Our Weird Universe: Clumped Dark Matter

Growing up, I (like I assume many of you) had to memorize the steps in the scientific method. According to our classroom, science progresses by making hypotheses, designing careful experiments to test the hypotheses, and then analyzing the results and modifying the hypotheses as needed. I don’t know if science actually works that way in other fields, but that is seriously not how astronomy seems to work. Starting with Aristotle, theorists have built the theories, often without actually looking at the universe, and declared that we should be able to understand our universe from first…