Dark matter is an observation, that several independent phenomena give the same estimation of baryonic matter mass, which is roughly 5 times higher than estimations of visible matter. Does the article explain or even enumerate all of them? At a glance, it is just a ‘quantum’ justification for MOND, which only deals with galaxy rotation curves.

Dark matter is a proposed explanation for an observation, that's all. All these other theories (MOND, etc) are also kludges. Nobody has a satisfactory explanation for galaxy rotation speeds, yet.

Yeah we should stop calling it dark matter and call it “missing matter” or “the unexplained matter issue” or something that is more obviously a placeholder.

If it is matter at all, then we do know something about it, that it is "dark" (does not interact with electromagnetism).

The alternative is that it isn't matter at all, and that some other explanation is required for galactic rotation curves, the Bullet Galaxy, observed gravitational lensing, and the configuration of the cosmic microwave background.

It's nice that one theory currently does all of that. That doesn't guarantee that it's right, but it means it's more than just "we have a guess about one thing".

Let me suggest Lorem Ipsum Matter ;)

Why should the academic community care about your opinion? Dark is a very accurate term

> "Transparent matter" would be better

Dark implies the unknown. The Dark Ages weren’t literally dark, we just don’t have a lot of written sources from the era.

Transparent matter implies a known property about something we don’t know. To the extent dark matter is a problematic term, it’s in the matter but.

Dark is ambiguous: it can mean light is not emitted, but it can also mean light is absorbed.

Even going with the first one, it's an incomplete description at best. "Dark" matter does not simply fail to emit light; it does not interact with light at all (other than by gravity, and that only bends it slightly, no absorption or emission involved).

Transparent fully captures this.

The overloaded meanings of those words which you are invoking are not relevant to the description of a physical property.

> "Dark" matter does not simply fail to emit light; it does not interact with light at all

We don’t know this. We have a parcel of observations from which we are trying to intuit a cause.

Those are two separate things:

1) We have unexplained observations.

2) A hypothetical explanation is dark matter, defined as a form of matter which does not interact with light (other than through gravity).

Whether dark matter actually exists does not affect how it's defined.

"Assumed" tbh

cause it's an assumption our "measurements" are representative of the reality of what's actually going on that far away.

we can't verify anything from this distance, so calling it empiricism is a stretch

> we can't verify anything from this distance, so calling it empiricism is a stretch

We can’t directly sense most phenomena, and even then our senses can be misleading. Empiricism just means based on observation; that describes cosmology to a tee.

Another practical issue with this name is that it suggests a singular entity. 'Dark matter' could very well be the result of multiple independent phenomena.

Worth noting the author disagrees with the theory and states as much a few times in the article.

Phlogiston, C-field... the list of such "placeholders" is pretty long.

The list includes the neutrino (added to explain missing momentum in observed nuclear decays), the Higgs (added to explain mass which would otherwise not make sense in electro-weak theory) and arguably antimatter (added to fix incompatibility between special relativity and quantum mechanics).

Reality is more complicated than slogans would suggest. Sometimes adding new types of matter to our understanding of physics was the right choice, sometimes it wasn't.

Another example might be anomalies in planetary orbits that could be explained by a missing planet.

This is how Neptune was discovered, for example. Astronomers noticed Uranus was moving "wrong" based on their physics of the time and worked out where Neptune should be based on that. When they pointed their telescopes there they found it.