Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Dark Matter. It exists as certainly as squarks and sleptons and Higgsinos exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Dark Matter. It would be as dreary as if there were no supersymmetry. There would be no childlike faith then, no papers, no grants to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in observation and experiment. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Dark Matter! You might as well not believe in Dark Energy! You might get the DOE to hire men to watch in all the underground laboratories to catch Dark Matter, but even if they did not see Dark Matter coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Dark Matter, but that is no sign that there is no Dark Matter. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the best experiment, nor even the united efforts of all the keenest experiments ever conducted, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Dark Matter! Thank God! It exists, and it exists forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, it will continue to make glad the coffers of science.

Paraphrased from the famous letter Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Stacy McGaugh is an astrophysicist and cosmologist who studies galaxies, dark matter, and theories of modified gravity. He is an expert on low surface brightness galaxies, a class of objects in which the stars are spread thin compared to bright galaxies like our own Milky Way. He demonstrated that these dim galaxies appear to be dark matter dominated, providing unique tests of theories of galaxy formation and modified gravity. Professor McGaugh is currently the chair of the Department of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory. Previously he was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, having also held research fellowships at Rutgers, the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

3 thoughts on “Yes, Virginia, there is a Dark Matter”

  1. An outstanding post. I believe it should be published in the Proceedings of the United States Academy of Science and many other learned journals.

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  3. {… there is a Dark Matter. It exists as certainly as squarks and sleptons and Higgsinos exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. … Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there.}

    Indeed, in induction, the NEGATIVE result does not exclude the tiny possibility still lingering. But in science, a great theory (or proved one) can still be cut by the Occam’s razor.
    Everything that SUSY can do is done, and everything that SUSY cannot do is also done by the same scheme, see https://tienzengong.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/natures-master-key-cuts-out-susy-the-undead/
    SUSY however real or wonderful is cut by Occam’s razor.

    For dark matter/dark energy, the key the key is all about being able to DERIVE (via theoretical calculations) all nature constants, such as Alpha, Weinberg angle, CC (Cosmology Constant), Higgs mass, Planck CMB data, dark flow, etc., and this is the bottom-line, see https://tienzengong.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/natures-manifesto-on-physics-2/

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