Slashdot Mirror
What If Dark Matter Really Doesn't Exist?
sonar67 writes "According to The Economist: 'It was beautiful, complex and wrong. In 150AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria published his theory of epicycles--the idea that the moon, the sun and the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were moving in circles around the Earth. This theory explained the motion of celestial objects to an astonishing degree of precision. It was, however, what computer programmers call a kludge: a dirty, inelegant solution. Some 1,500 years later, Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, replaced the whole complex edifice with three simple laws. Some people think modern astronomy is based on a kludge similar to Ptolemy's. At the moment, the received wisdom is that the obvious stuff in the universe--stars, planets, gas clouds and so on--is actually only 4% of its total content. About another quarter is so-called cold, dark matter, which is made of different particles from the familiar sort of matter, and can interact with the latter only via gravity. The remaining 70% is even stranger. It is known as dark energy, and acts to push the universe apart. However, the existence of cold, dark matter and dark energy has to be inferred from their effects on the visible, familiar stuff. If something else is actually causing those effects, the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.'"
So what if it doesn't really exist? We know very little about anything anyway. Trying to find a unified explanation via "String Theory" is spotty at best but at least it "helps".
What's the difference if dark-matter is really just another false theory? In the long run it's not going to make a whole heck of a lot of difference.
...what if we don't really exist?
Yes, but what does the Bible say on it?
If something else is actually causing those effects, the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.
As it should.
-Colin
Much like a dog staring at a shiny object, I'm fascinated by this but I don't understand it.
Let me see, changing the process about how galaxy clusters (which are extremely complex phenomena) are LESS disturbing than bringing in multiple forms of unexplanied forms of basic substances and forces into our fundamental model of the universe?
This is the part I do not understand.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
It's a theory. Theories can be wrong.
Jedi don't stand a chance.
HAD
Then we're screwed. Life is doomed to die out with the heat death of the universe. We won't go with a bang, but with a whimper...
Otherwise we'd be flying all over the place.
The remaining 70% is even stranger. It is known as dark energy, and acts to push the universe apart.
It will be interesting to see how scientists who have staked their entire careers upon the existence of dark matter would react to the discovery that it does not in fact exist. Ideally an invalid theory is dropped, and a new, more "correct" theory is created. However, I have a feeling that a lot of people have invested too much time and effort into dark matter to let it go without some serious evidence.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
You can't see it, anyway. It's too dark!
Actually, with Einstein's relativity, doesn't Ptolemy's theories hold true? Everything is relative to a point of view?
Sorry I didn't ask this question in Modern Physics's class. It was a morning class, and I was sleeping.
Anyone who's read a Brief History of Time would know that any theory that describes something accurately is pretty valid. Whether or not it's elegant is another matter. Most Physicists believe that God created the laws of physics to be elegant and try to iron our the complexities of their theories. If dark matter doesn't exist it pokes a rather large hole in things but going under such an assumption may lead to a more elegant picture of how the universe began, and the nature of matter etc...
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
are we in trouble or something? Is the universe going to collapse next week or what?
...but doesn't String Theory tend to suggest that "dark matter" isn't actually dark matter, but instead is gravitation bleeding from other universes? The same theory also explains why gravity in this universe is so weak. Because most of it bleeds of into other universes via the higher dimensions, it's weak enough for you and I to move our limbs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I couldn't be bothered with the article but I think I probably agree with this guy, not those other guys.
Are planes going to drop from the sky? Will we be thrown out of orbit? This sounds like the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs floats on air because he never studied the laws of gravity (I know I've probably got the reference wrong, but you get the idea).
Your experiment fits the model, or it doesn't. If it doesn't then one or both need to be tweaked, or scrapped.
In Britain it's called His Dark Materials. Our supply of asterisks dissapeared along with our dentists
We don't understand something fully? Wow... that's about as brilliant as deciding to cut my sandwich in triangles instead of in squares.
The truth is this. We have such a little understanding of actually governing laws that we can't begin to fathom it. However, that doesn't stop us in progression to learning. Just because this theory might not be right (and probably isn't) doesn't mean we are any less an idiotic species. We've been working on these theories for many millenia. One of them turning out to be wrong won't be a surprise... it's a probability. Without the wrong hypthosesis, we can never stumble onto the correct ones. Its Edison's, "Every time I fail, I know one more way how to NOT build it" idea.
Since we know Dark Suckers aren't useless, dark matter must exist.
Q.E.D.
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
Woody Allen.
"What If Dark Matter Really Doesn't Exist?"
Then wait for Star Trek to invent a new theory.
"Derp de derp."
...then 99.9999999% of the world won't notice. But it will be on CNN anyways.
It would be nice to find a better form of energy transportation. Electricity is lossy and causes interference, electromagnetic radiation is hard to contain. If we could find a "purer" form of moving energy, efficiency would dramatically increase. Also, if our universe is so loaded with energy, why do we have to resort to breaking chemical bonds in oil/coal and splitting uranium for energy?
Well, we'd have star ship fuel and a poop machine that makes dark matter.
Blogzine.net
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
A friend of mine is doing his master's thesis on a theory that rather more elegantly explains the phenomenon without having to resort to dark matter, but unfortunately I don't understand enough of physics to know if he's right or not. Something about gravity. (I know, I know....in physics, that really narrows it down, since there's so little about gravity out there...) In any event, I suspect we will find something a little more elegant, just like the article said, because dark matter sounds......well, silly.
-1, "1337" speak
Does anyone kwow whether a Grand Unified Theory would help this problem? I can see how it would explain these unseen forces but from what I've heard, proposed GUTs don't really deal with forcse other than EM, Gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Would a GUT help to explain the force that is currently said to be caused by dark matter? Thanks.
The parent post is a verbatim copy from the article after the introductory sentence. It is not insightful, but redundant.
I have read half of this man's short book "a Brief History of Time", and he did not claim, but discussed a theoretical possibility that if this energy pushing the universe outward is moving at a decreasing speed, the trend would eventually reverse and the universe would begin to collapse. As of right now, researchers have determined that the universe is still expanding, if my memory serves me correctly.
[Please sign here]
so let me get this straight... the economist is a reliable source for news about astrophysics? I guess i should just read bash.org then for news about politics...
All of this sounds like the core setting of a new Final Fantasy game. I can see it now: the effeminate antagonist finds a way to control this dark matter/energy and threathens to destroy the world, then the spiked-hair, badly dressed hero comes to destroy that antagonist, who happens to be his former friend. Insanity, stupid names and buxon girls ensue.
Wasn't the missing mass accounted for with Dyson spheres?
There seem to be growing "hints" that something is wrong with current theories about the very nature and behavior of gravity. This includes alleged dark matter that cannot be identitied, planetary space probes with slight deviations from expected sun "pull" [1], and the fact that there is no identifiable "negative" gravity while the other forces do have negative values or particles.
[1] It was originally thought that heat generated from nuclear fuel cells was "pushing" the probes, but this was mostly ruled out because the heat lessens over time, but the pull was constant.
Table-ized A.I.
An open universe, that is, one where spacetime doesn't contract back into a singularity (Big Bang), implies a fundamentally different spacetime geometry that the one of a Closed Universe.
Open Universe is Hyperbolic (Infinite)
A Closed Universe is Spheric (Finite but boundaryless)
Saavik: "Protomatter. An unstable substance which every ethical scientist in the galaxy has denounced as dangerously unpredictable."
David: "But it was the only way to solve certain problems."
Is not to figure out what it isn't if we are wrong but really what not to do if it turns out that we aren't right. That is the nature of Physics.
(Yes, I know what a GUT really is. This post is what's known as a "bad joke". And some would call it a GUTH instead of a GUT, though.... :-)
you were a crow.
Science has been progressing on the basis of constantly proving theories as kludges and bringing about something newer and more real. Imagine if our currently held view was true (before Standard Model), we will never be able to travel faster than light, we'll never harness energy bigger than a hydrogen bomb, we'll never really travel far beyond the Solar system, travel back in time etc.
Before the cannon was invented everyone thought the arrow was the greatest weapon, and few could really predict the power of "Little Boy" on Hiroshima. Quantum Mechanics has given us so much hope, of unknown and unexplainable realities, and that far more is possible than we first thought. It means the road before us is much longer, but far more interesting. I'd prefer it that way.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Dark matter had better exist- otherwise, I've wasted a hell of a lot of money on that dark matter damage insurance I bought a couple years back...
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
Then I can walk down the hall in the middle of the night without fear of stepping on my little boy's building blocks.
Namaste
I once had the idea of building a moving model of the solar system with the Earth placed on the central static position, and with the rest of the celestial objects moving as they should.
;)
From our perspective *here*, yes, everything is going around us.
It's the next best thing to building a flat-earth model!
if we could figure out a way to add cream to the dark matter..
Jeoin
I recently picked up Elegant Universe after a colleague of mine recommended it. I am only 75-100 pages into the book and its a pretty intense read. I probably have to start it all over again 'coz there is a lot of stuff that just doesn't make sense the first time round though. Me not so smart, eh?
Free XBox, PS2
Until they can explain what magnetism and gravity is and how it's created.. and not just that "it's there.. we can measure it".. then there's no chance in hell that anyone can explain the rest..
It's like the damn superstring theory. Superstring doesn't really make any decent predictions. It does explain things that we could never observe, thus It's not testable. (And the standard model has a pretty decent working description of what we do see already.)
Dark Matter to me is a fudge factor created to explain by cosmolgist's math is off. It would be like me inventing "virtual customers" to explain shrinkage at a store.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
. . . the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.
Does that mean that my Login/Password won't work anymore?
Stuff that matters.
Yep, this is kind of like there not being any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It doesn't matter that they don't exist, because we did the right thing anyway. See -- so even if dark matter doesn't exist, it's OK for scientists to invade space and look for it. Space will be better off anyway ; )
Doesn't this notion of a kludge apply to all of physics at any point in time though? Someone creates a theory for something which is backed up by current knowledge and experimental evidence. That's all it is though - at some point later when some new piece of knowledge appears, things can change dramatically and a whole new theory is born.
I've always wanted someone who was really good at physics to create a book that explained common phenomena like gravity, electricity or light in radical new ways but was able to back it up and cover all the angles with solid theory.
anyway? My first experience with Dark Matter and Energy was all that it was "well, things are going faster and so people just postulated this idea." I wasn't told that anyone really believed in it (unlike terracentrism or whatnot).
My prof mentioned it was like that Far Side where it has the equation on the chalkboard that said "Here a miracle occurs".
What is music when you despise all sound?
From the article:
"...launched in 2001 by NASA, America's space agency."
Excuse me? 10yrolds in all but the most backward countries know what NASA is. Just who does the Economist think it's target audience is?
There is some intriguing evidence of the existence of strange quark matter, a dark matter candidate, which we've recently published in the Bulletine of the Seismological Society of America. as previously discussed on /.
Dark Matter will be taught to school children as the Aether of 21st century science.
There is also a theory that does not require any other matter or energy to account for the structure of the universe. The Electric Universe This is build on the work of Halton Arp who believes the is an error in our use of redshift to determine the distance of objects and likewise their age, and the work of plasma physicists who have their own theory about things
But what if dark matter/energy does exist?
We already know that 90% of everything we actually can see is crap. Think of how much crap we theoretically have yet to discover!?
Makes you think, or something.
668.5
...but theories generally aren't wrong. I think you mean a hypothesis, right ?
There goes my senior thesis!
There's nothing wrong with a kludge, aesthetics aside. Every evolving line of discovery needs it's necessarily flimsy connectors of reason. It's only when we allow our pride/ignorance/greed etc. to deny that the kludge is just a kludge: this is where mistakes are made, and thus we fail to evolve.
The fact that the universe may not boil down to 3 categories of matter is not earth-shattering. If we discover something to the contrary we must look at it plainly.
The problem with kludges is that it's only a kludge when it's a theory that is revealed to be inherently flawed. Before this realisation, it's just the best theory we have at our disposal. Just because something is revealed to be inelegant doesn't mean it wasn't serviceable, or simply the limit of our reason at the time it was presented.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
The problem with the article is that CMB is only one of the ways to verify the existance of Dark Matter. The reason why Dark Matter was proposed was because of the rotational velocity of stars in galaxies. Stars orbit galaxies at the wrong speed given the matter we see. Dark Matter "Halos" are used to explain why the speeds don't add up. CMB only indirectly is used to prove the existance of Dark Matter. The measurements only really measure how "clumpy" the universe was right after the Big Bang.
Everyone knows that dark matter is all the alternate dimensions and source of supernatural powers. Fox Mulder believes me...
The term 'Dark Matter' refers to all celestial matter that does not radiate to a significant degree rendering it 'invisible' from this distance at which we view it.
The existence of dark matter should be obvious, since we know of the existance of numerous asteroids in our own solar system, there should be many throughout the universe, but since they don't radiate energy we are unable to see them and thus cannot account for how much mass they contribute. Astronomers, by examining the change in the rate of expansion of the universe (a tricky prospect, prone to errors that I do not completely understand) it is believed that such 'dark matter' makes up roughly 70% of all mass in the universe. Which means that we cannot account for 70% of mass because we cannot see it.
Even stars fall into the category of dark matter, old dead stars, halo stars in other galaxies (those in a sphere around galaxies which we have only recently confirmed exist around our own galaxy) and likely many other astronomical bodies exist that we simply have not observed.
Dark matter has too many connotations in lay-man's speech that are overly misleading. I'm sorry, but Star Trek did not 'get it right' by any stretch.
This is not a sig.
I don't think what Dr. Shanks is proposing is as big of a change as that article makes it out to be. Dark energy has always been a kludge of sorts. He is proposing a theory to define this dark energy factor/constant. It does not radically change the Big Bang Theory, rather it adds to it.
------------
Create a WAP server
The keynote speaker at the 2003 SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego was the British astrophysicist Anthony Lasenby. He claimed that a new kind of unified Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry could explain acceleration and deceleration in the Big Bang. He was talking at SIGGRAPH because his new unification of geometry is supposed to be more elegant for computer graphics modeling than the current homogeneous coordinates now used. He wrote a book about the geometry. But I have been unable to find a paper relating to the cosmological application on the web.
This is not the first time geometry has been used to unify and simplify physics. Previous examples are Galilean coordinates, special relativity, and general relativity.
