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Good bye Dark Matter, Hello General Relativity
dr. loser writes "The CERN newsletter reports that a new paper by scientists at the University of Victoria has demonstrated that one of the prime observational justifications for the existence of dark matter can be explained without any dark matter at all, by a proper use of general relativity! What does this imply for cosmology and particle physics, both of which have been worrying about other aspects of dark matter?"
.. that Dark Doesn't Matter??
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The concept is neat. I'm not about to wade through the math and double-check anything. It'd be nice if we could stick with general relativity without dark matter.
On a side note, they are distributing the source. It's possible they may even be GPL friendly.
GPL friendly physicists rule.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
...the simplest solution turns out to be the best.
Geeze science, make up your mind - Think of the poor sci-fi writers for those made-for-tv movies! Have you considered THEM before publishing research findings??
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Science just isn't definite these days, is it?
Maybe.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
That's really interesting. It makes sense to model a galaxy as a fluid on a very large scale. After all, gravity is a relatively weak force. I haven't gone through the paper, but if their math is right, since the assumption is relatively benign, this seems like it would be experimentally verified.
Since the model assumes that a galaxy is a fluid (on a large scale), the model would predict fluid-like phenomena. What I wonder is if there is a galactic analogue to solitary waves. How would these manifest? (A friend wrote his thesis on solitons)
After all, I am strangely colored.
...was physicists around the world collectively slapping their foreheads.
Dark Reflection
Aha, but the Electric Universe theory offers a solution as to why much dark matter is replacing the grey matter that used to be important to our society.
Was this another English to Metric conversion that screwed it all up?
Science never has been definite. The defining characteristic of science is that it accepts that all solutions to problems are tenative, and that some piece of information might turn up in the future that will cause us to doubt what we now believe. Intellectual process can't happen without replacing wrong old ideas with better new ones.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
A recent Scientific American article does mention the formation of waves in galaxies. It's worth reading!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Always smelled like aether/ether to me anyway.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
I always thought "dark matter" was a kind of special pleading, an appeal to magic in the face of the unknown.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
It has seemed in recent years that scientists have shunned the scientific method in exchange for sensationalism. As someone else alluded to, it seems that scientists are more interested in concocting incredible theories rather than addressing the more simple facts that are staring them in the face. Science community: please return to hard science, not fantasy.
TFA is just plain silly.
Every teccie knows that the universe is held together by gaffer tape, and the only problem has been to find the link between gaffer tape and dark matter.
If relativity does away with dark matter, well fine, but the cosmologists are missing the key issue here. All this means is that now we have to find the link between relativity and gaffer tape.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What does this imply for cosmology and particle physics, both of which have been worrying about other aspects of dark matter?
The case for dark matter has been built for several decades. There is a mountain of evidence that needs an alternative explanation. I would call these new results tentative at best.
an ill wind that blows no good
I wonder if some scientists might already be so invested in theories of dark matter that they will refuse to accept this position.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
This may also be a cautionary tale about the use of linear models (Newtonian gravity) versus nonlinear ones -- interactions among masses distort the solution. If one assumes the wrong things and gets an answer that doesn't fit the observations, perhaps its time to change the assumptions, not add unseen dark matter, epicycles, etc.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It is worth noting that a new idea surpassing current thinking (and demoting current thinking to wrong, old ideas) is not arbitrary. It is not a matter of the old scientists dieing off.
It is a matter of new ideas (a) explaining all of the old observations and experimental results that supported the old theory, as well as (b) explaining observations and experimental results that the old theory could not.
I am not capable of reviewing the observations and redoing the math to verify whether GR by itself explains the observed rotation rates of distant galaxies. Over the next few months more qualified scientists will look at this and publish what they think. Dark matter may go the way of the luminiferous aether. Once it is gone, it is very unlikely to come back in its original form or for its original purpose.
I wonder if this analysis has an effect on the chain of inferences leading to the conclusion that the galactic expansion is accelerating.
