Well, it is certainly nice to know that dark matter is a long-proven, absolutely immutable law of physics, much more secure than F=ma, and far more certain and fleshed out than 2+2=4.

If it wasn’t for the sarcasm, I’d complain about the strawman argument.

Anyway, F=ma is wrong. And you may call 2+2=4, but if you want a theoretical underpinning for it, you can’t be sure it’s true.

The first 50 or 60 groups of scientists who artificially made it in labs were probably excited at the time, but now it is just boring. I am old enough to remember when you couldn’t buy a 5 pound sack of dark matter at WalMart for $7.99. And it has been made by children at science fairs for so many years now, that nobody even bothers with it any more.

Dark matter is such a long-proven thing, I do not know why Risa even brings it up. It is like spending time arguing whether or not air exists.

Is MOND really more complex than postulating thousands of unknown, and unseen particles that have evaded detection for an increasingly implausible amount of time shooting through your fingernails?

Maybe cosmologists need to renew their commitment to understanding Occam’s Razor.

Really? RLY?!

Should we reject electromagnetism as well since that too calls for 10^60 or so invisible charge carriers spread out over the entire universe?

Hell, by that standard we’d have to reject MOND too – along with Newtonian gravity – since is requires those selfsame invisible atoms to work on.

Why do they make the talks shorter for middle school and high school kids?

Concentration. The rule of thumb is that people can at best concentrate for a period equal to their age plus two minutes.

I was told that high schoolers may concentrate for 20 minutes at a time in class, but only 6 minutes if you’re really upping the level of abstraction.

Maybe cosmologists need to renew their commitment to understanding Occam’s Razor.