Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

This puzzle of galactic rotation drives a great deal of modern research in astronomy. Two hypotheses are presently under investigation. The favorite is that the glowing star matter we photograph is only about 10 percent of the physical universe—the rest is “dark matter”—not simply unlighted matter, but a special kind of matter that doesn’t interact with light. By imagining galaxies as embedded in an invisible blob of dark matter, the anomaly is resolved by the gravity of this hidden dark mass. But, of course, this leaves open a great many other questions about the hypothesized dark matter. The other theory, less popular, is that received theories of gravity—Newton’s and Einstein’s—are wrong. Thus, the simple facts of galactic structure lead in amazing directions—either most of the universe is invisible dark matter, or gravitation theory is incorrect.