Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn’t disprove the “matter-like” observed behavior, it just shows that the particular assumptions under which exactly these non-found WIMPs were imagined were false.
If you have an infinite space of particle parameters and a series of tests keeps eliminating large swaths of this space, at some point it feels like you're playing a god of inbetweens game a la creationists arguing using gaps in the fossil record. There is a categorical difference, of course, but as a practical matter the parallels are useful, at what point do we table (for now) the search for the populist position a…
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-...
"Five Reasons We Think Dark Matter Exists: No other idea explains even two of these."
"1.) Galaxy Clusters"
"2.) Galactic Rotation Curves"
"3.) The Cosmic Microwave Background"
"4.) The Bullet Cluster"
"5.) Large-Scale Structure Formation"
From these 5, only dark matter matches all. Whereas MOND theories match only one, the "item number 2" and only as an attempt to after-the-fact-explanation of what's anyway observed, not as any prediction of anything new.
As I've quoted in my another message here:
"the predictions of dark matter were first made in the 1970s and 1980s, and were observationally confirmed later. This is not a case of tweaking the model to fit the data; this is a case of the best kind of science you hope for: where you make predictions, make the observations, and what you see validates and confirms the predictions you had made."
Moreover, there's nothing "large" of the possible space that is now excluded. The possible space includes everything that "behaves like matter". What's (still just "probably") eliminated is just what were for us, humans, in this particular moment of our history very convenient to happen: that the energies needed are exactly such that WIMPs that were conveniently postulated to be such can be generated by the device which design and maintenance costs less than 2% of the total cost of the F-35 fighter planes (the money invested and planned to be invested in F-35 is 75 times bigger than the international investment in LHC). It would have been luck if it had happened, but the possibilities are much bigger and include such which are going to remain physically unreachable to be produced by our technologies.
That we, humans, can't produce some particles doesn't disprove that dark matter exists when we have precise observations that can only be explained by dark matter and effectively by nothing else.