The Best Evidence for Dark Matter & the Uncertainty Therein

If I told you that I was 99.81 percent certain I had made a big discovery, you might suggest it was time to break out the champagne. If I said the discovery resolved one of the biggest outstanding problems in science and would probably let me punch a ticket to Stockholm to pick up a Nobel Prize, you might suggest ordering a case of the best champagne I could find, and start planning out my acceptance speech. After all, 99.81 percent certainty is pretty good; it’s well above 95 percent, the bar used for “statistical significance” in most fields of research. 

But most physicists would tell me to hold off on the bubbly until I got rid of a bit more of that remaining .19 percent uncertainty. How much more? Well, the simple answer would be, “almost all of it.” 

Dark matter is an enigmatic substance that