system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Given that "the Ether" was so discredited, what makes "Dark Matter" any different/more legitimate?

I've always had a side hobby in reading non-specialist texts on quantum physics (e.g. Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", Greene's "The Elegant Universe", Kaku's "Hyperspace", etc.).  I recently watched a few episodes of Greene's "Fabric of the Cosmos" and honestly his explanation(s) of dark matter seem eerily similar to the basic idea(s) behind the Ether.  Given I am a Ph.D. in a social science and not physics, I know that my knowledge is inadequate to the task at hand here: why is dark matter so plausible when the ether is laughably wrong?
gpt
Ether isn't laughably wrong; it was a reasonable explanation until experiments (Michelson-Morley) and better theories (special relativity) made it unnecessary. Dark matter was hypothesized to explain the galactic rotation curve anomaly, which it does. It also fits with data that it was not contrived to fit, such as the mass distribution in the Bullet Cluster. It is also potentially possible to detect dark matter particles, either directly in experiments such as CoGeNT and DARMA (I think that's the acronym) or indirectly in the LHC.