
[ [astro-ph/0507619] General Relativity Resolves Galactic Rotation Without Exotic Dark Matter ]
Their method holds up remarkably well on the data for several well-known spiral galaxies; if this new model stands the test in other needs dark matter problems, it could well be any future mention of the stuff in your future writings and conversation will immediatly carbon-date you, like talk of aether, or yellow bile and humors.
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Apropos to this item, and because
Apropos to this item, and because I really had picked it up and posted it as a commentary on that Other Debate, but this one I want to underline in red because, well, consider the title of the website (New SCIENTIST) and then consider the vitrolic bile it spews for rhetoric, attempting in a gradeschool character assassination on Biochemist Michael Behe. Note for example, the straw dog of Astrology given first paragraph and title, and the closing lines, ooh, that's SO scientific, I am like SO convinced now ...
You see, and I know readers of TeledyN are street-smart enough to know this already, but all this media and geekpundit rhetoric misses a very important point: Intelligent Design is not a theory, it is a conjecture.
Re-read that if you're having trouble following, but in a nutshell what this means is that, for example, in Biology, we may propose a hypothesis under the theory of evolution that dates a certain organism by the mutation of it's DNA from a known ancestor, for example those kids found in the woods of Borneo however, it is not 'science' unless we can verify the DNA-mutation hypothesis by independent means and, dig, even then it is not 'fact'. Science does not admit 'facts', only hypotheses (plans for future action toward an expected result), theories and conjectures (and sordid other logical creatures).
What ID then tells us, as a conjecture, is that we must be prepared for a failure in the DNA-mutation data, perhaps caused by Divine Intervention (like "Act of God" meaning "something we didn't do and can't explain or predict" -- therefore the anomalies in the DNA-mutation timelines, of which there are many, need, as the article admits, explanation. If that timeline is unbelievably short, as may be the case with all Earth biology, then we have to go a-hunting, and ID is one of the directions we can go. Von Daniken is another, but there are many others too. You see, Science shouldn't play favourites just because the answer may be unpallatable. Remember Darwin and his Caterpiller-consuming Wasp larvae.
The only thing added by the conjecture of ID is to pose the question before the hypothesis was discredited, to voice a word of caution, illuminating a blindspot, and that is very often a useful bit of caution; alchemy progressed great leaps and bounds over it's hodge-podge predecessors using the similar conjecture of tetragrammaton (the basis of Astrology, fwiw), proving focus and leverage enough to find Ohm's Laws in electricity and many basic rules of chemistry and pharmacology, and even today Hollywood (and TOHO) make their fortunes lampooning precisely this blindspot of the so-called Scientific community and their penchant to believe before experience, as doggedly pitbull to dogma as the best medieval priest, viciously attacking all those who oppose them. Unmerited ridicule can be a two edged sword, he who laughs last and all ...
And this story, on how two theoretical physicists could blow away Dark Matter by a mere shift in analitical paradigm, is a jolly good proof of that.