As a matter of fact, it's all dark . . .

Just a fill-in update, I realise these posts are very idiosyncratic and apparently disjointed. As might be expected from an amateur's attempt to make sense of an apparently intractable problem.

In fact it is as if every attempt to find a simple core to the answer results in the exposure of another layer of complexity. Having got a good handle on the nature of matter, the normal or baryonic kind, it turns out that 90% of it, including our own Galaxy, comprises dark matter. It can't be detected directly at any wavelength, the only evidence for it is the gravitational effect it has on observed galactic dynamics.

As if the suspected black hole at the centre of each galaxy is a lot more massive than thought. But the unseen mass is distributed in an oblate (80%) spheroid encompassing the visible and detectable material. It "is" all around us.

Plenty of scope for surmising that the mystery of dark matter is a feature of gravitation. Just as a mass distorts local space causing other masses nearby moving or being moved through it to appear to attract each other, a large accumulation of mass (as a galaxy) further significantly distorts the space it occupies with the effect of making it seem 10 times more massive than its baryonic material.

My surmise is to do with the relationship between the size/dimension of galaxies compared with the universe as a whole - galaxies are macro scale. In what sense is the gravitational constant a variable after all?

I always had an intuitive problem with the big bang, preferring a continuum to be more elegant, but realise the evidence for the big bang is irrefutable. Well I am also sceptical about the existence of dark matter, and will be betting the solution lies in the measurement method and theory rather than in some new and totally undetectable form of matter.

Why does nature have to be so intractably complicated? At what point in human investigation will it start to become simpler? Answers on a postcard please . .