this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Listen, power to women, and Vera Rubin's work was amazing and she deserves every praise.
But nobody has ever proven the existence of Dark Matter. What's proven is that our current mathematical models do not accurately represent the universe due to the way things move and effects of gravity, under our current understanding, requiring a large amount of mass that we have not observed.
Does that make sense? It could be that our models or understandings are just wrong, or it could be that there is some magical unobservable matter, but we don't know. We haven't proven anything.
The reason I think this is important is because we keep throwing money at bigger and bigger dark matter detection chambers, and we keep operating on the possibly incorrect assumption of dark matter while we create new theories.
This is actually the bit that Vera Rubin discovered. The summary of her discovery in the quote is the issue :)
That's.... What finitebanjo said?
Originally, banjos post read like the line about Vera Rubin was outright incorrect, rather than simply being a case of the OP in the image making a poor summary of her contributions.
It sounded like Banjo was challenging Vera's relevance in the list, rather than clarifying what she actually did
I would not make praising her the opening statement of my comment if I were challenging her contributions.
Broadly, what you said was "Power to her, but what’s proven is that our current mathematical models do not accurately represent the universe". The "but" in that statement is that issue, as it sounds like you're challenging her findings with a correction, but your correction was just to summarise her actual findings
Her achievment is proving the current mathematical models do not represent the universe and explaining why, where many men before her utterly failed.
Her achievment is not proving the existence of dark matter.
The "but" is very warranted and I honestly feel like the "dark matter is real" zealots are the ones besmirching her name by misrepresenting her accomplishments.
What I'm getting at is that your "but" made it sound like you were challenging her findings, rather than images incorrect summary of her findings.
Nope.
Yes, it was.
Okay, Sabine, whatever you say. I'm sure bubble chambers and TPCs (I assume since you're targeting "chambers" that other experiments like DEAP are fine) for direct detection are a catastrophic money sink that you're totally not exaggerating even a little.
Edit: Wait, are you specifically targeting the funding for the search for WIMPs? Since you're just joining us from your 15-year coma, I'm afraid to inform you that problems have gotten much worse for science than bubble chamber and TPC costs.
How would you go about proving the existence of regular matter?
I think therefor I am, I guess.
How do you know you're made of matter?
Matter describes what exists.
So, dark matter is matter?
Dark matter has never been proven to exist.
The only matter you've proven to exist is your own consciousness, so that's not saying much.
Since you've defined matter to be everything that exists, you must believe that whatever is the explanation for dark matter is matter, since it exists.
There are no observations of dark matter and few to none theories on how and why it exists. The only indication that it might exist is that our math doesn't accurately predict or simulate how celestial bodies are moving, there are other theoretical explanations such as a better understanding of gravity or a larger celestial mechanism just outside of the observable universe supplying an external force.
If you stipulate we must accept Dark Matter as the one true answer then you must also accept any hypothesis regardless of evidence, which is stupid.
TLDR: You're stupid.
According to what you said, gravity is matter, since gravity exists.
The effects of gravity have been observed, the cause itself has not. Prevailing hypothesis is gravitational waves which are being experimented to prove as we speak.
Saying that gravitational waves (which were observed in 2015) are the "cause" of gravity is like saying light is the "cause" of electromagnetism.
Your characterisation of dark matter as "not having been observed" is one of degree and one of terminology. There is evidence that something causes stronger gravitational lensing than can be accounted for by otherwise-observed matter, but this gravitational lensing (alongside other things) is an observation. How then has this phenomenon "not been observed"?
Oh shit, they did detect them, and dude got a nobel prize for it. How did I miss that, lmao.