For fifty years and thirty billion dollars, physicists have been chasing a ghost. Dark matter — we’re told — makes up 85% of the universe, yet it has never been seen, touched, or detected. Trillions of particles are supposedly flying through our bodies every second at supersonic speeds, but they leave no trace, no heat, no collisions, not even a whisper of entropy. Half a century of detectors, satellites, and accelerators have returned nothing. The only thing that has grown is the bill.
Like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, the field has adapted to absurdity. Each null result should have cooled enthusiasm, yet instead the theory has metastasized. WIMPs became axions, axions became sterile neutrinos, then fuzzy particles, primordial black holes, mirror matter, and “dark photons.” Every failure simply spawned a new candidate, a new grant, a new simulation. After five decades and billions wasted, the community treats the absence of discovery not as a scandal, but as business as usual.
This is not science progressing — it is science drifting. Real matter collides, radiates, and feeds entropy; dark matter does none of these things. It is mass without substance, gravity without physics, a placeholder masquerading as reality. The longer the community tolerates this, the further it slips into the boiling pot — mistaking survival of the paradigm for success of the idea. History will not forgive the waste. It will remember dark matter as the costliest mirage in the history of physics.