...is going to become the major worry. Data from supernovae distance measurements indicate that the Universe has been expanding for some time already. That means that there has to exist a sort of anti-gravity (called dark energy by astrophysicists). Now, that is hard to explain by conventional means (although it is possible), and may involve either a "beyond Einstein" type of theory (e.g., an improved general relativity) or some exotic form of energy (or both). So, although general relativity alone might account for the rotational curves of galaxies, it does not account for the large-scale properties of the universe.
It means my physics paper is proper fucked, for one.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
How many of us have done as much?
Hell, even Hawking has never shaken up the ideas of science and physics to anything near the degree Einstein has.
How long has he been dead? And he's STILL stirring up trouble!
Personally, I think his statue in Washington DC needs to be bigger. He's done far more for this country and the world at large than most of the people with bigger statues. It's just not fair!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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The poster title is misleading, the paper still leaves a place for dark matter, but on very smaller amounts and far from the halo. So, this matter could easily be barionic (paper's conclusion).
What is really interesting is that the third galaxy didn't fit the model as well as the others. It may be because of the inacuracy of the calculations (is the inacuracy measurable? The paper should have said that) or because there is something different on this one, maybe a smaller concentration of dark matter near the center.
Rethinking email
Really?! I'm interessted in astronomy and physics at a hobbyist level, and have always assumed that the simulations of gravity and galaxy formation was done with relativistic mathematics. Instead they have used approximations using newtonian theories? WTF? No wonder they came out wrong!
I can live with newtonian approximations on a solar system level, but doing cosmology on the scale of galaxies, the age of the universe it self and so forth they really should have used the sharpest tool in the tool box.
If I had the knowledge and the machine power to do simulations my self I would've done so, but I don't so I trusted the astronomers. They really shuldn't have taken the shortcuts, escpecially after their scientific profgress went boink and they started devicing exotic new models just to cover up their seemingly faulty theories! Shouldn't they have done a simmulation without the approximations just to evaluate how good their approximations was?
I'm dissapointed!
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Dark matter always seemed like it was in the honored high school chemistry tradition of adding a fudge factor. There was no direct observational evidence for it, but tossing it in there made the numbers fit.
Particle physics in particular is an interesting exception to the "old scientists dieing off" rule of how science works. From what I hear, it's commonly accepted that the Standard Model is "wrong", in that the fundamental underlying model is false, but it keeps predicting new observations so well that alternative theories can't get any traction.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What does this imply for cosmology and particle physics, both of which have been worrying about other aspects of dark matter?
I think it implies that we can stop chasing for something that probably doesn't exist, and get about the business of finding out what's really going on out there.
Maybe it's just me, but the first time I heard about dark matter and how it "must be out there" because it makes the calculations add up nicely...first thing I thought of was the ether. For a long time we needed an ether to explain radio waves, light propogation, etc. Turns out the truth of the matter is something totally other. And it's a far more facinating other, IMHO.
I'm guessing that hundreds of years from now, physics students will be reading about dark matter and chuckling. Same way we do today when we read about the luminiferous ether.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Before this paper, it seemed that the rotation of galaxies was inconsistent with the amount of visible matter.
Now it is consistent. But is it consistent with the visible matter plus any significant amount of dark matter? That is, does the GR calculation show that there can't be much if any dark matter?
Even if the article was correct, and dark matter was not needed to explain rotation curves in galaxies, dark matter is still needed to explain the acceleration of the universe, its large scale structure and the primordial anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background.
I noticed you were referring to an article on arXiv.org. While it may certainly be true, these articles have not been peer reviewed by a scientific journal. Also note that this author appears to have only the single article on the site (which may or may not mean anything - draw your own conclusions).
I think arXiv.org is a great idea - a way for physicists to communicate ideas informally before going through the hassle of getting them published. It's still best to take it all with a grain of salt, as papers here may not be as carefully reviewed as other sources.
"(a) It is worth noting that a new idea surpassing current thinking (and demoting current thinking to wrong, old ideas) is not arbitrary. (b) It is not a matter of the old scientists dieing off."
