Is dark matter a scientific (falsifiable) hypothesis?
The existence of dark matter is an inference, not an experimental fact. Individual candidates for the dark matter can be tested and falsified. For example, it was once reasonable to imagine that innumerable brown dwarfs could be the dark matter. That is no longer true – the brown dwarf hypothesis has been falsified. WIMPs are falsifiable dark matter candidates – provided we don’t continually revise their interaction probability. The concept of dark matter is not falsifiable. If we exclude one candidate, we are free to make up another one. After WIMPs, the next obvious candidate is axions. Should those be falsified, we invent something else. (Particle physicists love to do this. The literature is littered with half-baked dark matter candidates invented for dubious reasons, often to explain phenomena with obvious astrophysics causes. The ludicrous uproar over the ATIC and PAMELA cosmic ray experiments is a good example.) The express elevator doesn’t just go down to hell. It keeps going t
