LHC starting up again

[AFTT47]

So why the mainstream speculation of exotic explanations?

[Alex K]

So why the mainstream speculation of exotic explanations?

Which ones are you thinking of?

[Alex K]

I'm just suspecting that the more elaborate proposals either have something else going for them apart from explaining dark matter, or maybe aren't all that mainstream. But I'd be curious what you've encountered

[AFTT47]

I just mean the theories that dark matter is something exotic and new and that dark energy is some new fundamental force. Both assumptions seem kind of premature.

[Anomalocaris]

I guess a lot depends whether you think a single thing which is fundamentally unlike anything else you've encountered should be considered exotic or not.

I believe there are multiple lines of evidence to suggest properties of dark matter is inconsistent with it being baryonic matter.   As far as I know we have only ever encountered or measured baryonic matter in all of our inquiries into nature EXCEPT where mapping of distribution of mass based on inferred Gravity is concerned.   Does that not make dark matter quite exotic as far as our experience goes?

[Alex K]

I guess a lot depends whether you think a single thing which is fundamentally unlike anything else you've encountered should be considered exotic or not.

I believe there are multiple lines of evidence to suggest properties of dark matter is inconsistent with it being baryonic matter.   As far as I know we have only ever encountered or measured baryonic matter in all of our inquiries into nature EXCEPT where mapping of distribution of mass based on inferred Gravity is concerned.   Does that not make dark matter quite exotic as far as our experience goes?

I'd tentatively mention neutrinos as an already known form of non baryonic dark matter. In light of this, a "some more of that please, maybe more massive" doesn't appear all that exotic

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I just mean the theories that dark matter is something exotic and new and that dark energy is some new fundamental force. Both assumptions seem kind of premature.

I'm trying to imagine which ones you mean. There are proposals that dark matter is made of supersymmetric partner particles for example
. But there, the supersymmetry is motivated by other things beside DM. 
Then there's the proposal that they are an  Axion condensate. Here, the theory was invented to solve the  so called strong CP problem and is independently justified as well. Maybe you've heard of another one. Usually (ideally), more elaborate proposals only become mainstream if they also address multiple other problems. Of course, the field is also susceptible to fads and sometimes, specific more far-out proposals get a disproportionate amount of attention because sociology... That's the unavoidable human factor...

Dark energy being a fundamental force... Maybe you mean the quintessence models of dynamically varying dark energy from a scalar field. there is currently no evidence that dark energy varies with time, so indeed I don't see much motivation for those models except that it might be worthwhile going for the next plausible more involved scenario in order to see what else it might entail.

That being said, introducing a new fundamental force sounds fancy, but doesn't entail much more than introducing a new bosonic particle into the theory. Hence I don't perceive that as very exotic, but that may be professional blindness...

[Anomalocaris]

I guess a lot depends whether you think a single thing which is fundamentally unlike anything else you've encountered should be considered exotic or not.

I believe there are multiple lines of evidence to suggest properties of dark matter is inconsistent with it being baryonic matter.   As far as I know we have only ever encountered or measured baryonic matter in all of our inquiries into nature EXCEPT where mapping of distribution of mass based on inferred Gravity is concerned.   Does that not make dark matter quite exotic as far as our experience goes?

I'd tentatively mention neutrinos as an already known form of non baryonic dark matter. In light of this, a "some more of that please, maybe more massive" doesn't appear all that exotic

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I stand corrected regarding neutrinos.  

but it I think "maybe more massive" fits "exotic" since it is backed by no other evidence or direct detection.

[Alex K]

Well, yeah, a completely new hitherto unknown type of particle is always exotic in a sense. From a theorist's perspective, it just isn't a very complicated extension of existing theories, as opposed to more elaborate things like extra dimensions, Supersymmetry, or extra dimensions with supersymmetry, which I'm also guilty of having worked on

If adding one particle with suitable interactions provides the simplest explanation for several existing observations, that's as non-exotic as it gets on the physics frontier.

[Mister Agenda]

I'd heard it was seriously broken, glad to find out that was exaggerated.

[vorlon13]

Somewhere on the grounds/facilities of the LHC, there needs to a giant knob, and with big numbers around it that go from 0 to 11.