Bad Science

Let's apply to russell's teapot. "It exists, but we just need 9 billion dollars and 70 years of research funding to make a telescope capable of finding it."

The standard model:
A quantum-mechanical model that explains the three nongravitational forces—electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force—and their interactions with matter. ...

Just to establish some factual baseline here: There is no detector machine they plug in which gives a finger print of whatever happens to be passing through. They detect collisions either in the form of ionization, radiation or heat exchange, via a number of different techniques, and from these collision results they postulate what the cause of said collision may have been.

So to be clear: they make collisions between particles at very high energies then they detect the secondary collisions and hypothesize as to what the cause of the secondary collisions may have been -- that's a particle accelerator.

With the 'weak particles' they simply posit a particle that has no strong interactions with matter, and therefore can't be detected by the preexisting means, then attempt to use the preexisting means anyway, pick up some background noise and say "look we found it, the universe is 95% composed of invisible pink elephant matter."

 

More likely that they were after funding and grants and this was the avenue by which to get them.

I don't understand to what the question refers.

To give an example of the impoverished nature of the evidence, one might misidentify a 'photon' as an 'electron', having observed some ionization in a detector, and then be forced to go back and check for signs of mass using other devices along the same track, then, having reviewed the evidence, essentially make a guess as to which it may have been.

In my mind this becomes sufficiently ridiculous to raise red flags when one also considers that these detectors are used in conjunction with atom smashers; analogous to trying to determine the components of a guitar by listening to two guitars being smashed together at the speed of sound.

 

(Atoms, actual photograph.)

Still is.

Entirely possible.

Fallacy: Appeal to Ridicule
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-ridicule.html

Try conceiving of an actual argument to make before posting in this forum.

 

Actually its taken with a scanning tunneling microscope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

In that respect, yes it is more of a physical imprint than a photograph.

But of course this isn't the only evidence. The entire microchip industry is based around photo-lithography at (thesedays) the atomic scale. Electron-light ('beam of electrons') and laser light are used in conjunction to cast nano-scopic patterns onto etching materials on slivers of silicon, over and over, building up the layers of the integrated circuit.

 

The device that took the picture 'requires the use of' conductance, electrical charge, and the transfer of charge through a vacuum, not particulate 'electrons' -- which are an hypothetical explanation of electrical phenomena.

If you were to use the term 'electron' in the same sense that one uses the term 'meter', then that would be fine, but a meter still isn't a class of existent.

It doesn't logically follow (from either your argument nor the phenomena exploited by the device) that electrons are particles. Indeed, the principle in use 'electron tunneling' suggests anything but a particle.

My original quote:
With the 'weak particles' they simply posit a particle that has no strong interactions with matter, and therefore can't be detected by the preexisting means, then attempt to use the preexisting means anyway, pick up some background noise and say "look we found it, the universe is 95% composed of invisible pink elephant matter."

I think it's pretty clear. I can restate it if you like:

Errors in cosmological force calculations are being attributed to a hypothetical class of matter which is nothing more than an appeal to the unknown. Dark matter is god matter. You can't see it, you can't detect it, it doesn't react with anything, all it does is exactly what you need it to do to make your equations work; By its definition it is literally absent to all senses, internal and external.

As I said somewhere earlier: it is basically a third re-postulation of Aether. The first being the early 20th century luminous Aether, the second being space-time, and the third being dark matter / dark energy. The key identifier of an Aether is that it's an undetectable invisible magical thing which makes X happen, where X is what you want to happen, whether that be the acceleration of mass toward other mass, or the transmission of light in a vacuum, or anything in-between.