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A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

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Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#21

Post by laretluval »

douche wrote: post #19
hwillis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a misunderstanding of the problems and evidence of dark matter: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/6488wb/i_dont_want_t...

I'm not seeing anything there that isn't a handwavey explanation for "reality doesn't match the models, so DARK MATTER!"

It's still a nontrivial observation that the equations can be corrected to account for reality most simply by adding a term for unseen matter (rather than some factor or some other mathematical operation).

Maybe the term doesn't have a straightforward physical explanation but there's a long history of introducing math without any corresponding mechanistic explanation---this is what gravity itself was until general relativity, nothing more than an inexplicable inverse-square attractive force.

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#22

Post by pishpash »

solotronics wrote: post #6

the non light emitting mass could be Dyson spheres of space based computers

I think you got caught up by the misnaming of 'dark matter'. It's better to think of it as 'transparent matter'. It's non-interacting, not like a Dyson sphere which would obviously be interacting e.g. from it blocking what's behind it even if it itself makes no emissions.

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#23

Post by wayn3 »

roywiggins wrote: post #20
wayn3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly what dark matter is. Journalism misleads people very hard about physics research. Physicists dont run around claiming they've observed dark matter. That's the wrong direction. Physics has a problem with gravity because some things don't behave in such a way that makes theory agree with observation. Since we are talking about gravity here, we call the thing we are observing "matter". Simply because…

But dark matter is theorized to he a particle that we haven't observed yet, which sounds like "matter" to me. The specific idea to fix up the discrepancies is, there are huge clouds of invisible particles. There are competing theories on what sort of particle they might be, but dark matter theories predict that these particles are out there.

again, thats what theoretical physicists do. Someone makes a weird observation and your theory is left with a hole. You try to plug it.

They don't preach these things. Physicists don't run around preaching unprovable holy grail theories. They just make something up. Out of nothing. Because its their job. They need to come up with falsifiable theories that can be verified in lab experiments.

In order to do so, they HAVE TO hypothesize something. They can't just say "err dark matter right?". They have to say "there could be a particle with these properties, a mass of roughly X, producing a cross-section of Y when bombarded with tau-leptons etc.". That's just the scientific method.

Any physicist who postulates particles does that from a position of "it probably doesn't exist". The same way when you measure something to be faster than the speed of light, you assume that a cable is broken.

Then some journalist comes around saying "lol paper says weird particle exists, scientists are whack". That's annoying. But it happens.

If journalists wrote about CS the way they write about physics, the next time someone loses 2 BTC from their wallet, they'd claim that thats hard evidence of quantum computers being invented by north korea. Hypothetically plausible but as outlandish as permissible by reality.

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#24

Post by kradem »

kobeya wrote: post #8
Lordarminius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...But, dark matter isn't something to be denied. Because it isn't understood yet, to the point where we can doubt its existence.... There is something not quite right with your logic and I am struggling to identify what it is :/

He expressed it badly. The point I think he is trying to say is that dark matter can be neither proven nor disproven at this time with the information available. An intellectually honest person should remain open to both possibilities. You can say "I am not convinced of the dark matter hypothesis." But unless you have information the rest of us do not, you can't really say "I deny the dark matter hypothesis could be…

I [too] don't think it's about bad wording, yet pure bad logic.

The article is positioned on the principle that was imagined based on wrong assumtions of other theory and which acceptance will dissmiss the other theory.

I'm not even being close to think of being positioned on a side there, but afaic one could easily take one in this subthread.

TL; DR yep, dark matter could be denied no matter of the state of its understanding - just bring the better explanation of those irregularities its existence explains!

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#26

Post by z92 »

solotronics wrote: post #6

the non light emitting mass could be Dyson spheres of space based computers

A dyson sphere would block the light of stars sitting behind it on straight line of sight from us. That doesn't happen with dark matters. It's transparent. Unlike dyson sphere.

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#27

Post by olavk »

douche wrote: post #9

Dark matter appears, to a layman with some historical knowledge, as nothing more than modern day epicycles. When we can't explain something with the models we have, and have to invent magic terms to balance the equations, that indicates that we really don't know what the fuck is going on.

There was/is nothing magic about epicycles. Epicycles was part of a model which described the movement of the planets. Now we have better and more precise model, but that does not mean epicycles was "magic".

There is nothing magic about the the word "dark matter" either. Yes indeed it describe a phenomen we don't understand, this does not mean it is magic.

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#28

Post by electrograv »

laretluval wrote: post #21
douche wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing anything there that isn't a handwavey explanation for "reality doesn't match the models, so DARK MATTER!"

It's still a nontrivial observation that the equations can be corrected to account for reality most simply by adding a term for unseen matter (rather than some factor or some other mathematical operation). Maybe the term doesn't have a straightforward physical explanation but there's a long history of introducing math without any corresponding mechanistic explanation---this is what gravity itself was until general re…

If a Newtonian model of gravity doesn't "explain" gravity, then neither does general relativity. These are all different models of reality with different levels of model complexity and predictive accuracy, but there's no fundamentally binary difference between them in their power of "explanation" etc.

So new models like "dark matter" or "MOND" are all just different models that model observations better than prior theories but currently have the problem of being difficult to unify with the rest of theoretical physics.

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#29

Post by TillE »

olavk wrote: post #27
douche wrote: post #9

Dark matter appears, to a layman with some historical knowledge, as nothing more than modern day epicycles. When we can't explain something with the models we have, and have to invent magic terms to balance the equations, that indicates that we really don't know what the fuck is going on.

There was/is nothing magic about epicycles. Epicycles was part of a model which described the movement of the planets. Now we have better and more precise model, but that does not mean epicycles was "magic". There is nothing magic about the the word "dark matter" either. Yes indeed it describe a phenomen we don't understand, this does not mean it is magic.

Epicycles were wrong. They were an incorrect theory attempting to fit the math.

Re: A Physicist Who Denies Dark Matter

#30

Post by [deleted] »

Lordarminius wrote: post #5
shakna wrote: post #2

The title is irritating. This is an interview with Milgrom, covering the man more than MOND. But, dark matter isn't something to be denied. Because it isn't understood yet, to the point where we can doubt its existence. We don't have all the answers yet, where denial rejects something as patently false. But, "The man who has an alternative to Dark Matter", is a far less attractive title for those clicks.

> ...But, dark matter isn't something to be denied. Because it isn't understood yet, to the point where we can doubt its existence.... There is something not quite right with your logic and I am struggling to identify what it is :/

[deleted]
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