I agree with (a) but disagree with (b). Saying (b) is simply ignoring the social aspects of science because they aren't pretty. But that in fact is how science often works. The new ideas cannot gain traction while the old guard is in control. The new scientists are able to see both theories for what they are, and choose the better one, but the old scientists (a) have too much vested in the old model (like their entire reputations), and (b) after agreeing with a particular model for an extended length of time, have trouble seeing the difference between something which disagrees with their model and something that disagrees with reality. After a while, they become one and the same.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I worked for years drving the VLT in Chile...MOND was a very hot anti-dark matter theory in that control room...
y namics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_d
The universe is expanding. Has been expanind (in the minds of astronomers, at least) since Hubble's observations let him convince the rest of the astronomers.
An interesting question is "is the rate of expansion increasing or decreasing?" GR (even classical Newtonian gravitation) suggests that the expansion rate should be slowing. Observations of Type-I SuperNovae over the last decade or so suggest that they are brighter than we would expect if the expansion were slowing. This brightness is usually taken to indicate that they are closer than we think they are. Which suggests that their recession rate was smaller in the past than we observe now. Which implies that recession rates are growing, which is to say the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Now, we still have a few gaps, including that small things appear not to behave the same way as big things. No doubt, if we can quantify the differences* -- or explain why that would be impossible -- we can take a stab at a single Grand Unifying Theory which would underpin all of Physics.
It's also possible that there could be another possible set of laws of physics which would be mutually consistent, even consistent with the G.U.T., just contrary to all our observations. If there existed a parallel universe which obeyed this set of laws, one of four things could happen:
- It would collapse to a single point in our space
- A single point of space in that universe would be bigger than the whole of this universe
- It would exist for only a brief instant of our time
- A single instant of time in that universe would last longer than the lifetime of our universe
Of course, it's also possible {but extremely unlikely} that there is no Grand Unifying Theory, just a supreme being with a sick sense of humour who keeps changing the rules slightly every time we get close to discovering what they are* Canonical example of difference between quantum and classical phenomena: Why can't a chair just spontaneously shift position? My own take is that quantum wave functions do exist in large systems, but "quantum" phenomena are not generally observed because the waves are not coherent {just as you don't see interference fringes where the light from two candles falls on the same surface}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Hypothesizing Dark Matter isn't a bad idea, but it seems as if it bypassed the vetting process and became accepted as fact too quickly. It does fill a need (accounting for unknowns in the previous model), but it's hardly the only possible explanation. It's almost a scientific equivalent of Haliburton's "no-bid" contracts in Iraq.
People don't like unknowns, and sometimes let their imaginations fill in the gap. Get enough people together imagining the same thing and belief system forms. Carry this too far and it becomes institutionalized. A lot is then staked on that basic belief.
Right now, "Intelligent" Design is making inroads into the American education system. It answers questions a lot of people have, but in no way holds up to scientific scrutiny. Teachers careers have been ruined by opposing it. Education becomes indoctrination and critical thinking becomes the enemy.
Acceptance of the Dark Matter model is hardly on that level, but there quite a few scientific reputations dependent upon it. I wonder how much thought and experimentation may have been stifled because it threatened someone higher up.
The three most important words in a relationship are "I love you." The two most important are "Humor me."
Black holes are, well, dark... so all the 'dark' matter is concentrated in localized places, namely the center of the galaxies.
Black holes at the center of galaxies have masses of 10^6 to 10^9 times the mass of the Sun. (Our Galaxy's black hole is towards the smaller side of that range.
Large galaxies themselves have masses of 10^11 to 10^12 times the mass of the Sun.
The black holes at the centers of galaxies, as far as just gravity is concerned, are dynamically unimportant to the outer parts of the galaxies.
Plus, the problem is more than that. It's not just that we don't have enough matter to explain the rotation curves of galaxies or the velocity dispersion of galaxy clusters, it's not in the right place. As you get farther from the center of the galaxy, you need more and more matter compared to what we see. Adding more matter right at the center wouldn't help that, even if the black holes were big enough (which they aren't).
(The black holes may be dynamically important to the evolution of galaxy structure for other more complicated reasons-- the generation of energy in their accretion disks can create jets and such that may limit the growth of galaxies-- but that's a separate issue from expalining the rotation curves we see in spiral galaxies.)
-Rob
If gravity has no "speed" then the advisories against instantaneous communication are violated as a change in the relative position of mass A to mass B would instantly be signaled even across the galaxies.