Actually, most Physicists don't believe in God.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Entire careers in physics are going straight down the shitter because of dark matter, because it doesn't exist. From the very first time I read about it, I thought "Geez, this sounds like a 3 year old trying to cover up the fact that he doesn't KNOW the reason why". I really think that's what it comes down to. Very smart people not wanting to admit that they have no idea why they can't explain the lack of visible matter in relation to the effects of gravity.
It's one thing to predict a phenomena without being able to immiedietly prove it. Proof is usually found pretty soon. But kludge's are the black eye of science, and even really bright people can make them (remember Einstein and his cosmological constant?). I think Dark Matter will join that same heap, right on top of Steady State Theory, and it'll happen in my lifetime.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
ILLUMINATING....
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
then whoever said "always bet on black" lost some serious cash
Yeah.. there were invisible dog/bears and aliens with little zap guns and stuff. Had to put a trademark Hoffman Institute smack down on em too.
Stupid Alternity getting cancelled... First Dark Sun, then Dark Matter... screw this, I'm going to go play Cyberball.
So "The Economist" is running an article about how a theoretical framework in Physics may come crashing down?
Can it be that Economic theories have proven so certain and stable over the centuries there just isn't much to write about the possibility of an economic theory being subject to re-thinking?
All sigs should be as funny as possible, but no funnier.
Bringing this up without mentioning M.O.N.D. is irresponsible journalism. MOND (Modification of Newtonian Dymanics) is a theory that simply says that gravity 'decays' at a slightly different rate than expected over astronomical distances. The effects predicted by this theory are spot on to the observed effects that dark energy and matter try to explain.
I googled about found this link, but I first read about it in New Scientist about a year ago.
Shouldn't it be taken as a given that any theory not proved may in fact be completely wrong? Maybe the way things really work in the universe is simply beyond our ability to comprehend. So they do what any good scientist would do: create the theories which they can understand and attempt to improve them rather than just throwing our hands up and yelling "who the hell knows?". Is their a possibility they are wrong? Of course. But at least we can try to come up with theories that can explain things. When you find a better one let em know. Otherwise keep trying but don't be suprised if people are wrong.
Who says there is a simple solution anyway. As I have already stated maybe the secrets of the universe are just really really complex. 10,000 years ago we were still throwing sticks at wholly mammoths and living in caves. 1 million years ago we were as dumb as dirt, 1 million years from now maybe our decendents will say the same of us. It is arrogance to think that such primitive creatures as oursleves could fully grasp all the mysteries of the universe with our simple understanding of world around us (not to mention how boring it would be for our decendents if we figured everything out now.) To qoute Forbidden Planet: "The fool! To think the primitive H-brain could hold the secrets of the Krell!"
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
for some Star Trek episodes!
does it take to change dark matter?
None...apparently it never existed in the first place.
Thanks. Thank you. You've been a great crowd. Don't forget to tip your waitress.
The parent is either the most insightful thing ever posted, or the biggest bunch of doubletalk crap I've ever read.
Would someone please translate this and tell me what the hell is being said?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
The real problem is equating what we find mathematically with ideas that we can conceptualize. I remember reading a book(Hyperspace by Michu Kaku) about a "Unified Field Theory" that required 11 or so spatial dimmensions for all the mathematics to line up. The dificulty is that its hella confusing to try and conceptualize anything beyond 3 spacial dimensions. So, we are limited by our observational capacity to rationalize what numbers tell us. Dark/Exotic matter, Superstrings, multi-dimensional explanations of the Universe all are destined to innacuracy because of some inherent "flaw" in the design of humans, particularly relating to perception.
Mathematics can express with complete clarity a truth we have difficuly relating to our preception of reality.
If he's right, we're in for a bad time starting later this year.
This dark matter/dark energy stuff reminds me too much of the Jak and Daxter video game series.
Dark Eco anyone?
But Kepler's ideas saved so many line of code that it was
included in the next patch.
well, let's see here. 4% of postulated matter in the universe is known to exist. 96% of postulated matter in the universe is NOT known to exist. that's a fine fudge factor to have in a test, and might explain where budget figures come from in the government :-D
:-D
it certainly explains where a lot of my assignments come from at work, lol
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What if the ether in which light waves travel also didn't exist? Would the universe go dark?
In 120 years, people on the nerd chat system of that day, might laugh much about people believing in dark matter as people today laugh at the ether.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
At the risk of feeding the trolls...
No, Relativity (neither the Special nor General theory) says that "everything is relative". Special Relativity says that inertial motion is relative in flat spacetime (i.e. in the absence of gravity). This is another way of saying that all inertial coordinate reference frames are equivalent. (Special Relativity says more than that, namely that light propagates at the constant speed 'c' independent of the motion of its source. This is what separates Special Relativity from Galilean Relativity.) General Relativity says that *locally*, accelerated motion is equivalent to inertial motion in a gravitational field. (The "locally" part accounts for the fact that the gravitational field lines are not parallel, but converge on the gravitational source.)
What this boils down to is that circular motion is accelerated motion, not inertial motion, and is not simply relative, and spacetime is not flat surrounding bodies that planets orbit. So no, Relativity does not validate the epicycles theory.
Sometimes I feel like true Science has been mostly supplanted by the popular opinion of know-it-alls. That may sound harsh, but the resistence to change often seen in the scientific community is surprising.
:)
I imagine a true scientist would be thrilled if new discoveries replaced old theories. Isn't that the point of research, discussion, and exploration? Obviously there are many good scientists out there who agree, and work on the fringe like those discussed in the article. But the accepted "scientific establishment" really is closer to a religion these days than it is to science.
It's also a bit amusing that the article calls up the example of Ptolomy's epicircles... as if it is a rare black mark of error in scientific history. But error is the norm. Theories get replaced regularly. It would be surprising if our modern theories were _right_. I assume they are subtly wrong in some areas and greivously wrong in others.
That's what makes all this so fun
Cheers.
I may be showing a few gray hairs here, but revolutions in the sciences have occurred in my lifetime with scientists adapting fairly well. The first was the acceptance of Big bang in the late 1950s. Between 1927 and 1955 the Big Bang was just one of several "equally attractive alternative theories" which included the eternal-infinite universe and continuous creation of matter. The microwave background and the abundance of helium brought the big bang into the fore front.
In the 1960s the quark unification of subatomic particle became the predominate theory. Plus quantum electrodyanamics was verfied in high energy experiments to extremely high precision.
Also in the 1960s plate tectonics replaced an up-and-down explanation of geologic forces.
If the evidence suggests a more powerful theory, then physicists will revise their theories again. Science does not stay attached to incorrect theories (though block-headed individuals do).
I've always wondered how the scientific community would react if someone actually discovered a grand unified theory that works unbelievably well in every concievable respect, but is also unbelievably kludgey?
Basically: what if God had to debug and patch the universe over and over? What if it really, really is a big fat blob of kludgey spaghetti code?
How many scientists would accept that? Considering the value that scientists place on elegance, I don't think many would. In fact, I don't know if I would, myself!
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I wrote "Relativity [...] says", when I meant to say "No part of Relativity [...] says", or perhaps "Relativity [...] doesn't say", or something to that effect. You get the point.
I may be incredibly naive, but it has always bothered me that we insist on believing there are only 4 types of force in the Universe, each operating on widely different scales. Why can't there be other forces that operate on too large a scale or too small a scale for us to observe? Is the postulate of "dark force" effectively a theory about a fifth type of force?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
But I post, therefore I am.
What if slashdot doesn't exist? I can observe it's effects on my productivity - but what if it's actually something else? Like laziness?
My God, it's full of tacos...
- w
My sig sucks.
I would be thrilled to see such a widely accepted theory overturned! It needn't be dark matter, it could be anything. It would be great to witness a moment where pursuit of the best explanation triumphs over all the ego, dogmatism and self-interest rife the academic world. If those who are "wrong" can brush off their dented self-esteem and carry on then it will be a great day.
The crackpots who claim that "the establishment" never listens to new ideas will be left with several fewer legs to stand on.
(Incidentally, I don't blame scientists who have strong feelings in favour of the theories they have developed or are familiar with. It's perfectly natural, and there's not a lot we can do about it other then try to be as grown-up as possible.)
there are several types of dark matter that have been proposed. some are pretty exotic (rare, hard to observe particles) and some is pretty straight forward.
one type we know to exist merely from looking at the rotational velocity of galaxies. looking at the visible matter (stars) of a galaxy allows one to calculate it's visible mass. stuff on the outer rim of galaxies is moving far too fast to be held in place by the gravitational attraction of the visible matter alone. therefore there must be more mass in the galaxy than we can see. we can't see it so it's called dark matter. nothing exciting, no CMB measurements involved.
on a side note, the existence of anything we observe is inferred from it's effects on other things. when i see something, i infer that it exists from the photons that have bounced off of it and into my eye. gravity is just a valid observational tool as light is.
I won't understand any of the posts marked "Insightful" or "Interesting", so I'll just be reading the ones marked "Funny".
Life in Orange County
First claim: Analyses of the WMAP data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) show correlations with galaxy clusters that indicate the official analyses of the data are wrong. I find this highly unlikely. First, the effect of the hot gas in those galaxy clusters on the CMB is well known - it is called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and perturbs the spectrum in a well-known way. Second, the official fits to the WMAP data use a consensus cosmology model with about 12 free parameters to fit a dataset of more than a hundred points... beautifully. Third, the consensus cosmology itself has been built up out of a huge array of other observations (supernova distances; Big Bang nucleosynthesis; the "weighing" of galaxies and galaxy clusters; the age-dating of globular clusters), all of which were pointing to the existence of dark matter (even within our own Galaxy!) long before WMAP was even launched. Fourth, modern theories of particle physics also give us good reason to expect the existence of dark matter particles, independent of any astronomical observations whatsoever. So WMAP has simply been the final nail in the coffin, and anyone who wants to overturn dark matter and dark energy has a great deal of additional work ahead of them.
Second claim: Measurements of the masses (actually, the luminosities and temperatures) of high-redshift galaxy clusters indicate a high fraction of baryonic mass, removing one of the justifications for positing dark matter. This finding is even more fishy-sounding. To understand this, realize that the group in question has deliberately chosen the most-distant and therefore hardest-to-study clusters to study, and adopted temperature-mass relationships that are calibrated in the local universe (and may not apply at these great distances) in order to find that their sample differs from the standard model predictions. Without even bothering to list all the ways in which they might be wrong, let me simply state that even if they are right there is a lot of independent support for the dark matter + dark energy picture that neither of these groups is addressing.
Rather than distract yourself by trying to figure out why the carefully constructed consensus cosmology might be wrong, then, I think it is more useful to examine the remarkable ways in which it has been proven right in the last few years. Altogether it is truly a wonder of the modern world - even if it may at some point be shown inadequate to the universe we live in.
-renard
Same idea here. Kepler's laws reduced a nightmarish tangle of mathematics to a three line "program", if you will. Out current model of how various things in our universe interact requires a degree in cosmology to fully grasp, and a PhD to do any meaningful work in. Imagine reducing that to one chapter of a freshman-level physics or astronomy course.
Einstein's Special and General Relativity, Maxwell's Equations, and Schrodinger's Equation are all expressed in a few lines of equations. But you need extensive math and physics training to relate them to the familiar world around us. Simple doesn't mean easy. Theoretical physicists are already busily looking for theoretical formulations in which dark matter and dark energy arise naturally, rather than as a kluge. Of course, if the original observations turn out to have been misinterpreted, they may be wasting their time.
Professor: You see, virgon 6 was once filled with the super dense substance known as Dark Matter. Each Pound of which weighs over 10,000 pounds Leela: Wait, what about the animals? Professor: Well Dark matter is extremely valuable as starship fuel, thats why it was all mined out leaving the planet completely hollow Leela: Yes, but what about the animals? Professor: The whaaaa? Leela: The animals! Professor: I didn't say anything about animals. Now it seems the planet will collapse in 3 days. Incidentally, this will kill all the animals.
Relativity holds between non-accelerating frames of reference. In such frames, one can not perform a local experiment to determine one's velocity absolute velocity. One can only define a reference frame and perform an experiment to determine one's velocity relative to that frame. Hence, the concept is called relativity.
Orbital motion results from acceleration caused by gravity. One can measure acceleration locally at any point within the influence of the gravitational field. Thus, symmetry between difference frames of reference are broken, and a natural "center" is defined as one of the points where one experiences no acceleration. In reality, you never have a true "center" in a multibodied system such as our solar system. However, the Sun is so massive that we can say, to reasonable accuracy, that the center of our solar system is approximately at the position of the sun.
I don't know about dark energy, but there is more direct proof for the existance of dark matter than background radiation and galaxy clusters.
Take a few neighbouring galaxies for example. We can measure the velocity of stars orbiting the center using Doppler effect, which is pretty accurate. The problem is that all stars circle the center in approximately same time while gravitational therory predicts that those stars that are on the rim of the galaxy should take longer to make one orbit. That can only be explained with a large halo of dark matter that sourunds the galaxy and holds more mass than the visible (light-emitting) matter in the galaxy.
Compton scattering can't explain that.
Modified Newtonian Dynamics, proposed by Milgrom in 1983:
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/faq.html
Essentially 'fitting' Newton's laws to what we observe. Equally dicey, in my opinion, to 'dark matter'. But I'm not a physicist - just the son of one. And Dad does low-temperature, not cosmology, so what the hell do I know?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
My recollection of the talk is bit fuzzy, by Lasenby defines an extension to Cartesian analytical geometry consisting of the linear combinations of perpendicular, parallel and infinite unit vectors. Zeroing the the latter two gives conventional analytical geometry. Another choice of coefficients gives the hyperbolic geometry, best illustrated by some of Escher's olizard paintings. Lasenby claims if you give the cosmos this mixed geometric basis, with a slight non-Cartesian component, then that will explain the change in the Big Bang expansion rates.
On the other hand, some physicists claim "Geometry Equals Force", so augmenting geometry is creating new forces, and we are back to dark energy again.
On the other hand, my brain may have blown a fuse hearing these new ideas and I restated them incorrectly.
The Economist?
Okay, news is news, I guess. It's not so much that I have an issue with this story breaking in The Economist as I do with it breaking only in The Economist rather than in one (or more) reputable, dedicated, peer-reviewed science publications. Even consumer-friendly science pubs like SciAm and Science News would be all over this story if there were solid empirical science behind it (I subscribe and they're not). The way it's presented here is a little too close to the conspiracy-theorist fringe.
If I want that sort of thing, I'll watch Fox News, thanks.
Karma
Only a "scientist" who believes that a random sample omitting him must be biased against a god in which he believes would believe in such a god.
