Dark matter is too much "I have these observations that don't fit. In order to explain them, I would need these exact properties, which are virtually impossible to test for. Please provide grant money."
Dark energy, by comparison, is currently at "I have these observations that don't fit. If they're caused by X, then we can test that by observing Y. Please provide grant money."
... the former is career-building...
... they're only detectable by theoreticians seeking grant money, with properties that are defined by what they can't be, rarely what they could be tested to be. Hence my references to the "modern epicycles."
Those statements are woefully ignorant of the state of research in these topics and scientific process in general. They’re also grossly unfair to the physicists and astrophysicists doing the work.
This is how science works. You make observations. Certain observations don’t match law or theory. So you come up with a hypothesis that does explain the observations. You figure out way(s) to test that hypothesis. Sometimes those tests cost money.
Observations raising the issue of dark matter have been around since the 1930s. In the early 1990s, I worked with a theorist on large-scale structure who tried to explain it without initial dark matter fluctuations. He didn’t ask for grants. He worked it out on chalkboards and laptops. We’re finally going to put his and dozens and dozens of other dark matter theories to the test with JWST observations. JWST is a very expensive telescope, but it or something very much like it is required to see the young universe early enough to rule-out or rule-in certain dark matter hypotheses. No one is involved on JWST to test the impossible or for grant money.
I was at one of the two institutions whose extragalactic supernova observations in the 1990s first raised the issue of dark energy. I had a small hand on a panel of astrophysicists who defined the follow-on to JWST, which, among other things, will measure thousands of extragalactic standard candles, reducing mathematical uncertainty about the accelerating expansion of the universe, which will rule-out or rule-in certain hypotheses about the dark energy driving it. No one is involved in the Roman Space Telescope for the sake of “epicycles” or because only theoreticians can test dark energy.
The natures of dark matter and dark energy are hard to solve not because researchers enjoy writing grants (they absolutely do not) nor because our profession rewards going down known dead-ends (it absolutely does not — terrible way to get published, win awards, and advance up the ladder). Dark matter and dark energy are hard to figure out because they’re not luminous sources of light like stars. We can only observe their influence indirectly. It’s like trying to understand something by looking at its shadow. A circular shadow could be cast by a circular disk, a ball, the base of a column, the base of a cone, or any number of other objects. Trying to test for disks, balls, columns, and cones without being able to see or touch those objects — only the shadow — is immensely difficult. Dark matter and dark energy have the same problem, only magnified many-fold.
If someone has a shortcut on this kind of research, please, bring it forward. Otherwise, those of us on this forum, and ombudsmen in particular, shouldn’t be ignorantly denigrating the work of others or assigning them malicious intentions.
And I have seen a lot of money get poured into it, which I'd rather have spent on getting a few folks and a backhoe to Mars, for example
This is also a woefully ignorant statement. I’ve also had jobs funding NASA planetary science missions and human space flight. They don’t compete for the same pots of money. Moreover, we could wipe out all the astrophysics theory grants at NASA, NSF, and DOE for a year and not even get a single, cheap cargo mission to the ISS.
