I didn't read a negative judgment of the term in the grandparent comment, just an observation.

Yes, and I'm challenging that observation. "Making an observation" doesn't mean you're not subject to criticism or questioning.

You haven't meaningfully challenged anything they said, though. Your thing was an odd rant about the need to name things (not a hot take), and theirs seemed more focused, well

>>That is, an interrim scientific theory that will eventually be completely replaced by revisions of our physics.

But you were reading criticism of the naming in the original comment, which wasn't there.

No worry, I did not intend any criticism of 'dark matter'. I understand it as a placeholder concept for 'something we know amazingly little about, except that it appears to be in conflict with the naive version of our observations'. It reminds me of the very complex ways humans calculated the planetary motions, when they believed the sun revolved around the earth - once the proper relation was understood, a comparatively simpler model sufficed. As I understand it, we have plenty of guesses at what dark matter could be, including quantum particles that emit no energy we (currently) can observe. I believe the original theory of ether also sufficed in its time, until we had enough observations that contradicted that model. I'm not saying dark matter is wrong in any way, but it appears to me, it's a place-holder concept for until knowing what is _really_ going on, like 'planet X'.

> The unnamed phenomenon were some astronomic bodies behave as though a vast quantity of matter were affecting them but that matter can't be otherwise detected or identified"

How about "missing matter"? To non-astronomers, dark matter sounds like it has already been found and it doesn't emit light.

It's not missing though, is it? It has the characteristic of having effects of mass but not being otherwise observable.

Other comments have suggested better names, based on the fact that we don't even know for sure that it's matter, just that gravity at large scale doesn't behave like it should.

If you say "missing matter", the thing most physicists think of first is probably missing anti-matter, and then missing baryons. Not dark matter.

It's a bit late to suggest new nomenclature for something that's been around for many decades.

> So what's wrong with "dark matter" as a name?

it encodes a normative, biased prejudgement about what we think explains the syndrome.

Exactly, the fact that it's a phenomenon gets lost--all we have to do is find the missing mass (X-Y problem) that's causing the gravitational effects.

What would you prefer the concept be called?

Gravitational anomalies, gravitational discrepancy, unexplained gravity effect? Hell, dark gravity, if you want.

Until the point where the observations are multimodal. Then I'd be more comfortable assigning provisionally normative names. Till then it should probably explicitly reference the fact that all observations are gravitational in nature.

Dark matter works just fine.

It needs to be "matter" in the cosmological sense [1] because of the ratio of protons and neutrons to photons produced during Big Bang nucleosythesis. We know the ratio of the number of protons to number of photons. We know the number of photons in the universe (most of them are in the CMB), and we therefore know the number of protons. That means we know the amount of "normal" matter in the universe, and it is far less than the total amount of matter in the universe (that must have survived from baryogenesis). This requires there to be "dark matter" in the universe.

The other effects like galaxy formation and stellar motion in galaxies are just things that might be caused by dark matter (though that's come into doubt).

Sean Carroll discusses it here: https://youtu.be/tZQadPmTd84?t=4642

[1] "Matter" in the cosmological sense is "stuff" that moves slower than the speed of light, as opposed to "energy" which moves at the speed of light.

Those are all example of observable phenomena. Dark matter is an inference made by inconsistencies with theory. I think they’re vastly different because it overstates the certainty. Maybe I’m splitting hairs

Ether.

X-rays.

Black hole.

Dark matter.

I think it’s going to stick as a name even when the details have been largely worked out, especially considering the other examples I listed.