--
make install -not war
As the parent points out, not everything with regard to position and motion is described by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Only constant non-accelerated motion. A frame of reference which obeys this constraint is termed an "Inertial Reference Frame."
A common misconception, with an easy to learn answer.
This answer can then be applied to say that Einstein does not support Ptolemy, as Ptolemy's theory describes motion that does change. In rotating even at a constant rate around a fixed point, the orthogonal ("at right angles") components of the motion (e.g. East-West versus North-South) each oscillate between maximum and minimum values. That's the acceleration. The total magnitude of this acceleration may be constant, but its direction isn't. The reason for it in the case of the planets wasn't even apparent in Kepler's time. It took Newton to find laws which approximately described this effect (his laws of motion and of universal gravitation) and this model was further refined by Einstein with General Relativity published the year after the Special Theory.
The fact is that Kepler had no more sophisticated ideas of the mechanism underlying orbital motion than did Ptolemy. Kepler is better than Ptolemy on the grounds of superficial description of the motion alone.
This is far from an indictment of Kepler, but speaks rather to Kepler's imagination, trust to observation (notably from the perspective of history, Tycho Brahe's data), and willingness to challenge the accepted theory, which authority at the time was backed up by armies and courts of Inquisition.
The late Richard P. Feynman's little treatise "The Character of Physical Law" (MIT Press) is the best introduction to this history, and features Feynman's extrodinarily hilarious expository style, as well as his legendary insistance on accuracy with regard to interpretations of both the various physical theories, and their canonical histories.
I wish to God that Feynman were still with us. Goodbye, Dick, we hardly knew you.
... but I play one on TV.
So:
"If dark matter doesn't exist, there will be a lot of erasers sold to the astrophysics department of your friendly neighbourhood university"
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The original article makes the parallel argument that theory keeps adding cruft to fit the current observations, just as adding epicycles on epicycles was required to account for the Earth-centered theory. So far, so good. However, cosmology has now fairly completely accounted for the observations at this point, and has no more tooth fairies to fall back on; that is, no more epicycles are waiting in the wings, nor are more required.
This line no sig
Preprint archives to the rescue: Problems with the Current Cosmological Paradigm, a talk recently given by Tom Shanks. Maybe a real cosmologist can tell us how much authority Tom Shanks has in the international community, and whether his view is taken seriously or that it is sceptically set aside as yet another attempt to kick the establishment.
In particular, dark matter, though incredibly mysterious, is probably on firm enough ground that it will withstand a series of challenges. Galactic rotation curves and measurements of cluster temperatures both give very strong evidence for dark matter on vastly different scales; in addition, it is difficult (OK, fine: downright impossible in standard Einsteinian gravity) to get any kind of structure to form *at all* in the universe if one is only allowed to use the visible matter. The precise ratio of dark to visible is definitely up in the air; and, of course, there are competing models that modify gravity -- if these matured enough (they may already have -- I haven't kept up) to make predictions on a wider range of scales, they might work as well.
Indeed, a lot of gravity modifications (extra dimensions, etc.) behave *phenomenologically* as if there was dark matter -- so all the effort we've put into simulating dark matter may not be in vain after all, even if Einsteinian four dimensional spacetime is not the name of the game.
In contrast, indeed, is the exact count of the "baryons" (ordinary matter.) I would be very surprised if we were off by a factor of (lets be ultra-conservative here) five in the baryon number, which is constrained very well by big bang nucleosynthesis, whose predictions remain in the "ordinary" realm of nuclear explosions. Something we know a little about.
The real mystery is "dark energy." There, the evidence is a lot shakier. It rests on a few pillars. There is a theoretical bias that wants the universe to be flat (so that the missing mass-energy is made up for by some dark energy component that doesn't cluster and affect our galactic rotation curves.) There are some really excellent (but difficult) measurements of universe acceleration, a signature of dark energy, from people who observe distant supernovae (these provide "standard candles" that allow you to measure distance given an apparent brightness.)
Finally, there are the CMB measurements, which provide a similar kind of distance measurement, but are open to alternative interpretations (instead of measuring apparent brightness, they measure apparent angular size -- but it is perhaps possible, if you squeezed around, to construct a different model where the apparent angular size is squished in odd ways.)
And then there are a host of other measurements that one might call more "marginal" (without prejudice to the people who work very hard to do them -- I aspire to be one of them.) They rely on a few more astrophysical assumptions, and perhaps would not convince the slashdot skeptic. (My profound apologies if I've missed out someone's awesome measurement.)
One big "trouble" is that we haven't seen good evidence for a very particular signal that one would associate with the simplest model of dark energy. (This is the "low quadrupole" -- the news stories you read about finite universes are from people who, in part, are motivated by the desire to explain this low quadrupole signal by other means.) Of course, it is entirely possible to make more exotic dark energy models that don't show this signal (I've coauthored a paper on one such model), but that missing signal, gosh, damn.
The Economist is usually good with science articles, but it really kind of missed the point on this one. Shanks et al. are not "bringing down the whole edifice"; they are pointing out what they see as a possibly problematic signal in the CMB data. This may inspire in some a little additional -- and very healthy -- skepticism about the dominant models. But it is important to mention that there really is no "dark energy mafia"; nearly any astrophysicist worth his or her salt would drop dark energy like a stone if the evidence started piling up, and many, many astrophysicists keep a hand in alternate models that don't rely on dark energy because, hey, what a scoop that would be.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
I've examined MOND before, and that's not it. MOND postulates that gravity is modified at weak _accelerations_, independent of distance.
Thomas Kuhn worte a great book in the 60's called The Structure of Scientific Revolution, which coined the terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" in terms of competing scientific ideas. A must read for anyone interested in this stuff.
Someone else wrote a book on the structure of ideas that classified them into three areas, I believe ideas, paradigms, and worldviews. I remember it being a poignant argument, but can't remember for the life of me the author or title. Perhaps someone else knows?
First, I think Jimmy Buffett has the right idea.
Second... Swamp gas. That's all it ever is, that's all it ever was, and that's all it'll ever be. Swamp gas. Hey, the gang at 'Project Bluebook' said so!
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Mod parent up as INFORMATIVE
This is just one alternative cosmology; probably the most "down to Earth" of the alternatives:
P ri nciples.asp
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/PhysicsHasIts
At least they have observations. And astronomers in general are a genial bunch. Anyone who finds (and this is the most likely case) that there is dark matter, but not nearly enough of it, is assured of nothing more that a few years of ostracism before enough new scientists come into the field who don't have the same emotional investment in dark matter theories.
Compare that to the potential fate of the poor wretch who disproves the Riemann Hypothesis, and undoes almost all progress in pure mathematics since the beginning of the 20th century. I know for a fact that there is a basement in Cambridge where this person will live out their days being forced to review unsolicited "proofs" of duplicating the cube, trisecting the angle, and squaring the circle.
--
E_NOSIG
Well, Ptolemy was wrong... and so was Kepler. With Einsteins's Theories of Relativity we were able to get closer than Kepler. IIRC, they are still running across inconsistancies in observed data and theory suggesting there is even more to discover.
Today, we have enough obserable to know that something is going on from the study of background radiation as well as the rotational speeds of galaxies. The simplest thing that fits in with current theory is dark matter. If we find dark matter then we don't have create entirely new theories of physics. It's Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation. Other ideas, which could very well be true, would probably change some of the other theories we have about how the laws of physics work and would be more complicated solutions.
Even if there is some strange solutions for what is going on, the dark matter work might still stick around just the same as we are still using Kepler's theories. Those theories may not be competly right, but for general solutions, the results of said theories are still usable and easier and quicker to solve than the more precise and more technically correct theories. Ptolemy's theories were discarded and are no longer in use, not because they were wrong, but because they were more complicated than what replaced them.
Dark matter was postulated because galaxies spin at the wrong rate for the amount of observable matter they contain. That's not some obscure thing having to do with background radiation or age of the universe, it's a pretty concrete problem that can't be easily be explained away by reinterpreting measurements.
The existence of dark matter has also been inferred from other observations (see above link), but even if that observation doesn't hold up, the odd behavior of galaxies still remains.
Sorry, but natural selection (the strong survive) has been shown over and over (which gives us confidence in it). Evolution, OTOH, has never been demonstrated or shown in an experiment. To demonstrate evolution would require watching a planet from start to finish, which we have not yet done.
Showing that moths with gray wings blend in, and thus survive while the white-winged moths are eaten provides evidence for natural selection, not evolution.
Something not taught in school that should be is that evolution is dependent upon natural selection, but not the other way around. The earth could have been populated by God/Aliens/someone creating species in a test tube somewhere and populating the earth. Natural selection would just as easily occur with this hypothesis.
BTW, I'm a scientist, so I'm quite skeptical of most theories, including evolution. We've never proven anything except that theories are WRONG. There is no such thing as proving a theory right (i.e. as truth). You can never say that the next observation won't conflict the theory and prove it wrong.
Evolution is so mathematically improbable that I'm surprised that most scientists just accept it. It's a great theory to explain things right now (which is why we use it), but there's a good chance it will probably be proven false someday.
I've looked at it this way for years: Say there happened to be a race of creatures that lived on the nucleus of an atom, held to their home by, say electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is their dominant force. They know about the strong and weak forces, but they know nothing about gravity. This race has developed the ability to look out into "space" and they can see lots of other atoms, all of which obey the laws with which they are familiar. Looking out further, they see huge groups of atoms (electrically neutral objects, such as, say rocks) that behave in ways that are contrary to the laws of electromagnetism. If they followed our path, they might be forced to posit the existance of invisible charges or Dark Charges that are responsible for the movement of these objects.
Now, we happen to know that electrically neutral objects obey gravity, but when we look out and see large groups of objects acting contrary to gravity, it never occurs to us to theorize the existence of a force that we don't experience in our regime.
Maybe there are forces "above" gravity, just as gravity is above electromagnetism.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
I don't think this is a very fair comparison to make. Ptolemy's theories were a kludge. They were accepted as fact by many people, accepted by the church as the "official" version of how God had designed all things, and anyone who contradicted it would be risking execution and ridecule.
Even Galileo, who'd agreed quite strongly with the sun-centered Copernicus theories, had to promote it as merely a method to more effectively predict where planets would be rather than an explanation of how things actually worked.
Of course you could apply Copernican theories and they'd explain where planets moved quite well, but everyone already "knew" that the real system that God had made was of transparent spheres with more spheres attached and glowing lights spinning around on them. Trying to prove or demonstrate anything otherwise was ludicrous, and trying to prove that it was correct was even sillier because it was plainly obvious that "this was how God had created the world".
Modern theories of dark matter aren't nearly the same -- everyone knows that it only takes one contradiction to be found, and a theory will die. (in terms of scientific acceptance, at least). Although dark matter is a theory that's widely accepted as being likely, it's not yet accepted as fact and anyone who does fully accept it as such wouldn't go down well amongst others. This is why, right now, there are people out there that are trying to think of ways to prove that dark matter does exist, designing experiments and observations, and carrying them out.
The fact that millions of dollars get allocated to experiments like this, just to try and prove a theory that's already thought to be likely, should demonstrate how important it's considered to prove theories correct before relying on them too seriously. It should also demonstrate why it's a different environment to that which was dictated, defined and ruled over by the church. Even the thought of such actions would have been silly in during the time that the church so heavily dictated people's beliefs.
My Businesss
You remove spyware and virii from other people's comps for a living. Is that what you dreamed of doing when you were still in college?
I'm sorry, but you have it exactly backwards.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
Dark matter is simply a theory. If Newtonian mechanics is correct (we don't even need to worry about relativistic corrections here), and the laws of physics are the same everywhere (a fundamental principle of science), then there is a lot more matter than we can see (i.e., that is glowing). We can tell this by looking at the rotation curves of galaxies, and even the behavior of clusters of galaxies. There must be a lot of matter there that we can't see, if Newtonian mechanics is a reasonable approximation. It's called dark matter.
Dark matter in and of itself is really not a revolutionary concept. In most wavelengths of light, for instance, you qualify as dark matter (you emit no visible light, although you do emit infrared radiation, so you're not completely dark matter). Look around your room or office. How many things emit electromagnetic radiation. Your computer and your monitor, sure. Your light fixtures and other electronic equipment either emit light or heat. But most of the stuff around you emits internal radiation. A pen is dark matter. A cup of dark matter (once its reached thermal equilibrium, of course). That book is dark matter. The concept of dark matter is not only not revolutionary and mind-blowing, it's downright mundane. Given the survey of stuff in your office/room, is it any surprise that most of the junk in the Universe doesn't emit radiation on its own?
When we start getting into the weird realms of dark matter is when we start applying the Standard Model and find out that it doesn't seem like all that dark matter can be explained by baryonic matter (basically, protons and neutrons -- what we would normally consider matter). That's where things start getting sketchy and speculative, although we have some theories about what might be responsible. But dark matter in and of itself is simply a consequence of the mediocrity principle (that is, the laws of physics operate elsewhere just the same as they do here) and Newtonian gravitation.
All the popular media's fascination with dark matter is only so much hoopla.
...mostly around Uranus. And remember... Uranus is a gas giant.
Un-news
Dark Matter to me is a fudge factor
<voice style="homer">
MMMMMmm Dark Fudge..... Glaaahhhhhh...
</voice>
Dammit, now I'm all hungry.
The Earth is made out of dark matter.
You are made out of dark matter.
It's true.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
...
Well, no, is not the worst think it could happen, i.e. something bigger than a cat could find you there. And with this, if the dark matter is not what explains something, the real explanation could not be nice (you know, murphy rulez)
"The USS Make Shit Up"
----------------------
I was stranded on a planet, Just me and Spock
We met a nasty nazi alien who locked our asses up
We found a hunk of crystal and a metal piece of bed
We made a laser phaser gun and shot him in the head
Bust a move, Tog
I was standing on the bridge when Sulu came to me
His eyes were full of tears he said "Captain, can't you see
the ship is gonna blow do something I beseech"
I grabbed a tribble and some chewing gum and stopped the warp core breach
And I say,
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
And though he's just a child, and some think him a twit
Wesley is the master when it comes to making up some shit
He's the guy you want with you when you go out in to space
Now if only he could beam those pimples off his face
And if you're at a party on the starship Enterprise
And the karaoke player just plain old up and dies
Set up a neutrino field inside a can of peas
Hold on to Geordi's visor and sing into Data's knee
And I say
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
Sisko's on a mission to go no bloody place
He loiters on a space station above Bajoran space
The wormhole's opened up and now they come from near and far
We'll keep the booze but please send back the fucking Jem-hadar
What is with the Klingons, remember in the day
They looked like Puerto Ricans and they dressed in gold lame
Now they look like heavy metal rockers from the dead
With leather pants and frizzy hair and lobsters on their heads
And I say
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up
Well, I was stuck on Voyager, pounding on the door
When suddently it dawned on me I've seen this show before
Perhaps I'm in a warp bubble and slightly out of phase
'Cause it was way back in the sixties when they called it "Lost in Space"
We were looking for a way to make the ratings soar
So we orchestrated an encounter with the Borg
Normally you'd think that that would get us into shit
But this one has a smashing ass and a lovely set of tits
And I say
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
Thats the way we do things lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we're totally screwed but nevermind
We'll pull something out of our behinds, we just make some shit up
[Impression gotten from title]
Then star wars would have a *lot* of explaining to do... I mean, what's Darth Vader meant to say now?