If gravity does have a speed then wouldn't this "dark matter" be explained as all of the extra grativational "signals" making their way through the universe?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
I've dealt with this same issue.
There seems to be, as you put it, a "dogmatic" belief, often from undergrads (I'm guessing), that their now current understanding of physics is "right", and that any questioning of dark matter is an excuse to call the qestioner ignorant.
I've asked numerous times why I should think dark matter is anything other than a mildly promising theory.
The responses questioning my intelligence, calling me names, and generally being assholes outnumber the cogent replies 3 to 1.
Since when did scientists start behaving like fundies?
There are two problems in astrophysics in which dark matter is invoked as a possible explanation. One is the "galaxy problem": galactic rotation curves imply a distribution of matter different that you would infer from looking at the luminous matter. The other is the "cosmological problem": observation of redshift vs. distance, and of the cosmic microwave background, and other similar measurements imply a total mass density in the Universe different from what you would infer from looking at the luminous matter. Each of these problems can be explained with dark matter (e.g. some kind of extremely massive particles that only participate in the weak interaction, not yet observed). Sadly, the properties of the dark matter needed to solve these two problems are not necessarily the same.
This paper claims to eliminate the need for dark matter to solve the galaxy problem, but does not address the cosmology problem.
People tend to snicker sometimes history classes hearing about people who created the strangest "scientific" theories in order to fit their ideas to how the universe actually worked. Epicycles, aether, heavenly spheres...
Dark matter?
Actually, maybe those guys weren't all that laughable or dogmatic as you'd think. Maybe they just needed some time to work out the formula they needed.
Science tells us a lot more than it used to about the universe around us, but I don't think the days of imaginary constructs in science is over yet.
When science teachers started teaching `facts' instead of the simplest hypotheses which were not disproved by any observational evidence.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
IAAP, and while I see where you're coming from I'd actually make the argument in the opposite direction.
A previous poster has already noted a paper (astro-ph/0508377) which quickly followed this one and refuted its conclusions (I have seen other physicists describe the same point elsewhere). It seems (though I have not yet checked the math myself) that the authors made an honest error, and they weren't modeling the situation they thought they were. In addition to the self-gravitating cloud of gas they were trying to model, the metric also includes a disk-shaped "singularity" - essentially a very thin, very heavy disk in the plane of the galaxy. It is this unphysical disk which is responsible for the effect they observe.
It's also worth noting that dark matter has MANY independent lines of evidence pointing to it (rotation curves, gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, large scale structure, element abundances... see here). Galactic rotation curves were the first such evidence, but arguably they are the weakest today. I'm still more than willing to believe that the dark matter paradigm could be wrong, and this result would be VERY interesting if true, but there would still be lots left to explain. This is how science works, of course - idea gets put forward, it gets checked by others, the community works out what to think of it.
This also makes me think of the current controversy over intelligent design, but in the opposite way to the previous poster. Look at the Slashdot thread around us. Hundreds of people are posting to say how relieved they are that dark matter doesn't exist, since they always thought it was too weird and that those pointy-headed physicists were out of touch with their own good common sense. They feel very confident doing this, even though (1) they admit that they don't understand the evidence and reasoning they are talking about (even as some of them chastise physicists for the "basic error" they were making), and (2) the reasoning itself was later shown to be flawed. Several posters have tried to make follow-up postings showing that this reasoning has been refuted, but they can't hit every discussion thread (and it's not clear it would do any good if they did). As with the anti-evolution "controversy", people latch on to sensational headlines of flaws in basic science and simplistic errors by scientists to believe whatever they felt most comfortable believing to begin with. From there, it's an uphill battle to get the truth out there.
The problem, as I see it, is often that those who question the theories don't have anything better to back them up -- they're just presented with skepticism or an alternative answer that has nothing to do with physics.
Of course, I think there's more room for that in astrophysics, given the focus on math and proofs rather than testing (due to rather obvious logistics). A new mathematical proof can come out that completely changes how people view space (or, heck, an appropriate use of an old mathematical proof, as the article shows).
