141–150 of 162 posts
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Naked singletons in your locality.
Alright, who's been messing with the universal gravitational constant and making it not universal? No one's in trouble, I just want to know.
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There are multiple independent observations pointing toward dark matter: 1. Galaxy rotation curves. 2. Galaxy cluster mass measurements from gravitational lenses and infrared. 3. Cosmic Microwave Background models (mass measurements from inhomogeneities that correspond to acoustic waves, for eg). MOND only explains 1. Dark matter accounts for all 3. Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed.
> Only catch is that it hasnt been directly observed. Ok, so... why do people take it seriously as a concept? Occam's razor would point towards some general misunderstanding on which we have no evidence to reasonably speculate a cause.
One could also argue that on the one hand you need just one concept (dark matter) to explain three phenomena (galaxy rotation curves, gravitational lensing, CMBR), and the "general misunderstanding" might need to have three aspects to make it explain all three things, making it more complex.
Occam's razor is a good guiding principle, but in some cases, it's really hard to compare the complexity of competing theories. My favorite example of this is the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In some sense, it's really simple, the wave function just follows the Schrödinger equation. In another sense, it implicitly postulates the existence of many parallel worlds, which you can count as a quasi-infinite complexity penalty, or you can shrug and say it's not a big deal, the theory says the parallel worlds aren't observable, so there is nothing wrong with postulating them. There's no objective way to decide that.
If you follow Sabine Hossenfelder's channel, she has a MONDOmeter. With MOND (modified Newtonian gravity) on one side and dark matter on the other side. As new papers come out the needle goes back and forth, and I guess that she will make a new video if she hasn't already, with the needle moving one step towards dark matter. I find it interesting how it doesn't seem to settle. Dark matter is still the favorite, but t…
Dark Matter : supposedly makes up a big amount of the mass of the universe, but cant be seen, does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Also it can 'pass through' other normal matter, and other dark matter. It's basically magic aka not actually real, just something in vogue to pretend is real at the present moment.
Why do you say that like it's obviously ridicule or impossible? Neutrinos do exist and they fit all these criteria. We just know they're not dark matter (or at least not all of it) because they're not heavy enough (and some other things).
Don't try to rely on intuition when thinking about particles, there's no reason for evolution to make what happens at quantum scale or relativistic scale intuitive to us.
If you follow Sabine Hossenfelder's channel, she has a MONDOmeter. With MOND (modified Newtonian gravity) on one side and dark matter on the other side. As new papers come out the needle goes back and forth, and I guess that she will make a new video if she hasn't already, with the needle moving one step towards dark matter. I find it interesting how it doesn't seem to settle. Dark matter is still the favorite, but t…
It's funny how for MOND we cant accept that it has some unknowns yet but we are more than willing to accept the FULL UNKNOWN Dark Matter. it's easy. put "Dark" in front of something and you don't have to explain it at all, no matter that something else explains at least 60-70% instead of 0.
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I feel compelled to point out that (a)ether was the simplest answer until we confirmed that space is a vacuum and that light can travel in the absence of a medium.
aether was not the simplest explanation since it was disproved by Michelson-Morley experiment. Nothing as of now yet has disproved Dark matter as thoroughly.
Aether: observations show lack of aether so we update the theory that makes aether unnecessary.
Dark matter: observations show lack of observable matter so we keep hunting for decades locating it. The aether analogue would have been to continue to look for dark aether. Dark matter is more like god of gaps. We can 'darkify' any theory that does not fit empirical evidence.
It's hard to tell now which leans more towards the more correct theory.
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If it had failed it would've been a top science news. Every scientist dreams about the day when they're mentioned as "(...)'s experiment puts Newton's law of gravity in jeopardy."
Would it? Or would it be treated as an errant experiment by either the journal or the experimentalists themselves, foregoing publishing until they had a result that was better aligned with established norms? Rightly or wrongly, I expect that stakeholders would tend to invoke Sagan’s ECREE over the course of the publication process.
When I see dark matter in the news I'm always reminded of the story of Vulcan. In the 1800s, detailed observations of the planet Mercury showed that its orbit was slightly different than Newtonian mechanics predicted-- a difference of about 43 arcseconds per century. The study was rigorous enough to rule out any observation errors. Le Verrier, the astronomer who made these observations, wondered how to explain the di…
If you follow Sabine Hossenfelder's channel, she has a MONDOmeter. With MOND (modified Newtonian gravity) on one side and dark matter on the other side. As new papers come out the needle goes back and forth, and I guess that she will make a new video if she hasn't already, with the needle moving one step towards dark matter. I find it interesting how it doesn't seem to settle. Dark matter is still the favorite, but t…
Dark Matter : supposedly makes up a big amount of the mass of the universe, but cant be seen, does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Also it can 'pass through' other normal matter, and other dark matter. It's basically magic aka not actually real, just something in vogue to pretend is real at the present moment.