"Come to the kinda-grey side..."
there was dark matter in my toilet this morning.
So something doesn't add up.. for the Economist? Send in the IMF! They'll sort it out! We've got to subject all this scientific thought to the market! The market of thought! Yeah! Liberalize your thinking! hahaahahaha.. okay, bad joke.
Let me clarify what I mean by that. As I see it, one of the main goals of science is satisfying our curiousity. The mission of science (or one of the missions to be precise) is to learn about nature so that everyone who is eager to know why things are the way they are can learn and understand.
However, the way the physical science has been progressing lately, the more we "learn" about the universe, the farther we are from our goal. Before 20th century, the scientific knowledge could be explained to anyone, you didn't need any complex formulas, almost any law of physics could be explained in simple terms. People indeed could learn and understand.
Now look at what science has become. In order to understand field theory, or cosmology, students study for 10 years in school, then 4 years in college, then several more years in grad. school and only then they start getting a grasp at what this whole thing is, and start to understand how it all works.
It is practically impossible now for anyone except a very small group of very specialized people to understand the recent theories in physics. We seem to discover new things every day but noone understands them except a few chosen.
I remember that Einstein used to say in the beginning of the 20th century that in the 21st century special relativity will seem just as obvious and normal to every kid as steam engine was to kids back then. Yet today, I am a graduate student in physics, and I cannot claim to really understand special relativity, I only understand how to use the formulas to predict how things behave.
I think the way things stand now, science is failing one of its most important missions. We no longer understand our universe. All we do is learn how to predict the behaivor of things with greater and greater precision, which is very useful and all, but we are getting further and further from _understanding_ the universe which really is the inpiration of science.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
Dark Energy on the other hand is the equivalent of Einstein's Universal Constant. For some unknown reason, the universe is accelerating in its expansion (counteracting the gravity that SHOULD be causing it to slow down), instead of slowing down (and eventually ending in a Big Crunch) as we previously had thought.
Just FYI."Pascal's Wager" as this is called, is easily refuted in freshman philosophy texts. Nice try.
I'm reminded of what an American Airlines pilot said after he took a couple of days training on a "glass cockpit" (a couple of computer screens on the instrument panel rather than a myriad of gauges) Airbus:
"Now I know what a dog feels like watching TV."
If there is a much simpler theory, then don't be surprised if when you first see it, it feels like your head is imploding.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I know I'll get some flame mail for this idea, but I think God is humanity's longest living kludge out there. 95% of all people accept God to be true, but have we found out either way? No. We can only believe and hope it's true.
There is no decent explaination... emergent intelligence...
it may explain why things can be completely random at a quantum mechanical level, but balance out in larger systems...
It's called the Central Limit Theorem and Superposition. You've got billions of identical particles (low variance), and a huge sample size at macroscopic scales, thus your mean (likelyhood of "expected" things, the precision, and thus "intelligence" in systems) will be pointy as a pin.
I am 100% dead serious.
Perhaps maybe your REAL question is "why are quarks so damned sticky, protons so stable, and h_bar conveniently small?" because that encapsulates the huge gap between the quantum world and the stable world we live in.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
so you are saying that:
evolution => natural selection
we then can also say the contrapositive is true,
~(natural selection) => ~(evolution)
but we cannot say:
natural selection => evolution.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
[insert obligatory "WMD's-are-actually-Dark-Matter" joke here]
Who doesn't like free music?
yes ma'am...
there is no such thing as gravity... it's all magnetic waves.
we stick to earth because the magnetic forces of the rest of the universe push us to it...
Gravity is a push.
we are only starting to discover this recently. one day all jets will be replaced with "anti-gravity"
http://www.americanantigravity.com/
"Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are convenient labels to talk about unexpected observations. Either dark matter and dark energy exist or gravity and space-time don't behave the way we think they do.
What's important is that we have a way to talk about unexpected observations. We observe stronger than expected gravity and it makes sense to talk about that in terms of matter which does not otherwise interact. If it were interacting, we'd have seen it. Perhaps it's really matter in an adjacent universe. But that's as unreal and inacessible as dark matter.
Similarly, dark energy is a way to talk about the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. So far, it's the simplest explanation which explains the current observations. Perhpas the real explanation is that the gravitational constant, G, varies over time. But without a mechanism to understand how and why G changes, it's not a very fruitful path.
Physicists talk about new phenenoma in terms of familiar objects. It allows them to organize the observations and try to fit them into a well understood framework. Eventually, if enough observations are made which can not be fit into the framework, a new framework is necessary.
Science is provisional.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
well, since spontanious generation of a creature is so much more improbable, if not impossable, I would say that until a person can come up with a more probable solution to the origin of species than evolution, the prudent scientist would accept evolution as the best explantation and use it as a base assumption to build other work on that depends on an explantation of where species come from.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Before the Big Bang By Michael D. Lemonick Feb 2004 - Astronomy & Physics "Maverick cosmologists contend that what we think of as the moment of creation was simply part of an infinite cycle of titanic collisions between our universe and a parallel world ..."
VIRUSES, YOU IDIOT!! VIRUSES
Dark matter (and its various extensions, including dark energy) was always a
fudge theory, designed to reconcile data and theories that didn't fit one
another very well. There were always a lot of intelligent scientists who
never believed in it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I'm a long shot short of a physics expert but I have a vague recollection from freshman physics about how scientists first tried to explain how light moves. They thought there had to be this ether stuff for it to move through. Then a young German patent clerk proved them all wrong.
How did the great minds of the day react then?
I honestly don't know. Maybe someone else does.
Obligatory link for those people who don't watch Futurama.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
This is a good overview of how cosmologists arrived at the current theories involving dark matter and dark energy. Also, do a Google on the WMAP probe.
--- Ban humanity.
It sounds to me to much like sco talking about linux.
.. i have been an astronomy studend... but failed.
On the other hand maybe SCO discoverd a simelarity between linux and the universe. Only 5% of the source lines in linux is visible and 95% is dark matter, wich belongs to SCO ip...
anyway
I stil remeber a teacher saying that when a astronomer proclaiming that his theory was the right one, It means that there was a small possebilty that some part of hist theory was correct... Hmm still sounds like Darlic McBride
Jer
Actually, it took 2 pages of formal logic to prove that 1 + 1 = 2.
Principia Mathematica, Whitehead & Russell.
There is always, and will always be, a difference between the technical understanding of a phenomenon and the folk model understand of same. Unless (and if) we ever achieve planet-wide educational parity that may always be the case.
That said, I think some of the complexity we see in physics and other fields is self-inflicted, by necessity. We theorize on what might be causing certain events. Obviously, since we don't understand everything, fitting particularly ill-understood events into our current perspective can get messy. But that's the best we can do until our understanding has improved. In the meantime, if you want the best explanation available, you need to be on board with the current theories, publications, etc.
All of this doesn't mean science is failing. It just means we have more knowledge now and the bar is higher in terms of establishing a baseline of working knowledge.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
A universe infinite in time and space is not susceptible to such questions from the God-botherers, no matter how many hoops we have to jump through to account for the Hubble constant, the microwave background, etc. etc.
But then I'm just perverse ;)
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Evolution is falsifiable. All it takes is a human skeleton in a rock layer more than a few million years old....
Evolution (that organisms change with time as a result of alterations in genotype) is a simple and elegant fact that anyone can observe by picking up rocks and looking at the fossils. Its far stronger as a fact than atomic theory, as no-one really understands quantum mechanics.
The measurement of the cosmic microwave background to the detail required to determine that the universe is, in fact, flat, only just happened in the past year or two. Things like M-Theory and the accelerating expansion ARE the new ideas that are causing the hubbub. It's actually a very exciting time to bear witness to humanity's growing understanding of the universe.
--- Ban humanity.
Alexander Shulgin's writeup of the "Infinitely Old Universe" idea (in place of the Big Bang) seems more poignant than ever....
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
> Evolution, OTOH, has never been demonstrated or shown in an experiment. To demonstrate evolution would require watching a planet from start to finish, which we have not yet done.
Sorry to inform you, but science allows indirect evidence as well.
> Something not taught in school that should be is that evolution is dependent upon natural selection, but not the other way around. The earth could have been populated by God/Aliens/someone creating species in a test tube somewhere and populating the earth. Natural selection would just as easily occur with this hypothesis.
You seem to be confused about the subject matter. It is correct to say that it doesn't matter whether gods/aliens/naturalforces/blindchance created life, because evolution could operate on the result regardless of the origin. All evolution requires is imperfect self-replicators.
> BTW, I'm a scientist
You certainly don't talk like a scientist. What is your field, and where can we find a list of your publications?
> WRONG. There is no such thing as proving a theory right (i.e. as truth).
And a real scientist would know that scientists don't spend their time trying to "prove" theories right. Rather, scientists look for explanations for observed phenomena, and theories are the product of that endeavor.
> Evolution is so mathematically improbable that I'm surprised that most scientists just accept it.
Can you show us the math on that?
> It's a great theory to explain things right now (which is why we use it), but there's a good chance it will probably be proven false someday.
Can you show us the math on that, too? (I'll gladly accept "it may be proven false someday", but you are asserting more than that, even with your double qualification. What are the chances that the theory of evolution will be proven to be false some day?)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Natural selection is obvious, and, sorry, you're wrong about evolution. Evolution has been demonstrated repeatedly in both the lab and in the field. New species have been created in the lab and observ ed to evolve in the field. What definitin of evolution are you using? It is not necessary to watch the life of a planet from start to finish to demonstrate evolution any more than it is necessary to watch every movie ever made, or even watch one all the way through, to know that movies exist
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Matter sucks.
Or the cosmic background blows.
Take yer pick. :-D.
Nietzsche is dead - God
OK, 4% of the apparent mass of the universe is normal baryonic stuff (i.e. protons, neutrons, etc.) Can anyone give a back-of-the-envelope calculation to the equivalent amount of mass it would take to create the gravity produced by all of the photons in the universe? Stated another way, of all the mass-energy in the universe, what percent is photons?
Dark matter IS considered distinct from ordinary baryonic matter, which is what your asteroids and dead stars are composed of. They are supposedly undiscovered particles, although neutrinos have been put forth as a candidate.
--- Ban humanity.
we're all dead. So don't worry about it too much!
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. --Edmund Burke
Only having had undergraduate physics in addition to armchair-astronomy and a layman's understanding of the universe, my idea will probably carry no weight amongst the "actual" scientists. However, the "actual" scientists are the ones who have to posit this dark matter/dark energy thing, and don't have a coherent theory or consensus to back it up (or even an accepted hypothesis).
What if gravity has a different effects locally, interstellarly, and intergalactically? Why does it have to be newtonian throughout the universe?
I realize this would stand physics on its head and leave it trying to put on a hat, but maybe that's how it has to be.
For example, at the local level, the effect of gravity is the mass-based attractive effect that we've all witnessed when we get hit on the head with apples. At the inter-galactic level, gravity could actually act as a repulsive force! Just as when you have two weak magnets, you can force together the like poles, and they will stay that way, but if you pull them a little apart, they move apart of their own accord.
This would have the effect of galaxies pushing other galaxies together, rather than trying to force them apart.
I still don't have an explanation for why our galaxy doesn't fly apart, but hey, I'm no expert.
Obviously this is all speculation, but I like it better than "dark matter/energy" (and my astrophysicist friend says I'm not the first one to think of it).
1. Two entire paragraphs of an article from The Economist were directly lifted and used as a segue into the main article. Hey, it got me to click the link, and I'm sure The Economist appreciates the attention. But I'm also sure someone in their legal/ethics department is clamouring about copyrights, fair use, and all that. Just a thought.
2. Is it just me, or is that a kickass article about life, the universe and everything that makes it possible (or possibly doesn't) in, er, an economics magazine?! Deck.
3. I just wanted to echo something that's already obvious to anyone who follows the occasional results of these scientific pursuits: In 50 years, we'll have a lot more answers about what we now seek. In 100 years, we'll have a lot more answers about what we will be seeking in 50 years. And so on. In other words, the truth about dark matter and dark energy will be revealed, whether we understand it or even get it right or not.
4. Just for the hell of it: my personal belief/understanding/idea is that all of this so-called "dark" matter and energy really isn't dark or all that different from regular matter and energy at all. It's all the same type of stuff, but cleverly arranged such that we can not properly observe and comprehend it --- mostly because we are not made of it, thus our primitive perceptive capacity is not meant to decipher it.
Just thoughts. Have a nice day.
You take the facts, come up with a working theory that fits the facts. As more facts come in, you continue to test your theory against the facts. When too many anomolies show up, it's time to come up with a new theory.
And there is nothing wrong with that. Is Newtonian physics worthless just because it couldn't explain everything? No, but we had to be willing to look for new answers when we began to see evidence that the old answers didn't work for everything we observe. It's called a paradigm shift.
Check out Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought scientists had already created ( in sub-microscopic amounts ) anti-matter in laboratories, and measured it's presence.
Or is this "dark matter" something different than anti-matter?
Someone please explain, the article is high on fluff but low on details.
I'm reading the presentation at the moment, but my math's a bit rusty (20 years rusty, if truth be told), so I can't comment on it.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
You could build an acurate geocentric model of the solar system. It wouldn't be very pretty, but it could be done. That isn't Ptolemy's model though. Ptolemy constructed a very specific and detailed mathmatical model for predicting the locations of the planets.
The real problem is that Ptolemy used circles, not elipses. The Greek rationalists concieved of circles as perfect, so they wouldn't use anything else, but you can really only describe the planet's motion with 100% percent acuracy using elipses.