But I can understand why some people would be a trifle edgy nowadays. I'm not saying that you provoked the argument, as I've dealt with scientists (heck, I live with one and hang out with her friends), but I have to ask -- when you said it was a 'mildly promising theory,' did you present an alternative opinion? One thing I learned is that scientists really dislike people saying "I don't believe that" or "I think that theory is wrong" but then don't offer what they DO believe in that's based on science. After all, that doesn't accomplish anything -- it just states a claim of belief, which isn't science.
But I don't think I need to explain why an "accepted theory" will have people assume that it's accurate and "true" and be reluctant to drop it just at some new information or test or mathematical proof. That older theory generally has plenty of evidence to back it up -- the new theory has none. So people will look at the new theory, run through the math or tests on their own, and confirm, therefore changing the general understanding. That's how science works. The reluctance to accept just any new information without seeing a lot more proof is one of the reasons science tends to add to a base of knowledge, rather than jumping down any old path.
Dark matter always seemed like it was in the honored high school chemistry tradition of adding a fudge factor. There was o direct observational evidence for it, but tossing it in there made the numbers fit.
But that's how you usually discover things: Make predictions from your current theories, collect data and compare it to the predictions, make up new theories that explain it better, use the data to chose between theories and tell you where to look for more data to make better choices, and iterate.
Sometimes people take shortcuts or make errors in calculation and you have to check their work. And there's valuable science to be done there. But it's more "scientist fun" (and funding) to come up with "George's theory of dark matter" than "George's proof that Sam blew his calculations and Einstien was right after all". So sometimes it takes a while.
Now we wait for "Larry's proof that George blew HIS calculations and Sam was closer to the real world" or "Larry's confirmation that George's model has fewer/smaller holes than Sam's."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You say "even Hawking", as if he towers over other physicists, but I don't see what you'd base that on. It's true that he's really famous and kicks ass when it comes to blackholes... but I don't think Hawking is in the same league as Feynman (to take another famous personality), Heisenberg, Planck, at least in terms of useful ideas (how are we to ever really know if there's a singularity inside a blackhole?). For that matter, where would Einstein have gotten without his friend Minkowski or without the work of Lorentz or Planck.
Which just goes to show you--once a scientific "fact" has been established, our attachment to it becomes as dogmatic as any theological notion...
Perhaps for some people, but not for the overall scientific community. This article being the most obvious example. And I need not note the difficulty one would encounter trying to debunk a theological notion...
I have often mentioned my disbelief in common astronomical theories to my fellow students at the Niels Bohr Institute here in Copenhagen, and not once have I been meet with an attitude like the one you describe. (For instance I don't believe such a thing as a GR-black hole actually exists..)
In my oppinion your fellow students are seriously lacking in their scientifical education if they are unable to accept that alternative theories should be considered seriously but critically.
Perhaps with quantum mechanics as the only possible exception (because QM is true and that's just the way it is.. :), I have never had the experience that any scientific theory has been considered unquestionably true.
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None of that answers my question.
Dark Matter is far from an accepted Hypothesis, yet seemingly intelligent people defend it on the basis that it's the best thing going.
That's just stupid. Science isn't about being right, or falling into lockstep with "accepted theories", it is about continually asking questions.
My question about dark matter has always been "Why is it more acceptable to make up a new type of matter, rather than deal with the idea that the fundamental forces may work differently than is believed?"
Why is one SO MUCH better than the other? There is precedent for both possibilities.
Wrong. Copernicus still had the planets moving in circles. The big difference (and the reason of the rejection by the church) was that in his model he put the sun instead of the earth in the center.
It was Kepler who found that the planets don't really move in circles, but in ellipses.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm not in this field anymore, but I spent 4-5 years in quantum gravity, black hole astrophysics, and inflationary cosmology. Summarizing my reactions to other comments in this thread:
First, I will say that I have not gone through this new paper in detail. I'm skeptical at a gut level that their results seem to depend on general relativity, because GR should not be relevant on the scale of galactic rotation curves: there is good reason why all the calculations ignore GR. It makes me think that there is a flaw in their calculation, and indeed another poster referred to a potential rebuttal of their GR analysis.
