The whole “dark matter” issue assumes there is a truly massive volume of matter we can’t see or detect. This is purely to explain anomalies between what our theories of relativity predict and what we observe.
It’s always seemed to me that good science would instead attempt to develop new theories that explain what we can observe, rather than assuming stuff exists that we can’t see.
Shades of the old aether theories.
What the astronomers are observing now is our galaxy having a speed of rotation in the outer arms which should be causing the stars in the outer arms to escape from the galaxy, but those stars are not doing so. The implicaton is that there is enough hidden mass in the galaxy to keep these stars in their galactic orbits.
Doesn't bother me a bit. It attempts to define the "known knowns", "known unknowns", and "unknown unknowns". People in general though have no concept of the distances involved in all of our observations, how little we can really see, and even if they DO have some clue about that, how little we know about the nature of time, and the fact that we could meet someone in space but be billions of years apaart in time.
I wouldn't downplay the importance of creating theories about how physical systems work.
Just to use the "aether" as an example, I believe that the Michelson-Morley experiment was intended to measure the velocity of the earth as it traveled through the aether.
Light beams were emitted in a pattern which caused the light to travel two different paths, with a portion of the two paths at right angles to each other. The experiment was repeated at different times of year, so that the movement of the solar system through the aether could also be detected.
The surprising result was that light was not a wave traveling through a stationary aether. The speed of the light was unaffected by the position or velocity of the earth. Both beams arrived simultaneously, indicating that the light was not propagating through a fixed aether.
The aether theory contained within its details the possibility of falsifiability; that is, it was possible to design an experiment that could prove that the aether theory was false.
If only the so-called "scientists" supporting global warming believed in such a concept. From what I have read, these "scientists" seem unfazed by the fact that the upper atmosphere fails to show the warming predicted by all the computer models. To a real scientist, any model which predicts upper atmosphere warming must be rejected as false. It's really not any more complicated than that.