> Ok, but physics has had a long and fruitful history of inventing invisible stuff when theory and results disagree
Inventing and then testing, though. As you said, GR got a huge boost last year, still being tested a century after being proposed. That's how science should be!
We know the darkX behaviour and we have some ideas as to explanation, but far from being proved in the way GR has been.
Dark energy, dark matter, string theory. Lots of IQ being poured into them, with a reasonable chance they're not the answer.
We have a lot of the same type of evidence for dark matter that we have for black holes: strange movement of distant luminous bodies. We've never directly observed either. (With light, anyway. I suppose the gravity wave observatory could be said to have directly observed black holes.)
And like dark matter, black holes point out shortcomings in our theories--they are ground zero for the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
And yet, even though we don't fully understand them, there is not much public doubt that black holes really exist. To the contrary: they are quite popular!
I'm not arguing that just because we think black holes exist, therefore dark matter must also exist. That's bad logic. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the popular concerns with dark matter are not unique to dark matter.
Inventing and then testing, though. As you said, GR got a huge boost last year, still being tested a century after being proposed. That's how science should be!
We know the darkX behaviour and we have some ideas as to explanation, but far from being proved in the way GR has been.
Dark energy, dark matter, string theory. Lots of IQ being poured into them, with a reasonable chance they're not the answer.