Column Cosmology Physicists’ devotion to symmetry has led them astray before If dark matter WIMPs are mythical, they join the ancient idea that the planets moved in circles By Tom Siegfried Contributing Correspondent March 31, 2021 at 6:00 am In ancient Greece, Aristotle deduced the existence of an exotic form of matter in space based on the circular symmetry of celestial motion, a symmetry preserved in the Ptolemaic model of planets orbiting the Earth in a combination of circular motions.