Very helpful thank you

I'm sorry if this is stupid, my understanding of what space/time is would mean there's no way to not have an electric field. Even if you made a vacuum with no charge you would have to use an electric field to make the vacuum inside have no charge therefore there would always be an electric field.

Is that a flawed understanding?

Is an ideal vacuum a theoretical or mathematical concept that is technically impossible in our understanding of physics?

Thank you for any clarification, I think I have a good idea of high school level math + a high level of modern physics concepts so ELI16?

Dam, I read the whole article and here you edited all the filler out.

I just watched a really cool documentary on Amazon called Everything and Nothing. Basically it goes through the history of discovering first how big the universe is and what we generally know about it, and then how small things can get/ what is space in a vacuum.

If you learn what we know from math and scientific observations, and learn what we don't know, it gives you a good idea on why we think there is dark matter. It's essentially a place holder for observations that haven't really been explained yet.

Basically, from what we know about matter already, there are effects of only some of the Properties of matter in the universe, like gravitational lensing without any kind of black hole or star cluster or blob of gas.