THERE’s something out there, astronomers say, that makes up 90 per cent of the Universe but…well, unfortunately, we can’t see it and we don’t know what it is.
Should we doubt what astronomers are telling us? At times, dark matter does smell suspiciously of those other invisible substances, phlogiston and the ether, that scientists dreamed up as physical fig leafs to make sense of otherwise inexplicable observations. They turned out to be phantoms, and so indeed might dark matter.
Physicists invented it some 30 years ago to explain the rapid spin of certain galaxies. The argument went that some…