Second, as yet another poster mentioned, galactic rotation curves are just ONE evidence for dark matter. We have evidence from the aforementioned stellar orbits in galaxies, plus the motions of satellite dwarf galaxies, gravitational lensing, measurements of galactic gas temperatures (depends on the local gravitational neighborhood), anisotropies in the CMBR, the rate and structure of large-scale cosmological structure formation, etc.
(There are also a bunch of theoretical reasons to believe that dark matter particles could exist purely on the basis of particle physics, even if you ignore the astrophysical evidence; see axions, supersymmetry, etc.)
It's not surprising to come up with an alternative that can explain ONE of these phenomena. In fact, there is already another alternative that can also explain galactic rotation curves: MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics), an alterating of Newton's laws of gravity. (There is a relativistic extension by Bekenstein, although it's currently even more ad hoc than dark matter appears to be.)
The problem is coming up with explanations for ALL of these phenomena. Dark matter is the only theory that has been able to do so, and it's not for lack of trying. Contrary to popular Slashdot groupthink, scientists are not in love with coming up with the most absurd and exotic possibilities they can. Most astronomers hated dark matter. For decades. I even know one who only came around to it a few years ago. It's simply that dark matter works, and everything else people tried to propose in its place didn't. As Carl Sagan said, "No physicist started out impatient with commensense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction... Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, commonplace notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply."
Now, this is not to say that dark matter is the end-all, unassailable dogma. It's possible there are alternatives, including modifications to gravity. I like to compare it to the discovery of Neptune and the perihelion precession of Mercury. People say that it's ad hoc to postulate unseen matter to explain gravitational anomalies. But that's precisely what led to the discovery of Neptune: its gravitational effects on Uranus. On the other hand, you can't always get away with postulating unseen matter: when Mecury's orbit wasn't behaving right, people tried inventing an unseen planet ("Vulcan"), but it turned out that general relativity was the answer, modifying the laws of gravity. Either can be right a priori.
In the dark matter case, it was once true that the evidence in its favor was strong and there were a number of competing theories, but now there is a lot more evidence, and higher standards for theories, and dark matter is pretty much all that's left. People should and do continue trying to come up with alternatives, but as of now, dark matter is still the best game in town. Far from claims of ad-hockery and epicycles, dark matter is actually a robust physical theory: most theories of dark matter have already been falsified because they make such specific predictions about what we should see. It's only a very specific type, quantity, and distribution of dark matter that can work. That's the hallmark of a good theory, not unfalsifiable wish-fulfillment.
Finally: this is a
My favorite quote on this general issue comes from Carl Sagan in one of the Cosmos shows:
Talking about early observations of Venus...
"Observation: Couldn't see a thing.
Conclusion: DINOSAURS!!!"
That scientific methodology has not left us, I am afraid to say.
I think the reason is that in seeking for more fundamental theories in particle physics we get theories which imply there are some particles we don't know yet. Therefore it's not too unlikely that there is a form of matter we don't know yet, and there's no known reason that it may not be enough to be relevant in large scale structures. Therefore, introducing dark matter means introducing something which we might well have to introduce anyway. Changing the law of gravitation means doing another, independent change. Therefore, introducing dark matter is the simpler solution. Moreover, dark matter has a better testability (because we can search for new particles in our accelerators).
What astonishes me is that a GR calculation seems to be done only now: I would have expected this to be the first thing to check before introducing anything new, be it dark matter or modified laws of physics.
Disclaimer: I'm neither in astrophysics nor in particle physics, therefore the above is just an educated guess.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is a very interesting discussion for me, since I took General Relativity from Dr. Cooperstock when I was at UVic 6 years ago. He was a great teacher, but he always had slightly... unconventional ideas? Such as he doesn't believe in the existence of black hole singularities. It doesn't surprise me that he would write a paper refuting the existence of dark matter, but knowing him, I'm not sure I would trust it.
Now, I'm not saying he won't turn out to be right. But I'm not holding my breath on this one.
My question about dark matter has always been "Why is it more acceptable to make up a new type of matter, rather than deal with the idea that the fundamental forces may work differently than is believed?"