Ptolemy comes very close to actual values, and that's why he held sway for so long. Copernicus may have imagined a heliocentric solar system, but he kept with the circles, so his model didn't fit the data as well as Ptolemy's model.
It took Kepler to come along and use elipses to actually produce a model that fit the data better.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Thank you for the vote of support! However:
The total magnitude of this acceleration may be constant, but its direction isn't.
The magnitude and direction of the acceleration is constant, assuming a simple circular orbit. The acceleration is directed inwards.
Speed is a scalar, velocity is a vector (has both magnitude (speed) and direction). While the speed of an orbiting body is constant, the velocity is changing (i.e., accelerating) because the direction of motion changes. The rate at which this direction changes is determined by the acceleration.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Hello readers from the future!
You are probably reading these comments trying to get a feel for all of the silly things we believed in way back here in the 2000's and boy you've hit a gold mine with this "web site" (pardon the archaic terminology, and for the record a "gold mine" was a place where people dug Gold out of the ground. Gold was worth a lot because it was a rare metal that couldn't be created artificially very economically).
I just wanted to point out that these views certainly aren't representative of the educated among us, so please don't think we're all stuck on magical explanations for things that seem pretty obvious.
Anyways, hope you're all doing well.
We want $10,000,000 in unmarked $100 bills by noon sunday, or you will never see it again.
Vergon 6 should be in no danger of implosion from over-mining of fecal material.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
However in this case your comment is only slightly wrong and therefore I have some hope that my reply might be a useful contribution.
You are correct that mathematical proofs are based on axioms. However there is still a crucial difference between a mathematical proof and a scientific theory. A mathematical proof is an absolute certainty. Note that I am not claiming that the underlying axioms are certain. I am only claiming that the proof itself is certain.
To put it another way, mathematicians are never certain about their underlying axioms but they are absolutely certain that if those axioms hold then the result stated in the proof also holds. It's kind of like a building with indestructible walls but no foundation.
Scientific theory is a whole different kettle of fish. You cannot prove a scientific theory with absolute certainty. In fact it is not even clear to me how one can define certainty within the framework of the scientific method. You never have any guarantee in science that future observations will be consistent with past observations.
In science you can prove a theory in the sense of preponderance of the evidence. You can even sometimes prove a theory beyond all reasonable doubt. But there is no way to eliminate the unreasonable doubts. Any endeavour based on empirical observation suffers from the fundamental limitation that you can never be sure of the next observation.
Finally, regarding 1+1=2, the foundational proof of this fact using the standard propositional axioms of mathematics really does require 362 pages. You can see the 362nd page on the bottom half of this Russell's paradox site.
I think you will find that Ptolemy of Alexandria's Circles of Ptolemy was an elegant, if not emperical, result. It has since been systemitzed by Fourier and his Fourier series with can come up with an infinite series of diminishing Cosine terms that can approximate and function say like the motion of planets from another viewpoint. An equivalent if not infinite series form of the same thing. I think it took mathematics a few centuries to understand the brilliance of Ptolemy's insight. Most it seems even know have no clue what it really represents.
Your mathematics are wrong. Those are some old figures that don't take into account reallife systems, and knowable chemical reactions. Figures I've seen on evolution tend to be make it fairly likely. Though I admit I couldn't quote them to you anymore, it sufficed for me to see that the deck was heavily stacked in favor of evolution for already established lifeforms. (coming from inorganic is a completly different problem)
There are only two major questions left which you could have more justly complained over, namely where did cellular life come from, and how did the eukaryote cell evolve, which is massivly more complex in some ways then any other cell, and poorly understood how it came to be. This doesn't mean it can't be understood, just that it's so way back that it's hard to find any data on. Usually semi intermediary cell types exist, but none do in this case.
To get back on track though, in the massive majority of times evolution is showable, and there have been many experiments of micro evolution done which found such small evolutionary changes even in large animals like fishes, next to that the fossil record shows macro evolution fairly conclusively (even though some 'claim' it does not, I advise you look up some good examples (ie whales, and I believe horses)) , as well as it being possible to derive macro evolution from currently known species where there it's pretty much possible to build a simple multicellular to complex multicellular line without even bothering to look as the fossils, forinstance you can find a quite good development of the eye like this from extremly simple, light sensitive cells, to a simple eye to what you can find in humans.
And against this are thus those two unexplained points that at this moment have not been shown to have good enough evolutionary explanations. Though personally I think the eukaryote problem is more of a interesting riddle then it really being completly unexplainable.
To sum it up, evolution has a truly massive base of supporting facts, and only to my knowledge two sections lacking sufficient facts to be proved. And those points can not be used as evidence against evolution, because basically there is just near no information over that time period and as such you can't argue it either way.
Now you don't have to take what I stated for facts if you don't feel like it, by all means go out in the field or look up what they already found and convince yourself. But to clarify one thing so it's very clear, what I'm talking about here is not how things evolve, nor was I defending that. merely that there is a very large base of evidence for there being gradual changes in species, or in the biologist terminology, the evolution of species.
Quickshot
Or had he just invented the Fourier series a millenium and a half too soon? More seriously, I would be interested to know if the theory of epicycles was computationally useful - did it allow the ancients to predict planetary positions for considerable periods in advance. Did they do this? If so, the theory can hardly be said to be "wrong" anymore than Newtons Laws of Motion can be said to be wrong.
Squirrel!
I think you will find that Ptolemy of Alexandria's Circles of Ptolemy was an elegant, if not emperical, result. It has since been systemitzed by Fourier and his Fourier series which forms a fuction using a summation of an infinite series of of diminishing Cosine terms that can approximate other functions, say like the motion of planets from another viewpoint or that pesky Square wave.
The motions of the planets, lets see, a circle within a circle within a circle, diminishing cosines for my money.
This has given us a powerful tool for analyzing difficult problems that might not otherwise be solvable. I think it took mathematics a few centuries to understand the brilliance of Ptolemy's insight. Most it seems even know have no clue what it really represents. It just took a few centuries to develop the math to write it in a different form. Who knows maybe he had the math but didn't share it, much like Issac Newton and his personal math he used to work out his important theorties, which in and of themselves have proven to be just approximations, good for calculations much slower than the speed of light.
Not laughable, and still usefull, even if it is 'wrong.' It is still 'right' in most circumstances, and we know what those circumstances are. We know when to use it as a good enough approximation, and when we need to use more accurate theories.
Theories can never be proved. We will never fully understand the universe. We may develop theories that accurately predict every phenomenon, then the next day, something new could come along and show us we were wrong.
What is important is for scientists to fully understand that theories are always merely theories, not facts.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It seems to me that a central tenet of Christianity is the Good News itself -- that an actual guy actually taught a bunch of people how to be good to each other, and actually came back from the dead. That is (at least in principle) a physical, provable proposition, and finding things like the shroud of Turin is a big part of that. Other religions work the same way -- there're a core set of beliefs that hold in the physical world, and that are thought to be supporting evidence for some metaphysical beliefs.
It also seems that this thread is pretty far afield from the topic of cosmology. Religion and physical cosmology are somewhat orthogonal.
Grow a spine, got using your religion-crutch, get a brain and USE IT.
It absolutely appauls me that the human race still have faith in ludacris things like gods, ghosts and demons.
One of my friends [A] has depression, another one of my friend's [B] is a fundie - Friend B thinks friend A has a PHYSICAL DEAMON -- how whacked out is that.
Anybody who says "religion/god/the bible/koran/torah is beyond science and reason" is purely full of it and should be removed from the gene pool. I am so beyond sick and tired of seeing fundamentalists everywhere I turn.
ISN'T THERE SOMEWHERE ON THIS PLANET I CAN GO TO ESCAPE RELIGION AND TYRANY!!!
Evolution is so mathematically improbable that I'm surprised that most scientists just accept it.
Apparently you've not heard about genetic algorithms, where evolution *is* math.
the mod points when I want them?
That's why it's not enough just to learn Science. Science History lends a crucial perspective on how ideas have evolved over the centuries, and how we've arrived at where we are, and where we may be going tomorrow.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Why should anyone care whether 1% or 99% of scientists believe in god?
If only 1% of scientists say that they believe in god, it doesn't "prove" that god doesn't exist anymore than a 99% belief rate "proves" that god does exist--because although these people may be scientists, their belief is fundamentally un-scientific. There is no intellectually honest way to "scientifically" prove or disprove the existance of god--whether it's one god, six gods, or one hundred gods.
When you choose to believe in the existance of god, whether or not you are right is irrelevant--that belief, no matter how good or bad it may be, is not scientific--a point that is often lost upon the "teach creationism in the science classroom" crowd.
If someone claims something specific like "the Earth is only 10,000 years old," that can be tested scientifically--by measuring radioactive isotopes in rock samples and comparing the observed rates of decay, for example, and the data can be analyzed and shown to support or not support the hypothesis that the Earth is 10,000 years old.
Opinion polls and statistics are more often used by smaller, more radical religeons to inflate their own numbers and thus "prove" their rightousness to the world--I'd advise more mainstream believers to avoid that tack, it's just unseemly.
The magnitude and direction of the acceleration is constant, assuming a simple circular orbit. The acceleration is directed inwards.
You proved his point that the acceleration's direction isn't constant. It is always directed toward the center of whatever. It is the centripetal force that is causing it to go in a circle or ellipse. For a perfect circular path, the acceleration is always perpendicular to the velocity. Remember that constant acceleration gives you a parabolic path.
"Sure, one can argue that if two theories are functionally equivalent, there's no downside to taking the simpler one. But has anyone demontrated this logically or mathematically?"
It's really a postulate, an unprovable given. If the 2 theories are really functionally equivalent you must accept the simpler. The more complex one only wins if it can explain behaviour that the simple one can't. Then they aren't really equivalent, are they?
Assume for the moment that Einstein's physics and Newton's physics are functionally equivalent. Einstein's is more complex. If both came out in Newton's time, Einstein's would have to be rejected. Einstein's explains many things that Newton's doesn't - but back then they didn't realize that those things needed explaining. The only thing that could be pointed to then that Newton's didn't capture is slight misprediction of the orbit of Mercury. I'm not sure they could even measure it's orbit accurately enough to detect the misprediction back then. Not really good enough for Einstein to be percieved as more than a crank.
As time goes on more and more evidence accumulates that Einstein can explain and Newton can't. They become less and less equivalent.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Let's say our limited perspective from our solar system were somehow enhanced by a telescope/sensor at a neighboring solar system. Wouldn't this give us a much more accurate map of the universe than our current narrow view? For all we know most of the matter might not be visible because something is standing between us and it. The very fabric of space gets distorted by the weak gravitational field of our small star and each and every bit of matter floating around out there and we believe that larger gravitational forces exist, like black holes. If we can't even completely understand how and why our star warps the fabric of space how can we expect to KNOW the universe and all the matter contained within it?
We don't understand the laws of this universe. We've barely been able to explain it with simple mathematics. The universe, for all we know, might require higher mathematics than the human brain can easily comprehend. And what if there are other universes? But what do I know, I'm just one small voice in this titanic harmony-challenged choir. I'm sure one day someone with a lot of money will figure it out and tell all of us about it in an infomercial late at night on TV.
The modern term "faith" does not correspond well to the Greek and Hebrew terms from which the King James Bible was translated. Words shift meaning over time. Blind faith without evidence is utterly foreign to the Bible. And probably is to some other religious texts as well. True religion (if there is one) has nothing to fear from true science. (Although, there's plenty of false religion and false science.)
So the question must be raised *what* would the Universe look like if /.ers had had a billion or more years to work on it? Yes, I know that many of you will argue that it should not look much different but you have not run the numbers as I have on planetary disassembly times. Nor do you understand the limits of nanotechnology to the extent that I do.
I've tried to explore and address some of these questions in my papers about Matrioshka Brains as has Dr. Sandberg in his exploration of the various types of Jupiter Brains.
These are not new concepts -- they have been discussed on the Extropians list for perhaps a decade. There are a few good astronmers and astrophysicists who discuss these ideas but to a large extent mainstream science seems stuck in the paradigm that the universe simply must be dead.
Until we deal with whether or not that is a fundamental misconception we may be plagued by concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy that could be resting on very questionable evidence.
Robert
The term mearly refers to "matter which, for whatever reason, we cannot see." It's just plain old matter. It's just shielded from our view somehow.
Don't be all stupid and Star-Trekie.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
the moon, the sun and the planets ARE moving in circles in circles in circles around the Earth?
Maybe the sun centered solution is the kludge!?
They are all made-up, most likely by someone with Schizotypal syndrome.
Help fight continental drift.
1) Pascal's wager doesn't work - lots of religions make countervailing or contrary claims to being correct. The question that most people have to decide is not whether to have faith in anything or not, but whether to believe in Christanity or Hinduism or Judaism or Islam or... Many of these choices are exclusive or contradictory, so believing in something won't necessarily save you - only believing in the right thing will. In addition, believing in something excludes options from the here and now - if you hold a religious belief, you must act consistently with it, excluding some possible actions that might benefit you. Pascal's Wager is not cost-free, and since its benefits are unclear (if all beliefs lead to the same place, Pascal's wager holds; if some beliefs lead to Hell (or some other bad place) then the value of choice may be much smaller and on the order or the cost of choosing and the opportunity costs of actions you cannot do), it isn't really a very good argument for religious belief.
2) Science and religion are not exclusive unless one forces them to be. Science takes a pragmatic view of the world - what effects we can observe or measure are those of consequence to science. The immeasureable is not science's purview. Religious beliefs ask different, perhaps broader questions: What are we doing here? What do we do with our lives? How does everything work? Science can be considered a subset of this. Multiple religious beliefs may be consistent with a physical phenomenon - the things that distinguish them exist in a place science can't get to and thus has no legitimate say in. The problems occur when religious and scientific claims occupy the same ground and are contrary. In this case, science usually wins because it can be tested, whereas religion depends upon claims that cannot be tested (but which can only be trusted).
In my opinion, it is not the "anti-religionists" who have betrayed us, but a subset of religionists. Religion and science have existed side by side for some time and were not considered inconsistent. In the last few hundred years, some religious folk have tried to "prove" their beliefs by misusing logic and science to their ends (creationism/intelligent design/creation science, for example). Trying to prove the unprovable only further hardens the demands of people for proof before they will believe, undercutting the faith; after all, if the people who claim to most strongly believe something require proof to believe in it, how much faith can they really have? There is also the bonus of trying to force people to have a faith whose value derives from chosen belief (thus destroying the object of belief for others). In addition, the likely purpose of the logical legerdemain (to compel others to behave as one would like) only serves to alienate those who would otherwise be quietly accepting of the faith of others. Vehement (and sometimes illogical) people who don't believe in religion probably come at least in part from this.
