I HAD BEEN ASSURED THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: There is no Dark Matter and the Universe is Twice as Old as We Thought.

Gupta went on to state that if the universe is 26.7 billion years old as his team believes, “the Universe does not require dark matter to exist.” I’m obviously nowhere near smart enough to grasp everything these eggheads are talking about, but the layman’s explanation for this part of it boils down to missing data. Previous studies all suggested that the universe is expanding faster than it should be based on the amount of physical matter we are able to observe in space. That’s why physicists had to dream up dark matter (and its corresponding partner, dark energy) to explain what was being observed. But the vastly larger universe now being posited would allow for the apparent motion of all of the heavenly bodies.

Dark matter always seemed like a cop-out to me — insisting that something invisible must be there to make the theory work, instead of figuring out what might be wrong with the theory.

If Gupta is correct, now we just need to figure out how we got the age of the universe so wrong…