Black holes, dark matter and dark energy seem to pretty much fit this description. They are, after all, inventions tacked on to calculations, in order to make theory and calculation fit observations.
It seems somewhat hard to understand why are black holes being included in this list—for objects that by their definition cannot be observed directly, there certainly seems to be a whole lot of a solid observational evidence for their existence, both in the case of stellar and supermassive ones.
That’s a bad analogy. Mindbound already addressed black holes. Dark matter is however something where we know there’s something weird going on, and the simplest explanation that doesn’t involve completely throwing out general relativity is to posit that there’s mass out there we can’t see. Specific variants of that hypothesis each make different testable predictions (indeed we can even just test the general dark matter hypothesis by looking for other signs of dark matter, such as through gravitational lensing which confirms the presence of dark matter). The comparison doesn’t hold.
Black holes, dark matter and dark energy seem to pretty much fit this description. They are, after all, inventions tacked on to calculations, in order to make theory and calculation fit observations.
It seems somewhat hard to understand why are black holes being included in this list—for objects that by their definition cannot be observed directly, there certainly seems to be a whole lot of a solid observational evidence for their existence, both in the case of stellar and supermassive ones.
True. Higgs Boson anyone?
Photo of black hole
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/4/19/how-scientists-captured-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole/
That’s a bad analogy. Mindbound already addressed black holes. Dark matter is however something where we know there’s something weird going on, and the simplest explanation that doesn’t involve completely throwing out general relativity is to posit that there’s mass out there we can’t see. Specific variants of that hypothesis each make different testable predictions (indeed we can even just test the general dark matter hypothesis by looking for other signs of dark matter, such as through gravitational lensing which confirms the presence of dark matter). The comparison doesn’t hold.