“It may be that ultimately the search for dark matter will turn out to be the most expensive and largest null result experiment since the Michelson-Morely experiment, which failed to detect the ether.”

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 4, Dark Matter, p. 77

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John Moffat22

British-Canadian physicist 1932

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“Why is Einstein's theory better than Lorentz's theory? It would be a mistake to argue that Einstein's theory gives an explanation of Michelson's experiment, since it does not do so. Michelson's experiment is simply taken over as an axiom.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

“(Coining phrase "null hypothesis") In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the “null hypothesis,” and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.”

Ronald Fisher book The Design of Experiments

The Design of Experiments, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1935, p. 18
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“…when the experiment was attempted by Michelson and Morley it failed, thus showing that space and time assumed in the picture were not true to the facts of nature. …the pattern of events was the same whether the world stood at rest in the supposed ether, or had an ether wind blowing through it at a million miles an hour. It began to look as though the supposed ether was not very important in the scheme of things… and so might as well be abandoned. But if the bell-rope is to be discarded, what is to ring the bell?”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

“The existence of dark matter particles can never be disproven by direct experiment because ever lighter particles and/or ever smaller cross sections just below the current detection threshold may be postulated for every non-detection. There exists no falsifiable prediction concerning the DM particles.”

Pavel Kroupa (1963) Australian astrophysicist

[Pavel Kroupa, 2012, The dark matter crisis: falsification of the current standard model of cosmology, page 28, arXiv.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.2546]

“What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.”

Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) American mathematician

Source: [Wiener, N., A New Theory of Measurement: A Study in the Logic of Mathematics, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, s2-19, 1, 1921, 181–205, 0024-6115, 10.1112/plms/s2-19.1.181]