Is Dark Matter Our Generation's Ether?

Milgrom said:

What struck me was some regularity in the anomaly. The rotational velocities were not just larger than expected, they became constant with radius.

For me, that's the one thing that theoreticians can miss with alarming regularity, is alarming regularities. I can understand seeing something and attempting to backfill it into a theory, but if you're not willing or able to look at the data on its own terms, you can get stuck.

Milgrom said:

But dark energy is just a quick fix, the same as dark matter is. And just as in galaxies, you can either invent a whole new type of energy and then spend years trying to understand its properties, or you can try fixing your theory.

Muchas sassy-ass :)

Seriously, though, I think we've been in theoretical quick-fix mode for a few decades now.

-- Ritchie

h/t Joe Devon

I couldn't agree more.  "The Emporor's New Clothes" seems to be getting rewritten in current cosmological physics.  Here is Verlinde's work summarized in another article from Quanta Magazine that predates your reference.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161129-verlinde-gravity-dark-matter/

You know, I'm starting to wonder, upon reading a few more summaries on holographic universe hypotheses, whether these could act sort of as a restated Mach's Principle, or even from any number of increasing-entanglement approaches.

If Arp's hypotheses on the nature of quasars was correct, then quasars represent a "reset", but then follow one of the aforementioned other hypotheses instead of his and Narlikar's m α at² approach.

Smolin and Unger's book do a reasonable, if repetitive, case for the laws of nature being able to change over time, not necessarily in any sort of continuous or "at any time" sense, but rather, emergent from whatever was going on at the time. I've not made my way through to the end yet, but it may be that we do not need ultra-exotic conditions for the laws of nature to follow a different path. Perhaps the conditions in a quasar are quite enough for a slightly or not-so-slightly different domain to be in force.

That's not to say that they wasn't yet another different domain in past, even maybe that the likes of Seyferts were more common in the past to help fractally build the superstructures we have now, or even that there was something beyond that which made the Seyferts in the first place or that was comprised of or emitted quasars directly.

If only it were possible in the mainstream to allow for the second source of redshift...

-- Ritchie