But of course that doesn't mean that what you believe in from a young age is correct. If I was brought up a long time ago when the greatest minds believed the world was flat. I too would have believed it and we all know now that is not correct. Similarly, I could be brought up to believe and have faith in God, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm right. And getting back on topic, I could grow up believing dark matter existed and as of today, don't know if I'm right or wrong. But the point is that due to a few people questioning what is normally accepted as right, we may find the real truth rather than blindly believing something that is false.
Likewise, Newtonian mechanics also lets you choose any frame you want, but the pseudo-forces get hairy. In Einsteinian relativity, you use a collection of curvatures that describes the geometry of spacetime; in Newtonian physics, you use spooky action at a distance to describe the same forces. That means you have to include an extra pseudoforce (like centrifugal force) on every single object, if you work in a frame that has any Newtonian forces accelerating it at all. For example, if you're describing the solar system you want to choose the center-of-mass frame of the whole thing, which is pretty much the Sun's center-of-mass frame.
In either case, it's much, much easier to work in a frame that follows the most massive thing around. The simpler the math gets, the more explanatory power the theory has, and the more useful the description is. Geocentric reference frames are correct, just not necessarily as useful.
But since we showed up after the heavy lifting got done, what we're stuck with is building the simplest explanation that looks like it'll work trying it out for a while, and finding out that, no, it doesn't do the job either, and adding more complexity or precision to one of the edges of the model, or developing new tools that help with problems we didn't know how to solve earlier. The Greeks were starting pretty much from scratch, building ugly kluges like Epicycles to account for the times their simple theories failed. Kepler and Copernicus eventually straightened that stuff out to the point that Newton could start over with gravity and Newtonian physics, which gave you some simple ways to solve the problems for medium-sized objects. That turned out not to do a good enough job for bigger objects (like stars' gravity bending light) or really small objects (anything where quantum effects matter), but it was enough of a start for people like Einstein and all the 20th century cosmologists to kick out from.
The Universe still seems to be a really messy complicated place, full of division by zero (black holes), round-off errors (much of quantum effects), and more parts missing than the socks that vanished in the dryer. If you want to see farther than your companions, you're going to either have to find some giants' shoulders to stand on, or go sneak around under the feet of dwarves and steal a glance at the real plans.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Charm like yours is the best form of birth control, virgin.
I think you're exactly wrong. In the short term, it probably doesn't matter. In the long run, though, it may make a big difference. For instance, Newtonian versus Einstienian kinetic energy formulae.
If the fastest object in your personal world is a galloping horse (or, well, an arrow), there's no real difference between the two. But when you construct a particle accelerator capable of moving electrons at .75c, there's a big, big difference.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Other people have explained what the errors are in saying a Ptolmaic system or Brahe's system is "mathematically equivalent." I'll just add a few things- first, the real breakthrough in celestial mechanics was not the idea of Copernicus that planets revolve around the sun- some people had thought that for a long time- but rather Kepler's theory that the planetary orbits are ellipses. Nobody had taken heliocentrists seriously before Kepler, since a heliocentric model with circular planetary orbits actually conflicted with observation to a much greater extent than did the Ptolemaic system.
In general, the background of the scientific revolution from Copernicus to Newton was the opposite of what it is often taken to be- a revival of observation and experimentation. The Scholastic system, being based on Aristotelianism, put plenty of emphasis on observation. One of the major catalysts for this scientific revolution was rather the appearance of translations of Plato and a subsequent move to attempt to rise above the particulars of the world to the Forms. I think it was Galileo who wrote to one of his associates that he admired and labored to emulate the resolution of men like Copernicus who could, ignoring the input of their senses, contradict these senses in describing how things OUGHT to behave according to ideal laws.
One thing about the trouble astronomers had with the Catholic Church which is often ignored is that it was a real surprise. For almost a millenium before the Counter-Reformation, the Church was, on the whole, the greatest advocate of learning the world has ever known, though this advocacy had perhaps been on the decline for some time. The picture of a pre-Reformation Church working constantly to supress knowledge and free thought comes from the same sources of misinforming tradition which bring you the 2nd-grade Columbus Day elementary school assembly skits where a kid playing Columbus explains to his astounded peers that he thinks the world is round. (Very few people had believed the world was flat for quite some time, and the reason Columbus ventured west when nobody else would was because his calculations of the circumference of the world were way off; the Greeks had been very nearly right, and nobody had thought to try sailing west because crossing an ocean the width of the Atlantic, Pacific, and North America combined, without any places to stop, would have been far too risky to attempt at least until the advent of steam power.)
I knew it! All that 'dark matter' was just a lot of hooey to account for the fact they don't know much of anything about the universe as a whole.
Just like the gremlins of old aviation lore. If your astronomical models don't work... blame dark matter!
I just started reading Asimov's novelization of his short story "Nightfall"...one of my all time faves. It's funny...similar concepts are discussed in the chapter I'm on right now! What a coincidence.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
BTW, I'm a scientist
You certainly don't talk like a scientist. What is your field, and where can we find a list of your publications?
He may not talk like a scientist, but at least he is not bashful with no point of reference.
WRONG. There is no such thing as proving a theory right (i.e. as truth).
And a real scientist would know that scientists don't spend their time trying to "prove" theories right. Rather, scientists look for explanations for observed phenomena, and theories are the product of that endeavor.
There you go again. Btw., read what the person said... it is obvious that he is not proving theories right, rather he claimed the opposite
Can you show us the math on that?
Not only would he need mathematics but also quite a bit of knowledge in genetics... how can you prove the mathematical aspects of evolution? Derive a time frame based on the statistics of mutations on genecode that match the changes in the environment, and come up with an answer much different than what we take today?
Eh, sure, let me take my pencil and paper...
Why are things heavier on Earth than on the Moon, for instance?
Gravity is certainly a mis-understood force I think, but not in the ways suggested by the, "It's a Push" theory.
-FL
Jeez, MM must have really pressed your buttons... (You are a dickhead, by the way.)
sig under development
--He talks about some of the crap which went unreported during several doomed space missions. A legitimate story or more cointelpro stuff? Who knows. Entertaining reading nonetheless.
-FL
For that matter, what about the so-called alleged putative "Big Bang," huh? Doesn't "the beginning of Time" make your skin crawl? Keep tripping the Rift, phlogiston buffs!
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
erm...
sig under development
I also think there is a strong correlation to the 5/95 (in some cases 10/90 or similar) rule. 95% of the work (research) is done during first 5% time, the rest %5 of work requires %95 of the time to be done. Oh wait... It took 1500 years to decently describe %5 of the matter in the Universe...
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Perhaps because things aren't pushed as strongly towards the moon because by comparison the moon has a significantly weaker magnetic field?
i agree though..
the theory so far is sloppy. but it's probably still true.
A search for Conan Albrecht reveals this guy? Content on his site seems consistent with recent postings.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Though it depends perhaps upon which practitioners of religion you investigate. Literacy was kept alive by the Catholic church in Europe. Islam was the religion of science and scholarship during a good portion of the time leading up to the Renaissance. Buddism/Taoism/Confuscianism, to my knowledge, have not been a hinderance to science.
It's all point of view...
Actually the majority of geeks in the world are religious. And all the great figures of geek history have been religious. Do you really think you're smarter than Newton? Or Darth Vader, who said, "Search your feelings, you know it to be true", only in a different context?
...but isn't it theorems that are proven correct and theories that might be wrong?
There's the trick ... Every religious tradition we have begins with the Divine revealing Itself to man, either directly or through an intermediary.
.... step right up folks, let me tell you all about it."
And why should anyone believe an intermediary?
I tell you, it seems to me the height of arrogance to say "The Divine selected me to tell all you heathens what is going on. Yes, this supreme, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful diety, who made us all and everything around us
Somehow that just amuses me, that I should pay attention to anyone that arrogant and full of himself.
Infuriate left and right
To draw an analogy, let us consider an example of a balloon which we will inflate.
If we were to note the rate at which two points on the surface of the baloon move apart, as measured along the surface of the balloon, we would note that the further two points are, the faster they continue they move apart. In fact, the rate of change in the rate that they move apart is actually directly proportional to the rate at which the diameter of the baloon is changing, so if the balloon's diameter is increasing at a constant rate you end up with a constant accelleration and quadratically increasing velocity.
Enter the universe, a singularity that was blasted apart by the incomprehensible energy levels that existed at the time of the big bang -- this singularity spread out in all directions and dimensions. We only perceive three of those dimensions, so to us it appears that distant objects are receeding from us at an ever increasing rate. If we could see through all the dimensions, I theorize that we would still see the objects receeding from us, but they would not be accellerating.
Gravity could easily correspond to the elasticity that you find in a balloon and can effectively serve to slow down the rate at which space expands, but just as if you launch a rocket fast enough, it will escape the gravitation pull of the earth, it is possible that the force of the big bang could have injected enough kinetic energy into the universe to keep it expanding forever. My theory is that the speed at which the particles were blasted apart was exactly equal to c.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"so in some sense, YHWH (the non-Latinized version of Jehovah) and Allah refer to the same entity."
I have found it useful to discuss the identity of God by way of "the God of Abraham" who is believed in by Christians, Jews, and Moslims.
I wouldn't say perverse. However, there are good reasons for accepting the Big Bang theory over Hoyle's hypothesis, and doing the opposite requires more than just "it appeals to my religious beliefs" to be well reasoned.
You know you may have a point!!!
After all nobody's ever seen Michael Moore in the same room with Adolf Hitler!!!
I call shenanigans on you, liberal documentary producer!
Well, we know your favoured hand weapon is your dick....
sig under development
-Devil's advocate- Could it be that dark matter doesn't exist in any form, but we have some incorrect presumptions?
For instance we believe that gravity is a distortion of space and is thusly incompatible (except via string theory) with our other friendly forces. Has there been much effort to characterize this distortion with actual numbers? I wouldn't be to surprised if gravity could be represented by our other forces through a distorted space.
As a specific question, have we shown gravity to exist to the amount we expect the nanoscopic scale, such as two single protons, or two single neutrons? Again it wouldn't be surprising if gravity came from proton/neutron interaction, and the masses we determined for both actually don't make sense on the single boson level.
I don't mean to be any sort of a science troll, I just haven't heard of this kind of thing being addressed.
Well, it turns out that parent was responding to this:
which is certainly an attack -- it's a charge of dishonesty. Mild by /. standards, but also typical fare for this site. So, yes, there was an attack.
I think this severely misunderstands the state of Christian thought. If you look at the work of, for example, J.P. Moreland or Alvin Plantinga, you will see that they do not appeal to God as an explanation for the inexplicable. Instead, they believe in God because they believe that the evidence points firmly in that direction.
I teach science: H.S. Chem and Physics. I have a driving desire to learn, and I try to spark in my students a driving desire to learn and to analyze carefully, critically, and honestly. I also am an evangelical Christian (to use a loaded, ill-defined term) with an (additional) academic background in theology. I guess I would fit your description of the scientist who does believe in a God. So I have no problem with your suggestion that science and Scripture might converge on "God" as the "final answer to the Theory of Everything", and I heartily endorse your suggestion that science can give us a greater understanding of God. Indeed, I teach my students to think that way.
The problem I have is that you portray scientists as neutral pursuers and purveyers of knowledge. They aren't. It turns out (speaking philosophically here) that everyone has a prior notion of the answer to the "does God exist?" question. This is why the question has been and continues to be unresolved philosophically. Our prior judgment on that question entirely colors our judgment as to what "counts" as proof of God's existence. It's a vicious circle, and philosophers have been unable to untangle it.
Scientists are no exception to the rule, and it comes out in all sorts of ways. For instance, take Richard Dawkins, chair of the "Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford. He has written extensively promoting evolutionary thought. So far, a seemingly neutral scientific question, right? But his books contain not only an scientific defense of evolution, but also several defamatory comments about Christianity. It turns out that he integrates his scientific worldview with his atheistic worldview, and uses his position to promote both simultaneously. And so it goes in the world at large. No man is a neutral player on the "God question"; no evidence is ever evaluated without a priori judgments as to how much proof is enough proof. That is where "faith" comes in. For careful thinkers, Faith is not a substitute for evidence. Instead, it is a willingness to evaluate a certain amount of evidence in favor of God's existence, over agains
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
74% .... The dark side of the force is always more seductive and apparently stronger ....
What if D...O...G... actually spells
C...A...T...? (revenge of the nerds) LOL
Although one might argue that the Catholic church kept literacy in the hands of the clergy rather than in the hands of the people (witness the stolid resistance to putting the catholic service into any language other than Latin as an example).
However, this is probably still one step better than "only in the hands of the 'nobility'", which holds dangers of its own.
I'm curious, what do you mean by "prefer"? Holding onto a theory because it happens to gel with what you want the universe to be like is dangerous.
Note that I am also an atheist, and I actually welcome the "Well, what would a beginning mean?" questions - mainly because I don't know, and that inspires wonder. It's what the universe is like that fascinates me, not what I want the universe to be like.
I think the theory that "dark" matter is holding the universe together (and apart) is a lot like SCO's claims: lots of puffed up hyperbole that sounds good until examined closely.
Perhaps then it is this alleged dark energy that Darl and co. are trying to use to thwart Linux?
-- haaz.
Who cannot deal with the meaningless of everything and the incomprehensible size of infinity, and need to be told what to think to live as a happy little sheep.
Fuck that. I can make up my own mind. I do not need to be told what to think. I do not fear death. I can accept the meaninglessness of everything, and live life.. because I rather enjoy it. Religious fanatics are why I own guns. The whole middle east MESS is the result of "god".
I'd rather face any almighty having lived life to my principles and learning as much about this universe as I can; than been a mindless follower to books with bloody pasts.
Instead, it is a willingness to evaluate a certain amount of evidence in favor of God's existence, over against a certain amount of evidence that would suggest God's non-existence, and deciding to cast one's lot with one side or the other. We all do it, but some of us are up front about it
I don't believe there is any evidence what so ever. If you can give me some, I'd love to hear it. For me, I refuse to formulate a decision based on the lack of information. Be careful when you say we all do it. I don't.
Now if you want to view the whole universe as an intellect of sorts, then that's up to you.
