A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
wired.co.uk
A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
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Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#2Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#3Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.
My instinct says this as well. "My equation isn't balancing, there must be something sitting on the seesaw!"
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#4Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.
To be fair, physicists are quite aware of that. I'm no expert but it seems to me that theories that remove the need for dark energy are researched, and welcomed rather than mocked. Nobody is satisfied with this dark matter/energy need (especially when we know for a fact that our current fundamental theories are wrong)
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#5Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.
Given how many laymen love to make this comment on every dark matter article, I wish even a few mentioned the opposite historical anecdote: neutrinos were originally postulated as invisible essentially non-interacting particles who's only functional role, at the time, was to conserve momentum and energy in interactions where it seemed to be violated. And that turned out to be correct.
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#6Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.
Big difference between dark matter and ether: Ether was required conceptually, because people could not conceive of a wave of light without a medium for it to propagate in. Getting rid of ether required a huge conceptual leap, and so the idea of ether hung around longer than it should have. As a mistaken concept, ether is a "sticky" in that it has intuitive appeal and that makes it dangerous.
It wouldn't require the same kind of conceptual leap to get rid of dark matter, though. Either there's stuff there we can't measure as of 2018, or we'll need a better theory of gravity. Many physicists recognize dark matter as a hack and hold on to it only because it's the best guess we currently have. Dark matter isn't "sticky": people would rather get rid of it than keep it!
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#7Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.
To be fair, physicists are quite aware of that. I'm no expert but it seems to me that theories that remove the need for dark energy are researched, and welcomed rather than mocked. Nobody is satisfied with this dark matter/energy need (especially when we know for a fact that our current fundamental theories are wrong)
The primary difference between the scientific method and religion / dogma
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#8Forgive my utter ignorance but, what if black holes are not "holes" but solid spheres of massive density? There you may have your dark matter to boot.
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#9Forgive my utter ignorance but, what if black holes are not "holes" but solid spheres of massive density? There you may have your dark matter to boot.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181002102723.h...
“Based on a statistical analysis of 740 of the brightest supernovas discovered as of 2014, and the fact that none of them appear to be magnified or brightened by hidden black hole "gravitational lenses," the researchers concluded that primordial black holes can make up no more than about 40 percent of the dark matter in the universe. Primordial black holes could only have been created within the first milliseconds of the Big Bang as regions of the universe with a concentrated mass tens or hundreds of times that of the sun collapsed into objects a hundred kilometers across.”
“An as-yet unpublished reanalysis by the same team using an updated list of 1,048 supernovas cuts the limit in half, to a maximum of about 23 percent, further slamming the door on the dark matter-black hole proposal.”
Re: A tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
#10Dark matter/energy always sounds like a restatement of aether - unknowable and unreachable, conceived to fill gaps in the knowledge of the period. I'm probably wrong, but the parallels are strong.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-astronomers-wish-...
"Among the general public, people compare it to the aether, phlogiston, or epicycles. Yet almost all astronomers are certain: dark matter and dark energy exist"
"When someone puts forth the hypothesis that “dark matter and/or dark energy doesn’t exist,” the onus is on them to answer the implicit question, “okay, then what replaces General Relativity as your theory of gravity to explain the entire Universe?” As gravitational wave astronomy has further confirmed Einstein’s greatest theory even more spectacularly, even many of the fringe alternatives to General Relativity have fallen away. The way it stands now, there are no theories that exist that successfully do away with dark matter and dark energy and still explain everything that we see. Until there are, there are no real alternatives to the modern picture that deserve to be taken seriously."
For all the details read the rest of the article.