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Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

blogs.scientificamerican.com

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#51
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to cosmology, our observations have been using light, because that's what has traveled in space. It is pretty obviously not that useful to ask a dog to sniff the sky or a homing pidgeon to navigate to Alpha Centauri, or something. We've obviously long since passed using only the visible spectrum. We also recently added gravitational wave detection to our repertoire. I seriously doubt any animals out the…

About this: " It is pretty obviously not that useful to ask a dog to sniff the sky or a homing pidgeon to navigate to Alpha Centauri, or something. " That example might be bad, but there are others that are valid. For instance, in healthy human women, the menstruation cycle seems to be the exact length of the moon's orbit. Is that a coincidence, or do human bodies have a way of gaining data from the moon? If so, what…

> For instance, in healthy human women, the menstruation cycle seems to be the exact length of the moon's orbit.

That seems to be absolute coincidence. If there was a value in syncing to the lunar cycle it would stand to reason there would be a synchronization with the characteristics of the lunar cycle - ie ovulation on the 14th day or something. As it is, there is no link between when a woman's cycle and the lunar cycle begin, they just happen to occur with the same (ugh) period. I don't know what tidal forces women could be keying into that would result in totally seperate start and end dates.

It's also important to note the 28 days falls on the average, but the range is anywhere from 21 to 35 days for normal women. It's in no way the exact length of the moon's orbit.

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. Yes, we're seeing gravity waves and radio waves and gamma rays and near infrared and millimeter wave and neutrinos, and maybe a few others that I forget. We're way past human senses, or any animals. And yet I keep thinking of a deaf species that runs across Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. They can put an oscilloscope on the pressure waves in the air, so they can "see" what's going on. They can study the diffe…

Access to higher dimensions? Aliens shaking their heads as we waste enormous amounts of energy to travel through R3 in a straight line instead of taking a short walk in R7.

This makes me think of a quote on humans and science.

Italo Calvino said, "science interests me precisely because of my efforts to escape anthropomorphic knowledge; at the same time, however, I'm convinced that our imagination can only be anthropomorphic".

I'm not sure how to take in this quote - I wonder where humans stand in the progression of science.

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#53
I've never been a fan of Dark Matter. Not all galaxies have dark matter, but only incredibly diffuse galaxies don't have it[0]. Doesn't that mean that the density of matter in a galaxy is what gives rise to "faster rotations/more gravity", and not just the total matter irrespective of its galactic density?

Furthermore, the "Bullet Cluster" example is telling. Apparently, the extra mass stuck around the more dense part of the galaxy, and not in the less dense gas cloud that resulted from the collision. Again, only the dense parts of this cluster exhibit "faster rotations/more gravity".

So to me, this is terribly un-compelling. So there's a magic invisible matter that just so happens to only coalesce around dense galaxies/galactic areas and never around sparse ones.

[0] http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/03/ghostly-galaxy-without...

edit: s/no matter/irrespective of (poor use of the homonym "matter")

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#54
@astro123

There’s a tautology in your critique. You’re attempting to suggest that there is evidence for dark matter. There isn’t. Dark matter is a theory, one that has not yet produced empirical evidence to support it (& perhaps cannot ever do so.)

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#55
@astro123 Sorry my comment uploaded before I was done. It is an error to state that there is evidence for dark matter. There is no evidence for it other than that as a hypothesis it adds support to a larger cosmological theory; that of the so-called Big Bang. But that is basically a circle in the proof. A tautology.

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#56
@astro123

The following excerpt is the crux of the author’s argument regarding DM, & it points to the dark elephant in the room that a lot of physicists are bothered by but don’t want to discuss:

“It's perhaps worth stopping to ask why astrophysicists hypothesize dark matter to be everywhere in the universe? The answer lies in a peculiar feature of cosmological physics that is not often remarked. For a crucial function of theories such as dark matter, dark energy and inflation, which each in its own way is tied to the big bang paradigm, is not to describe known empirical phenomena but rather to maintain the mathematical coherence of the framework itself while accounting for discrepant observations. Fundamentally, they are names for something that must exist insofar as the framework is assumed to be universally valid.”

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#57
post #55

@astro123 Sorry my comment uploaded before I was done. It is an error to state that there is evidence for dark matter. There is no evidence for it other than that as a hypothesis it adds support to a larger cosmological theory; that of the so-called Big Bang. But that is basically a circle in the proof. A tautology.

What about the Bullet Cluster?

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#58

I'm a grad student working on cosmology, and while I agree there is a lot of work still to do (we don't know what 95% of the matter that makes up the universe is!), I disagree with a lot of what the author says. > Another recent probe found galaxies inconsistent with the theory of dark matter, which posits this hypothetical substance to be everywhere. We have found evidence of a few galaxies without DM. But most gala…

I've rarely seen more spectacular agreements with a theory than those of a Lambda-CDM fit of Planck's 2015 data. That can't be wrong (but as I've never worked on it, this statement is just some guy's personal impression based on his physics instinct). What's your take on those results?

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#59
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to cosmology, our observations have been using light, because that's what has traveled in space. It is pretty obviously not that useful to ask a dog to sniff the sky or a homing pidgeon to navigate to Alpha Centauri, or something. We've obviously long since passed using only the visible spectrum. We also recently added gravitational wave detection to our repertoire. I seriously doubt any animals out the…

About this: " It is pretty obviously not that useful to ask a dog to sniff the sky or a homing pidgeon to navigate to Alpha Centauri, or something. " That example might be bad, but there are others that are valid. For instance, in healthy human women, the menstruation cycle seems to be the exact length of the moon's orbit. Is that a coincidence, or do human bodies have a way of gaining data from the moon? If so, what…

> Maybe the mechanism is as simple as a springy protein that can absorb tidal forces and convert it to an information signal.

Tidal forces don't have periodicity of a month, but change twice a day:

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides...

"High tides occur 12 hours and 25 minutes apart. It takes six hours and 12.5 minutes for the water at the shore to go from high to low, or from low to high."

To detect the tidal forces in some organism that can't sample the sea level you'd need an organism of an immense size, not something of the size of any animal on the plant today.

> There are potentially a lot we can learn about the universe by making simple observations here on Earth.

We are making observations, but they aren't simple anymore.

It started with simpler methods than today's: there were ancient Greeks (more than 2000 years ago!) who correctly estimated the diameter of Earth and then also quite correctly calculated the distance of Earth to the moon, who haven't had too precise instruments. E.g. Hipparchus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus#Orbit_of_the_Moon

"According to Pappus, he found a least distance of 62, a mean of 67 1⁄3, and consequently a greatest distance of 72 2⁄3 Earth radii. With this method, as the parallax of the Sun decreases (i.e., its distance increases), the minimum limit for the mean distance is 59 Earth radii – exactly the mean distance that Ptolemy later derived."

We today precisely measure that distance to be 60.32 Earth radii.

Think about that it was more than 100 years before that famous "birth", that is, at least 120 years BC!

Still the bigger advances started when we used the instruments that enabled us to capture more signal than what just our senses without the instruments, or with the most primitive instruments, would. The first was Galileo's use of telescope to discover:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_moons

Re: Cosmology Has Some Big Problems

#60
post #54

@astro123 There’s a tautology in your critique. You’re attempting to suggest that there is evidence for dark matter. There isn’t. Dark matter is a theory, one that has not yet produced empirical evidence to support it (& perhaps cannot ever do so.)

If you want to reply to a comment, please click the "reply" button below that comment, rather than starting a new comment thread. @ doesn't do anything here.
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