Myself, I ask 'what would a beginning imply' - and find the whole doctrine of first causes creeping into whatever scenario I can imagine.
The universe is wonderful enough without asking whether it means anything, and my atheism is of the sort that actively disapproves of theism, so any theory that removes one more of the theists planks is attractive to me.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
As fair a treaty as you are going to get on religion and science.
Unfortunately, there are enough bad actors on either side of the debate to point fingers at with disdain. I would hope each would try to see the best in each side instead of look for examples to discredit each other.
Well, if Dark Mmmmatter doesn't exist, we'll have to rethink gravity, won't we?
:-)
IMO (very humble indeed) the Dark Matter theory looks more like a shortcut, a quick patch than a solid sound theory. Yes, it fits the observed facts, but probably just because from how little we know right now, we can safely fill in the huge blanks with the right numbers. Those blanks are easy to be filled because they're totally unobservable.
I read something very interesting on gravity in deep space. A scientist who revised the rules of gravity so that the model worked without all this invisible stuff around. The amazing thing is that while this guy does exactly the same as dark matter believers - filling in blank spots until the model fits reality - he's not taken seriously at all.
While I as a non-scientist will just have to wait and see until someone explains it weally well in small words, I am betting 10 to 1 on a revision of the general theory of gravity.
Who's in?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Just because they may not be "Christian" does not mean that they do not believe in some kinda of "supreme being". ;-)
Ok, I agree with the theory of Natural Selection, there's heaps of evidence that species change due to random variation and selection pressures.
What I don't see is how random changes in DNA can eventually create more quality information for new processes.
I mean it's like taking a software package (eg MS Office) and randomly modifying / deleting / and inserting code segments and expecting the code to actually work, let alone work better. Just think about it, could a random process produce a better 2.6 kernel? would you trust it in a production environment?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
It is human nature to "know" how or why things are the way they are. You choose your explanation to be God. It is a nice and easy way to go about life, believing that everything has a purpose, but you do not need know what that is because you have God.
This is both the funniest and annoyingly smarmiest bit of atheist dogma.
How exactly is it "easier" to believe in larger things than oneself and one's pleasure? No, the "easy" thing is to say "well, we're all just animals and nothing matters. Paaaarty!".
> A search for Conan Albrecht reveals this guy? Content on his site seems consistent with recent postings.
That's rich: MIS prof invokes non-existent probability calculations to convince us that biologists don't know jack about biology.
BTW, for those who haven't followed these discussions very long, be warned that misrepresentation of credentials is so common among creationists that alarm bells should go off any time you hear an overly vague claim to authority status such as "I am a scientist", "I have a degree in science", "I work in the field", etc., and you should demand clarification.
It would have been trivial for Conan to say "I am a MIS prof", but somehow that doesn't bear the implication of subject-matter expertise that "I am a scientist" does.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Kind of like Dr. Laura. Sure, she has a doctorate... in microbiology. But, she's plays it as if she has a PH.D. in human behaviour or something.
What if dark matter indeed exists, but it's not dark ?
This thread misses an important point. Even though Ptolemy's theory was wrong, it was a lot closer to the truth than previous ideas like "the lights in the sky are gods with flashlights." The point is that even theories that are wrong add to our knowledge by providing a starting place for deeper inquiries.
Again there have been attempts to prove the existance of these particles, mainly involving mine shafts and a lot of water, and again there have been no conclusive results.
This sounded too interesting to not look up:
Mine Shafts and a lot of water
Organization running experiment
what if "gravity" didn't actually exist? the effect we call gravity could be a pressure of super small particles. differences in changing pressure could explain the why the universe looks like soap-bubbles. it could also explain areas having 10X gravity as well as the expanding universe.
what else would explain the big bang? the 70% dark energy could be the energy in these particles.
it boggles my mind that people study light generated billions of light years away, billions of years ago. they see something behaving differently than the way things behave now, and get surprised.
another thing that puzzles me. why did they just discover our closest neighbor galaxy? we really know so little. they'll probably find another even closer, actually imbedded in the milky way.
my guess is our universe is not alone. its possible that there are other ones nearby. perhaps soon we will observe galaxies moving in unexpected directions. maybe one in the opposite direction of the big bang.
I'm not sure you get what I mean. When I said "What would that imply?" I meant it as "What does that do to our understanding of how the universe works, i.e., science?" not "Does that mean there's a god?"
The universe is wonderful enough without asking whether it means anything
Right, and that's not what I'm doing. But if the universe does in fact have a beginning, as the big bang theory suggests, then that certainly has implications.
and my atheism is of the sort that actively disapproves of theism, so any theory that removes one more of the theists planks is attractive to me.
Which I find, as I stated before, a dangerous mindset. Science is not about disproving religion, it's about observing how the universe works and trying to explain it. If the universe has a beginning, well that's really cool and it makes me wonder about how it all works. If it doesn't, and is some sort of steady state phenomenon, well, that's cool too and it makes me wonder about how it all works. Make sense?
Fine, so this might not be the answer. But does the Economist present any alternative? No. Kinda like someone who complains about something, yet has no idea how to solve the problem.
They should've saved their resources for an article about something they could've been productive about. Economics, for instance.
Evolution just means 'change over time' - this is undeniably true of all life that we know of, and says nothing about a creator of whatever sort.
Your assertion that it is mathematically improbable makes me want to sit you down with a flask of hot cocoa and Dawkins' 'The Blind Watchmaker', to show you the error of your ways.
The spontaneous creation of lifeforms (even unicellular) as they exist today is highly improbable, but given our knowledge that organisms change, adapt and become more complicated through natural selection, the gradual creation of unicellular life isn't so improbable, without the need for supernatural interference.
We know that amino acids in the presence of phosphates can form stable chains, and we know that these chains can attract and join together other amino acids to form enzyme-like structures.
We also know that the Earth is very, very old, and very, very big in terms of the number of molecules that are available for the generation of life.
Ah - stuff it - just go and read Dawkins.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Wish I'd read this before replying to the Mormon fool :P.
I should know better than to argue evolution on Slashdot, but what the hey, I'll bite.
First, my field is MIS. Yes, I've read the posts about worthless MIS profs, and I'm probably one of them. You can reference my many GNU apps I've contributed to OSS. I've contributed patches to several OSS projects, most recently Spyce. I know assembly, C, C++, currently teach Java, python, and a few others. Yes, I've programmed several genetic algorithms for use in real situations. However, I was trained in the scientific method just like other scientists. Most PhDs are very much the same as far as science goes. But no, I'm not a specialist in evolution or biology. I should have been more clear.
I won't nitpick your post. Let me just talk about the mathematics of evolution. I may believe in God, but I am not against evolution. God and evolution are not mutually exclusive, and evolution may just be right. My post said that from a scientific perspective, evolution doesn't seem to hold weight with me.
The human body is a base-4 computer (A,G,C,T). Take one side of DNA, and you essentially have computer code. The human genome project suggests we have about 30,000 genes. While genes is not the same as bits (it's a collection of base-4 "bits", I'll use them for the mathematics.
To get to where we are now, we'd need at least 30,000 mutations (actually quite a bit more) that were useful enough to select over other mutations. If we assume an x percent successful mutation (quite liberal) rate, we'd need x^30,000 mutations.
The universe is believed to be about 13 billion years old. Thats 297648000 billion seconds, or y^17. How many mutations would be required per second to get to x^30,000? Statistically, I just don't see it.
Again, I'm not against evolution from a "God" perspective. I'm against it from a mathematics perspective. Just like any theory, it's useful because it allows us to model the world and understand at some level. I think evolution will be a great step to a more correct theory at some point.
I just get very bothered that people (even some scientists) think evolution is "truth", when science never proclaims to find truth. It's a *theory*.
Newton, Einstein, and others were all shown to be wrong in time, even though their theories were elegant and helped us do wonderful things (like go to the moon, fly, etc.). String theory right now is quite interesting, but it's probably not the final theory either.
If I could come up with a really good argument for a universe with a beginning that simultaneously made the idea of a god transparently irrelevant, then I'd accept the Big Bang as a point of departure.
But I dislike religion more than I like tidy theories, so I'll continue in my disputatious mode.
I'm not a scientist - just a networks guy who knows some stuff, so it's not going to stop me from advancing the cause of cosmology or anything ;P.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
(Let us know if someone needs to explain it to you.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Or, an acronym, actually.
MOND = Modified Newtonian Dynamics
It's one of those theories that sounds totally crackpot when you first hear it (and, admittedly, has some problems), but many would argue that it's no weirder than a bunch of dark stuff that we know nothing about. The destain with which astronomers and physicists view MOND is quite surprising, since they are asking us to be believe that (something like) 95% of the matter in the universe is composed of some sort of weird, non-Baryonic particle (most people favor WIMPs over MaCHOs now-a-days).
Anyway, just food for thought.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
science does a good job of explaining "what". But does very poorly at explaining "why".
Literacy was kept alive by the church, after they had driven all the competition out of the market.
Saying the church was good for literacy is like saying that MS plans to be good for programming. The church needed some literacy, strictly confined within the bounds of the church. (Even village pastors were discouraged from reading anything that the church didn't hand them.) And MS needs programmers...in precisely the same way.
Authoritarian regimes that build their base around monopolization of knowledge need a small coeterie to maintain that monopoly. This is hardly the same as encouraging it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Theories may have some testing, but that does not mean they are not wrong.
Indeed, I would risk saying that all theories are at the very least incomplete, special cases of deeper truths, such as Newtons Laws compared to General Relativity and General Relativity compared to...
-pyrrho
Listen, people, I don't necessarily believe anything any more heartily than any of you seem to, but to blanketly blame religion for the woes of the world is not the answer.
Religions consist of groups of people. People are generally not immune to corruption. Did the religion cause the corruption? No. Are people sometimes assholes? Yes.
Saying Catholicism has no redeeming value whatsoever is extremely short sighted and indicative of flawed and predjudiced thinking. Taking any human organization of that size as a whole is not going to be accurate.
The Catholic Church in Europe *was* good for literacy. Often if you were a scholar, you were in the clergy, or closely related lay person.
Perfect example? Gregor Mendel. He was a priest, monk and abbot of his monestary. He also published, in the mid nineteenth century, the definitive description of genetic heredity for nearly a century.
Now, please, stop blaming everybody involved in religion for the actions of a few assholes that probably had political and monetary motivations anyway.
Explain this without dark matter. Or perhaps the nature of the rotation of galaxies. They would fly apart! It is not as though dark matter is only explaining one sinlge phenomena. If this was so then the theory would not hold well. It however explains more then just one (e.g. the two mentioned above).
-Lauren
"Most interesting how often you humans seem to obtain that which you do not want" -Spock
Ok, so let's assume that there is only
The formula you're really looking for is 30,000/x.
Now, with the correct equation, even if we assume there is only
Please go back and revise your math. And try another approach, this one simply doesn't work.
You're a scientist. I'm 17.
As for the rest I agree :)
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
jeez
(Replying to my post) Sorry for the bad math, folks. It's late here.
:)
The funny thing is I can get a +3 Informative ranking (at least, that's the rating as of right now) on Slashdot with it.
Since when have we started to take advice in physics from economists? :)
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
... that we don't even know that we don't know...
Hxt
I have to point out that the source here is not too great. The economist is not anything close to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, even though they spend a lot of time pontificating about shit they really know nothing about. They cover economics fairly well, but on everything else, their pretty much a crapshoot like anything other magazine. Their was actually a fairly large spat between them and Scientific American over some idiot named Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a large, and largely unscientific book when he couldn't get his stuff published. He was running around saying global warming really isn't what everyone else is making it out to be, and of course the economist jumped on this as "proof" from a "scientist". Scientific American then had a nice rebuttal written by several different scientists. SciAm may lean a bit the left (Which I'm happy with), but the science coverage is solid, and nicely done for the layman like me. The economist's science coverage is about as retarded as any newspaper ttyl
Could you atheists / agnostics not believe in God for no other reason than Occam's Razor? All things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one. To me, answering questions such as our existence is most easily answered with a God. Evolution and the big bang are, while equally far-fetched as the idea of a supreme ethereal being, much more silly.
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
As for the big picture, there are theories that replace DM with funky geometry, and an interesting one was recently featured in Scientific American. However, they should produce funky patterns in the cosmic microwave background (sort of like being in a hall of mirrors). Last I heard, funky geometry fans are starting to admit aren't there.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
- Tries to do probability calculations with percentages rather than raw probability values, 0<=p<=1.
- Identifies x as "quite liberal", even though he never suggests a value, nor even puts any constraints on it.
- Offers to calculate in bits rather than 4gits, but never actually uses either.
- Introduces y, which is never used for anything. (We can calculate y though, determining that it has such-and-such a value and the head-scratcher units of seventeenth-root-of-a-second.)
- Summarizes with "Statistically, I just don't see it", though he hasn't actually done any statistical analysis.
Let me know if I missed anything...> You're a scientist. I'm 17.
You're not so determined to get the "right" answer that you have to check in your brain when the topic comes up.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
When astrophysicists say "dark matter" they don't just mean matter that isn't glowing, but matter that doesn't interact except by gravity. If DM were Plain Old Dim Matter (PODM) and evenly spread out, its drag would affect galactic dynamics like any gas. If it were clumped into compact objects (old white or brown dwarves, neutron stars, or black holes, i.e. MACHOs), we'd see more gravitational lensing events than we do. The clincher is that if any more ordinary matter had been present during the Big Bang, the nuclear reactions would have continued longer before freezing out (as the universe diluted itself by expanding), and we would have more of the heavier elements today.
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
that's the point... nothing ever is proven by traditional means to absolute means unless it's a tautology (like "Bachelors are unmarried").
You will perpetually inquire, even when you are sure you will not be absolutely sure, just sure enough that you find it not worth the time to doubt.
I cannot prove the sun will come up tomorrow but I can count on it if I like, and I do.
-pyrrho
Also see my homepage for more drivel like the above line ;-)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Ignoring the obvious fault in your math, it still doesn't make any sense. You are assuming that:
a) there's only one correct order of things to happen.
b) there's only one correct outcome.
c) there's only one shot per round and if it fails you have to start from beginning.
By your reasoning no genetic algorithm would ever work yet you can test it by firing your favourite image editor and converting 24 bpp picture to 8 bpp. It doesn't take 2^(n+1) years.
