I watched the search for the Higgs Boson and the search for Cold Dark Matter carry on in parallel for decades.
The former was clearly actual science: they had a theoretical particle, they knew what it did, it had a place that made sense in the Standard Model, they had an estimate for the energy range in which they could find it, they built an instrument to look for it, and they found it.
The latter... well, it was clearly epicycles. Endlessly tweakable, with six free parameters, not in the Standard Model, a bunch of different guesses as to what it actually was, a bunch of different energies at which it might be found – oh dear, not there, well it must be at a much higher energy then – always on the brink of discovery but never actually discovered...
And then, as I began researching my book on cosmological natural selection, I could see that an evolved, fine-tuned universe was going to have startling emergent-looking properties built into its developmental process. Baryonic matter was going to pull off some weird shit, as the interaction of extremely fine-tuned parameters led to highly unlikely-looking outcomes. These would look like inexplicable anomalies, if your fundamental assumption was that we lived in a random and arbitrary one-shot universe.
And cold dark matter started to look awfully like the kind of think you would have to invent to save the old paradigm...
So as I developed my approach, I assumed dark matter was an error, and did my best to explain everything using fine-tuned parameters, and baryonic matter only.
I watched the search for the Higgs Boson and the search for Cold Dark Matter carry on in parallel for decades.
The former was clearly actual science: they had a theoretical particle, they knew what it did, it had a place that made sense in the Standard Model, they had an estimate for the energy range in which they could find it, they built an instrument to look for it, and they found it.
The latter... well, it was clearly epicycles. Endlessly tweakable, with six free parameters, not in the Standard Model, a bunch of different guesses as to what it actually was, a bunch of different energies at which it might be found – oh dear, not there, well it must be at a much higher energy then – always on the brink of discovery but never actually discovered...
And then, as I began researching my book on cosmological natural selection, I could see that an evolved, fine-tuned universe was going to have startling emergent-looking properties built into its developmental process. Baryonic matter was going to pull off some weird shit, as the interaction of extremely fine-tuned parameters led to highly unlikely-looking outcomes. These would look like inexplicable anomalies, if your fundamental assumption was that we lived in a random and arbitrary one-shot universe.
And cold dark matter started to look awfully like the kind of think you would have to invent to save the old paradigm...
So as I developed my approach, I assumed dark matter was an error, and did my best to explain everything using fine-tuned parameters, and baryonic matter only.