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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.'"
Much like a dog staring at a shiny object, I'm fascinated by this but I don't understand it.
Jedi don't stand a chance.
HAD
You can't see it, anyway. It's too dark!
I couldn't be bothered with the article but I think I probably agree with this guy, not those other guys.
In Britain it's called His Dark Materials. Our supply of asterisks dissapeared along with our dentists
Since we know Dark Suckers aren't useless, dark matter must exist.
Q.E.D.
"What If Dark Matter Really Doesn't Exist?"
Then wait for Star Trek to invent a new theory.
"Derp de derp."
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!
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?
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)
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.
Well actually knowledge of its existence and how much of it exists will determine whether or not the Universe eventually implodes on itself in the "Big Crunch" or whether the universe will keep expanding at the speed of light forever. So technically speaking, "in the long run" it will matter quite a bit :)
Regards,
Steve
We _ARE_ flying all over the place, so is the sun.. If Dark Energy exists it's probably somewhere in the shredded Enron papers..
Mod +5 Drunk
That's what I love about physics: it's so out there that you'd think the person who just said something like that was smoking crack, if he didn't have a PhD.
Gravity bleeding between universes...
Who needs science fiction?
Meep.
If it had been in the New York Times, I'd have bitched about the registration instead. Think of this as a change of pace.
...If we could find a "purer" form of moving energy,..
Oh great, Thanks. Now all I can hear in my head is Spock saying "pure energy" over and over again.
Proverbs 21:19
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.
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
Yes but, who cares?
yeah, ok, but who cares about them?
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
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?
Looks like we're gonna have to stick some moldy olives in a freshly-killed goat and bury it in the sand for 48 weeks. Then we dig it up and soak it in the blood of a 3rd-born virgin girl. If the goat's eyes turn pink, God will give Lyndon Larouche syphilis, if they turn purple, dark matter exists. It's not the cleanest proof, but I say we give it a shot.
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.
>> think about it - 1500 years wasted trying to make epicycles work.
Dang, their billable hours must have krunked the project.
Maybe if we wait another year the program will halt...?
Too bad they were so bent on epicycles, TRON has a much cooler cycle game and it works!
(-1, troll)
As a scientist, I'm sure you can completely explain this mathematically, as a scientist should.
Oh wait, you're not a scientist. Oh well.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
No its not, it just has a lot of "dark content" that you can't see but which weighs heavily against its moderation. ... really sorry, I couldn't resist.
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
... 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
You think THAT's bad? Some physicists will continue to work on dark matter for years and years AFTER their deaths.
There's nothing more piteous than a zombie scientist scouring the halls of CERN, muttering about "Brains!" and "WIMPs!" for all eternity.
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
Along the lines of "Musicians don't die, they just decompose," how about, "Physicists don't die, they just turn into cold, dark matter"?
You might as well say that tiny invisible demons are causing strange things to happen... Are you trying to say that TINY INVISIBLE DAEMONS DON'T REALLY EXIST?!?
What if we were just another type-13 planet, trying to resolve this question of dark matter, only not realizing that our scientists were about to accidentally unlock the secret that would render our planet into a super-dense collection of particles the size of a pea? ...or something like that ;-)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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.
Even though I try to believe six impossible things before breakfast, some propositions I just can't swallow
Then you need an Electric Monk (tm).
What happens if you live your live believing in the christian god, and it turns out that in fact the gods are norse?
Actually, God is a Bhuddist.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
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_
Reminds me of a joke.
A bunch of astronomers were at a convention and the speaker was talking about the sun. He said, "In five billion years when the sun dies..." and there was a gasp from the back of the room and a man stood up.
Everyone was silent, including the speaker.
The man says, "Excuse me, how long did you say?"
"Five billion years."
"Whew! For a minute there, I thought you said 5 *million* years."
Ok, I thought it was funny. I'll sit down now.
74% .... The dark side of the force is always more seductive and apparently stronger ....
mathematicians!
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.
That's so incredibly wrong, I don't even know where to begin. Fourier sequences are about transformation into the frequency domain. Epicycles are about imaginary circles.
This should be modded "funny"