Dark Matter Doesn't Exist: Cosmology's collective delusion

Dark Matter Doesn't Exist: Cosmology's collective delusion

Pavel Kroupa

The current cosmological model only works by postulating the existence of dark matter – a substance that has never been detected, but that is supposed to constitute approximately 25% of all the universe. But a simple test suggests that dark matter does not in fact exist. If it did, we would expect lighter galaxies orbiting heavier ones to be slowed down by dark matter particles, but we detect no such slow-down. A host of other observational tests support the conclusion: dark matter is not there. The implications of this are nothing short of a revision of Einstein’s theory of gravitation. Why the scientific community is in denial about the falsification of the dark matter model is a question that requires both a sociological and philosophical explanation, argues Pavel Kroupa.   

With my collaborators and students, we have applied a number of observed galaxy systems to the calculations of Chandrasekhar dynamical friction we would expect to see if dark matter existed, and in all and every case it turns out that the slow-down is not in the data. We have studied the motions of the satellite galaxies around our own Milky Way at distances of a hundred thousand light years, the motions of galaxies a few million light years away relative to each other, and we also checked how quickly the bars of spiral galaxies rotate, and none of these systems show evidence for dark matter particles. The galaxies behave as if they were naked, i.e., as if they did not possess the huge and massive haloes of dark matter particles which the theory predicts to be there. Rather than observing the slow down of galaxies through Chandrasekhar dynamical friction, we observed a speed-up as the galaxies fall towards each other. This is the same as two stars that fall towards each other in a star cluster. They get faster until they pass each other and then they recede again from each other.

We need to scientifically understand why the dark-matter based model, being the most falsified physical theory in the history of humankind, continues to be religiously believed to be true by the vast majority of the modern, highly-educated scientists. This is a problem for the sociological and philosophical sciences and suggests a breakdown of the scientific method

If this is true it would be very interesting...will see what the counterpoints are...

Dark Matter Doesn't Exist: Cosmology's collective delusion



If this is true it would be very interesting...will see what the counterpoints are...

It is interesting. You are right that counter-arguments need to be considered.


One other part of the conclusions in that article also seems relevant,

(c) What role does the modern fixation on prize-money, awards and rewards play in the unparalleled stagnation of physics? Does the modern homo-cosmologicus only want prizes and awards, rather than to advance our understanding of the physical cosmos?

"the unparalleled stagnation of physics" is a point of view, an opinion but maybe it also points to something more. Rather like the time towards the end of the 19th century when it was considered that science had pretty much completely understood the universe and not much was left to do beyond some "tidying up".

The 20th century introduced rapid changes in physics. I wonder whether (maybe not soon) there will be another period of rapid changes like that.

Counterpoint:

The case for dark matter has strengthened

Key Takeaways

• Though it makes up about 26% of the Universe, we cannot see dark matter. But we know it's there because we can see its effects.
  
• Not all astrophysicists agree. Some argue that dark matter doesn't exist; instead, our understanding of the laws of physics needs to be modified.
  
• Evidence that once favored the "modified physics" hypothesis is now seen to be more consistent with the dark matter explanation.
  

[Laird]

Dark Matter Doesn't Exist: Cosmology's collective delusion

From the article:

(B) Astronomers have also discovered that the local Universe expands more rapidly than the distant Universe. This problem, known as the "Hubble Tension", has triggered many concurrent conferences and hugely long texts written by hundreds of scientists in which all possible solutions are being discussed and explained.

A very recent article, from May 30, 2025, by Ross Andersen, in The Atlantic, has some interesting background on this "Hubble Tension".

The Nobel Prize Winner Who Thinks We Have the Universe All Wrong

(It puts up a membership paywall, but temporarily disabling Javascript in your browser before (re)loading the page lets you read the article just fine).

By doing the work that led to the discovery of dark energy, Riess had helped add the final piece to what has since come to be called the “standard model of cosmology.” Indeed, few people played a larger role in establishing the standard model as the field’s dominant theory of how the universe began, how it organized itself into galaxies, and how it will end. But in recent years, cosmologists, the people who study the universe on the largest scales of space and time, have begun to worry that this story, and particularly its final act, might be wrong. Some talk of revolution. A growing number now say that the standard model should be replaced.

Adam Riess is among them.

As these new and better data piled up, a problem soon emerged. With each measured distance to another galaxy, Riess would update his calculation of the current expansion rate of the universe. To his alarm, the answers he was getting differed from those produced another way.

When I talked to Riess for the last time, he was at a cosmology conference in Switzerland. He sounded something close to giddy. “When there’s no big problems and everything’s just kind of fitting, it’s boring,” he said. Now among his colleagues, he could feel a new buzz. The daggers are out. A fight is brewing. “The field is hot again,” he told me. A new universe suddenly seems possible.

Wait till they discover that the Big Bang itself is fundamentally flawed to the very core ~ it was in danger of failing entirely, but then Dark Matter and Dark Energy were invented to flimsily "explain" away its various problems. It was always doomed to failed, because an essentially pseudo-scientific mirroring of the events in the book of Genesis ~ Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest, created the idea, but the name "Big Bang" was coined by Fred Hoyle, who was extremely derisive of the theory at the time.

I believe that all scientific models of the universe are fundamentally flawed, actually ~ they are based on extremely incomplete information. We would need to know about the 99.99% of the universe we have never visited. Our laws of physics would need to be much more complete.

We don't even know of the laws of physics as we perceive them hold outside of our local area. We know nothing about the physics of other star systems nor galaxies. Yes, it's all good and well to collect light measurements and spectrographs ~ but those do not substitute for actual experience of what it is like to visit those locations proper.

Can science just say "we don't know"? Of course not... there's too much hubris among scientists ~ a public pretense of knowing answers that they will probably admit in private that they don't know, because they always want more funding, after all...

[Laird]

We don't even know of the laws of physics as we perceive them hold outside of our local area. We know nothing about the physics of other star systems nor galaxies. Yes, it's all good and well to collect light measurements and spectrographs ~ but those do not substitute for actual experience of what it is like to visit those locations proper.

There's perhaps a sort of a catch-22 here: to be able to learn a complete physics by visiting other galaxies, we need to know how to get to them, but to know how to get to them might require the same degree of knowledge about a complete physics that we'd learn by visiting.

There's perhaps a sort of a catch-22 here: to be able to learn a complete physics by visiting other galaxies, we need to know how to get to them, but to know how to get to them might require the same degree of knowledge about a complete physics that we'd learn by visiting.

A nice irony. The more I think about physics, and the more I think about how vast even just the known observable universe is ~ we're far too confident in thinking we know when we don't actually know with even the vaguest certainty, as that would require the very knowledge we'd be seeking.

I suspect that the scientific institutions feel obliged to present a front of authority and knowing, because they've been able to explain the basics of our local system really well. If they admit that they actually don't know anything for certain outside of the directly testable, they're probably afraid that they will lose the blind trust of the masses ~ and worse, the Atheist Materialist crowd probably fears that the masses might turn away from Materialism, along with the scientists who've invested their careers and ego into feeling important suddenly not having that attention and income anymore.

Which almost confirms my suspicions that science has become about money and fame and careerism, with the deceptive public-facing mask of being purely about knowledge and progress.

Yeah, it's cynical, but I'll take a discomforting truth over a comfortable lie.