A heavyweight candidate for dark matter

Indeed this is the traditional scientific method.

As an aside I have just read "Lost in Math : How Beauty Leads Physics Astray" by Sabine Hossenfelder, this being a good savaging of the current state of theoretical particle physics. Ideas like supersymmetry, a fourth family of leptons, extra dimensions, string theory etc ... are clung on to despite increasing lack* of evidence at the Large Hadron Coliider. As each observing run goes by it places greater and greater restraints upon what a theory must contain to agree with reality. Most of the 'beautiful' ideas are now getting quite implausible, requiring alot of fiddling to explain why we haven't seen anything at the LHC beyond the Higgs ( eg. the so-called 750 GeV diphoton excess ). It's a good insight into how groups of people can fool themselves, in this case because of pursuit of a flawed requirement that correct theories must be mathematically 'elegant'. Verification by experiment is almost optional.

The sociology of theoretical particle physics has gotten a bit toxic recently & groupthink rules. It's hard to remain literally solvent in an atmosphere where appointments, tenure, grants etc are all hard-wired to one mantra. Sabine was on the wrong end of this for many years and has decided to tell all. How do you deal with people who have nailed their colors to the wrong mast and thus spent decades up some cul de sac of irrelevance ? How might the next funding request for a brand spanking new & higher power collider be received ? They are not just Tev in energy but heading toward Tera-dollars too.

There are historical precedents for this. 'Vortex theory'** was quite in vogue about a century ago and it too had 'nice' mathematics. Observation wise it was a disaster. Both Dirac and Einstein pursued theoretical dead ends in the latter parts of their careers - one observer wryly noting that Einstein may just as well have taken up sailing after General Relativity - because they yearned for simplicity ( read : beauty ) in mathematical equations. It's strange how people of such obvious high intelligence can - I think due to pride etc - be so blind to the failings of the products of their work. Faced with failure they tend to redefine the measuring stick used to gauge success, instead of trying a new line of theory. Richard Feynman is an excellent counter-example of this, which is why he was so productive ( read : observationally correct ) even to his senior years.

{ Hence String Theory is a wonderful body of mathematics, full of symmetry & an abundance of elegance. Regardless, it utterly fails in any relevance to this physical universe. It has no testable predictions. }

As for dark matter, well, you need some abundance of very interaction shy material to make an observational fit here. This material would gravitationally clump long before the visible baryonic stuff. Either that or we are very wrong about the evolution of the universe. I remember a lecture by Rocky Kolb, a cosmologist, who railed against the Concordance Model ie. what the predominant number of cosmologists thought was correct. He said that one should go for observational agreement, not sociological agreement. But as you allude to there are many areas of 'science' which suffer these tensions of cognitive bias.

Cheers, Mike

* This risks a very profitable arm of publishing too, all the various popular books on one or another topic in vogue these days. 

** Never heard of it ? Neither had I. It was rightly placed in the dumpster of history.

( edit ) Another reviewer of Sabine's book states : "Perhaps the term ‘science’ has become uselessly broad as a description of method, and retains meaning only as a sociological term, to describe organized investigations of the world that are embedded in modern academic institutions." If so this gives an opportunity for the invention of new linguistic terms to clue readers as to which type of endeavour is being described. Try : trad-science, a shortening of 'traditional science' with the opposite being nouveau-science where voting amongst peers rather than physical references is the arbiter. That would reduce confusion & misrepresentation at least. Hence using the trad-science label implies that advocates/investigators throw out untestable theories, those that contradict physical findings plus those that contradict themselves eg. both more and less snow.

In such a mature area of study it is certainly cheaper to hire theorists than build a better collider. One barbed riposte has been that theorists should work harder on the data they have, rather than bemoan what they don't have. It sounds like it is becoming a bit cruel.

I think the Chinese are proposing a 100 Tev machine.

Cheers, Mike

( edit ) FWIW this is why I like LIGO and E@H : physical measurement to extreme degrees of accuracy is the norm, and analysis is replete with checks and balances to prevent any false discoveries. The outcome of such a hard-core approach has been some wonderful new insights into the universe.