Througout the 20th century, Newton's laws have been broken down for extreme situations: high velocities (relativity), small scale (quantum mechanics) and complex situations (chaos theory). I don't understand why it would be a shock if they turned out not to work for extremely large scale objects: the theory of Dark Matter comes from a firm believe in Newtons Laws, which is not quite scientific.
why does everyone go on about how mysterious dark matter is supposed to be? dark matter is any matter that is not undergoing violent nuclear reaction (viz., in stars)so it can be seen from lightyears away. I am dark matter. You are dark matter. Now let me hear you say dark matter is mysterious, or it doesn't exist.
the question is, of course, does it account for the vast majority of mass out there. That would be what this article is really about, doh.
what do they think them shadows are made from?!
it would plain just be
useless if the univers
should expand forever.
i can't even imagine what
would happen. is this just
to scare people?
The epicycle manpage also has a HISTORY section which explains a bit about the history of the idea. It says :-
Slashdot being what it is, I'm sure there are readers who have corrections to the above. If you do, please post them as followup or email them to me.
Ptolemy's model did not agree with the movements of the planets "to an astonishing degree of precision". It was observably inaccurate.
His model was simply the best that he could do given that he refused to consider any other type of motion than circles.
Brahe and Copernicus tinkered with his model precisely because it wasn't accurate. Brahe's observations then gave Kepler the kind of data to allow him to see what was really going on in the skies.
Sure, dark matter is a kludge, but our models of the universe, inelegant as they may be, are one hell of a lot more accurate, not to mention plausible, than the ones of 1000+ years ago.
that George W. Bush is comprised of nothing but negative qualities
sounds about right to me
A matter that cannot be seen doesnt matter! So what if the universe is going to expand forever? We die, its logically that the universe die too, its the nature of nature.
It may get pulled (gravity)into other distant universes that expand and die and get pulled into other distant universes that expand and die... and so on, so all "hope" is not gone.
The purpose of a scientific theory is to give the best - and simplest - explanation that fits the obsevations, within the limits of current knowledge. In this respect Ptolemaios'es theory was good: maths with equations, algebra, differential theory etc didn't exist, only simple geometry. He formulated a theory within this framework that actually fitted fairly well; and as it turned out, the reality wasn't radically different. Planets do (almost) move on cirles, and seen from Earth, they do indeed (almost) move on epicycles.
As for dark matter - the evidence suggests that something holds the universe together, something we haven't been able to detect so far. Ie. there is some unexplained gravity (~ space-time curvature) in the universe; that gravity is equivalent with mass is a fundamental concept in modern physics. All in all, I'd say that the existence of dark matter is beyond reasonable doubt.
As for the scientists that have their doubts - that's what a scientist get paid for: having doubts. Apart from that - there are also people with a scientific education, who never the less reject the evolution theory and believe the world was created in 6 times 24 hours. What is good science is not determined by whether there are some sceptics, but whether it stands up to continued scrutiny by large numbers of scientists.
allah
Occam's razor has parallels to the use of Unit Testing in Extreme Programming (or rather, vice versa) - you build the simplest model that will pass your tests (observational evidence).
You then write more tests (i.e. acquire more detailed observations) and adjust your original model so that it will pass these new tests, whilst continuing to pass the original ones (e.g. General Relativity extending Newtonian Physics).
This re-iterates the point made some way above that science isn't (primarily) about finding the truth, but about finding the best model for the observations you have, just as Extreme Programming isn't about writing the theoretically perfect piece of software, but the simplest code that will pass all your tests.
I'm probably missing something but there is one thing i dont understand. you say "When scientists look at the way that galaxies move through space, they see that many of them move a great deal faster (about a factor of 10) than theory predicts. Assuming that current theory is correct, the most likely explanation of these observations is that there is a great deal more matter in the universe than we can currently detect."
shouldn't more matter imply greater gravity which would slow movement?
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
A theory isn't something that's proven right or wrong, true or false.
That's a hypothesis. People often get the two confused. A theory can be demonstrated to be an accurate model of reality, or an inaccurate one. But that doesn't necessarily determine its usefulness.
Example: the "electron shell" theory of atoms. That basically says that electrons orbit in circular shells around atoms. We now know that this isn't remotely the case... however, even though electron shell theory does NOT represent the actual structure of atoms, it is still a very useful theory in chemistry! Why? Because it still is an accurate method of calculating the results of chemical reactions.
So there you have it... a theory is a model of reality, or an abstraction. If it accurately models the outcomes of events, it doesn't really matter if the underlying principles are true or false. If we had a pink bunny theory of quantum mechanics, you bet scientists would be using it if it accurately predicted the results of experiments (verifying hypotheses), regardless of whether there are actually pink bunnies driving all those tiny particle-waves around. I, for one, welcome our new quantum pink bunny overlords.
So the question is... is "dark matter" a hypothesis, or a theory? If it's an existence question, true/false, then it's a hypothesis.
By the way, another explanation for the same effect is "modified newtonian dynamics" which works out nicely on paper, and accurately models the behavior of the universe, but unfortunately it hasn't been tied to any existing theory yet.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
>The magnitude and direction of the acceleration
>is constant, assuming a simple circular orbit.
>The acceleration is directed inwards.
Er, no.
The direction of "inwards" is constantly changing from the standpoint of an inertial reference frame. Imagine hovering far "above" the plane of a planet's orbit, looking down at the orbit. The direction from the planet to the body it's orbiting (i.e. the star) is always changing. If the planet starts off to your "East", then the direction from the planet to the star is "West." If the revolution is anti-clockwise (seen from above), after one-quarter orbit, the direction from the planet to the star is South. Then East, then North, then West again.
So yes, of course the direction of acceleration is always towards the star. But "always towards the star" is constantly changing with respect to a non-rotating reference frame, and a simple experiment on the planet, without looking at the sky, should establish this.
If my memory is not wrong, Riemann's geometry and other non-Euclidean geometry have greatly fostered the discovery of relativity thoery.
>He may not talk like a scientist...
OK, if he doesn't talk like a scientist, walk like a scientist or even look like a scientist then chances are he is not a scientist...
In addition to the numerous mistakes pointed out I would also like to mention you have entirely neglected the issues of parallelicity. For instance it appears mitochondria (organelles) are originally a separate entity (an algae I believe) with its own DNA. Today they live inside of us. Yup, that is amazing, but the mitochondrial DNA is there to be found.
Today we (not just humans) have assimilated them, benefitting from their development over ages by importing their DNA like a macro to our DNA. That is parallel development. And we benefitted.
The point is not whether you're a good programmer or not. The point is that you got caught inflating your credentials by implying that you have some background in biology. Unless your undergrad education was in biology or a related field, you don't. Sorry.
I'll put my engineering background up against yours as a "science" education any day, but I would never claim to be a scientist. I've studied physics, biology, and chemistry at the college level, and it's obvious that I've studied more math than you. But my fundamental background is not in biology, and I would not consider calling myself a scientist, especially not in a discussion where the topic is as far from mine as biology.
You may be an interested amateur as many of us are. That's fine. The claim that "most PhDs are very much the same as far as science goes" is just wrong, though. It may be true when comparing an economist to a history professor, but surely you see the difference between that and implying a backround in biology when you're an MIS professor? Could you work on a dental filling for me as well?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Since relativity permits any and every possible frame of reference to be valid - you merely need to keep the frame of reference consistant - the Platonic model isn't "wrong", it's merely more complex than required.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'll try to translate.
Jerf (below in thread) got the jist of this, that there are a lot of independent reasons to believe in dark matter of some form.
Protons, neutrons, and electrons, what we commonly refer to as "normal" or "baryonic" matter, make up 4.4% of the critical density of the universe. We know this from one of the cornerstones of the big bang theory, the part called nucleosynthesis. This predicts the abundances of Helium-4, Helium-3, Deuterium, and Lithium-7, which is highly consistent with observations.
(Incidentally, the book "The first three minutes" gives an excellent popular account of this.)
This matter (which is where the "MACHO" theory comes from, btw) is insufficient to explain many observations, such as:
1) Galactic rotation curves. Spiral galaxies have FLAT rotation curves, which means the angular velocities stay the same all the way out. This means that either there is dark matter in the shape of a disk or halo, or the law of gravity is wrong.
2) Velocities of galaxies in clusters. These galaxies move faster than the escape velocities based on baryons alone, therefore, they wouldn't cluster like this. Either there is more mass in there (dark matter) in the shape of a spherical halo, or the law of gravity is wrong (in a different way from #1).
3) Cosmological parameters: From Supernova and Cosmic microwave background data combined, we know that the universe is about 30% composed of matter. (Incidentally, someone asked what % is photons. The answer is 0.018%)
30% is much greater than 4.4%, and therefore there really ought to be something else. If you want to try to modify gravity (and many people do, Philip Mannheiem at UConn is one of the more famous ones to try), you need to do it in a fashion that keeps all the predictions of General Relativity intact. So far, no theory does that. They have made theories that explain galactic rotation curves, but they fail when it comes to relativistic bending of light, etc.
Sorry for the length of this, but I believe the evidence for Dark Matter is overwhelming...
My head hurts now.
Is there ever an argument against evolution that can withstand even the most cursory critical analysis? This one certainly doesn't.
Your "calculation" is a prime example of the GIGO principle. It utterly fails to capture any of the significant features of evolution. The first thing to realize is that individuals do not evolve: populations do. Without any mention of populations, your calculation is meaningless. Secondly, your calculation assumes that each of these mutations occur independently and simulateously. Mutations can be rare, but they are often passed to the descendants with a very high probability. This is also not reflected in your mathematics.
Evolution may not be truth, but it is fact. Only perverse individuals would claim otherwise.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
What he also missed is that the calculation that he attempted to make is how likely it would be to reproduce exactly what we are, not some form of intelligent advanced life (which as far as I'm concerned certainly doesn't need to be limited to humans as we are now). Nowhere does he attempt to correct for the fact that not every one of his mutations that is required for us to be like us. Not explaining myself well, but he's not accounting the fact that there are numerous very improbable events that could have led to intelligent life, so we shouldn't just focus on the single improbable event that appears to have happened and exclaim how improbable that single event is.
What do I know about economists? They
- live in their own universe
- where things Are because they Say So,
- no matter what real scientists say.
So I wouldn't worry about the current theory at all. Anything an economist says is usually far more spaced-out than dark matter, strange matter, or dark energy, and certainly has less relevance on our universe.
Hehe, not sure who that's directed to (me or the person I replied to), so I'll just assume me.
True, but I'm not attempting to claim that my corrected calculation is correct. I was simply correcting the original logic of the parent post, showing how his argument didn't even make sense. I understand that there are many other factors that I left out, which I did intentionally as it would take pages worth just to summarize.
It was aimed at the person you replied to. I was just pointing out one reason why his analysis wasn't even aimed in the right direction (even if it were done properly).
Where's the proof. Where's your examples, books, or even links to sites that show Moore's fact fall apart. Give me an example. I'm not saying he is right and I even agree it is propoganda, but so is the everyday stuff you see on CNN and FOX. If you're going to *try* and make a point you need to back it up facts not just heresay.
Sorry it's offtopic, but I couldn't resist
Please ignore. This is just a test of some issues I'm having posting to /. with Firefox.
Why not start with Newton's theory of gravity and start adding terms to it. Add a separate term for each bit of experimental evidence you have that doesn't fit Newtonian gravity. Plug them all into Matlab (or your favorite symbolic package) and tell it to simplify. Out comes a formula that describes gravity without dark matter.
Start this whole process off with simpler relativistic effects in the local solar system (Star shine around eclipses, satellites in orbit, that sort of thing). And see if it comes up with Einstein's theory of gravity. That'll prove out the basics of your system.
Finally, if the system can't be simplified because there are just too many terms, then perhaps you have a lot of different sources of gravity: dark matter.
Sigh... this posting has so many replies already, this one probably won't ever get read...
Rudy
(subject used without Thoreau's permission)
1. 2.
My interpretation of the whole Dark Matter/Dark Energy thing is that we're not saying anything beyond that there is something out there causing forces that we can't explain. I mean, Ptolemy had a very exact mathematics associated with his spheres, and Aristotle had a very specific description of his elements...
But ambiguity is built into the definition of our Dark Matter/Energy, because we're not making any sort of assertions about its properties other than what we can directly deduce. I have a degree in Philosophy of Science, and from my point of view, the physics community has kept these definitions ambiguous precisely to keep us from falling into a bad or misleading theory/paradigm like we did for Aristotle or Ptolemy. This is closer, in my opinion, to the ether concept at the end of the 19th century, in which we believed that there must be an ether that accounts for the motion of light and other effects. Michelson and Morley and a few others proved this wrong, and if the Dark Stuff is wrong, then people will undoubtedly prove it wrong shortly also...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
I'm not going to argue that MIS professors are useless but I'm perfectly comfortable saying they aren't scientists -- they are closer to engineers but that's not quite right either.
I've read most of this thread and its various sub-threads.
Are you attempting to disprove the existance of God?
Or are you refuting attempts to prove the existance of God?
Would you agree with the statement "the proof that God is unecessary to explain the complexity of our existance can be interpreted as proof that god does not exist"? or would you agree with the counter argument that "the lack of proof that a phenomenon exist does not necessarily disp[rove its existance"?
I'm not taking issue with any of your arguments here. I'm just attempting to determine which side of this very fine line your belief (or lack thereof) falls.
If it's too personal, just ignore this.
I know this is a bit late to the discussion, but a book I found interesting regarding gravity is "Dark Mater Missing Planets & New Comets, Paradoxes Resolved Origins Illuminated", by Tom Van Flandern. In it, he discusses the idea that gravity doesn't eminate from massive bodies, but is composed of particles flying through space. The massive bodies effectively block some of these particles, pushing masses together, rather than the masses pulling themselves together. The idea isn't new, and of course there's a lot more to it. A part of this theory that staes that light will become redshifted as it travels through space due to being absorbed and reemitted by these gravitons. This has been labelled the "tired light" theory to try and discredit it. The only real criticism I have of this book is that he often states this theory explains observed phenomenon "a priori", whereas existing theories need to be changed. Of course, since he was aware of these phenomenon when he wrote the book, he would've made any such changes already. It's not exactly a priori. In that sense, he's guilty, IMHO, of the same close mindedness as others he criticizes for rejecting this theory without serious consideration. But, I believe many of his ideas are at least very close to the truth. It is simple, compared to dark matter. Everytime I read an article talking about how the latest experiments haven't identified the nature of dark matter, I chuckle. I think they're chasing ghosts, and clinging to those ghosts is preventing us from making real progress.