Well, because there was no theoretical framework to explain the data without the use of darkmatter. Let's face it, the whole darkmatter hypothesis is extremely ad-hoc, a fudge factor added into galactic rotation calulations to make them fit to what was expected. The outcome was a predicition that darkmatter must exist.Now, there is nothing particularly unscientific about this. Go take a look at particle physics where all kinds of particles were predicted to exist, and as a result many particle physicists went out looking for these particles. When they were found, this confirmed the theory, when the particles were not found, they continued to look, or they revised the theory.
The same kind of thing happened here. People have been looking for darkmatter for quite some time, however, it appears that a revision to the models used to predict galactic rotation curves *and* galactic clustering is what's needed.
Why was the existance of darkmatter more "acceptable?" 1) Basically, because it was a prediction that fit the models. That's something that scientists like a lot, it gives the experimentalists something to really sink their teeth into. And 2) there was no way to predict that a change in the theory was needed without having already developed a theoretical framework that could explain galactic rotation curves without the need for darkmatter.
As an astronomer, I would say that you're not wrong to ask your question, however, without having any idea of how our theory might need to be changed, it's kind of a pointless question. And in this case, it sounds like we really don't need to change our theory at all, it turns out that the range of validity of Newtonian gravity is a lot smaller than we thought.
I think the bigger question in my mind is why hadn't someone tried to do this before now? In some sense, it's one of those things that just kind of surprises you, because all of a sudden you realize that *everyone* has been operating under the same false assumption about Newtonian gravity, and then you wonder why nobody thought to check that out.
Of course, this all assumes that this new model using relativity is correct... It probably is, but I think it does need to under go the usual scrutiny just to be sure.
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Now, I don't mean to imply that the authors are cranks or similar; I'm not in the GR community, and I've no reason to believe that they're anything but sincere and competent. But it does add fuel to the fire, and something for the "I've always known dark matter is a crock"/"those scientists don't know what they're doing"/"they're repressing alternative ideas" folks to consider.
Dark matter is divided into "ordinary" and "exotic" dark matter. Ordinary dark matter includes baryonic matter, plus black holes, neutron stars and the like (astophysicists don't seem to call free neutrons baryons, go figure; they call carbon a metal). TFA is only really talking about "exotic" dark matter, the rest is detectable through its effects in reasonably certain ways.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> I believe the solution known as "dark matter" is an approach known as multiplying entities.
Funny, I call it "the best hypothesis so far". It may lose that status if the new one stands up to scrutiny, but that's no justification for dismissing it as a hack.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't know that they put theologians and politicians to shame, per se. I've seen ugly fights there too :) But you're right, science is no bastion of open-mindedness either.
There are certainly evolutionists that hold the view you describe, but they are not so monolithic in their attitudes (see the NCSE website, for instance). Bear in mind that the evolution fight for the past several years has been to keep evolution in the classroom, or to prevent it being watered down by indirect attacks (e.g. intelligent design theory). In other words, it's been largely a defensive fight. But that said, I think what you would find, were you to speak to evolution proponents, is that they do not object, per se, to religion in schools. You want to have a religion/philosophy/epistemology course? Go for it. Just don't put it in a science classroom. It's not science and it has no place there. If this isn't absolutely clear, then maybe we need to do a better job teaching what science is in the classroom.A valid criticism of science teachers, but not of scientists. A difference sometimes overlooked.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There aren't any competing scientific theories outside of evolution so I'm not sure what else a biology class could teach. Obviously, evolution is not cut dried, it's science, its a living thing that is being updated constantly. That's why we have journals.
Maybe you're thinking of Creationism/ID? I guess you could hold it up as pseudo science (what not to do) but that's more pertinent to a philosophy class.
"because QM is true and that's just the way it is.. "
I find this funny because I too see this a lot. It must come from trying to teach the subject. When pressed, however, I've had people fall back to "OK, it could all be wrong, but *you* have to proposed a better quantum theory of measurement first". So I think even Quantum(tm) alternatives may be considered seriously but critically, it's just that you have to propose a very broad replacement theory, beyond what could easily be expressed in English.
On the whole I too have found scientists very willing to consider alternative theories, as long as those theories haven't already been considered and determined to be false.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Please, global warming is a fact, the man-made greenhouse effect is the theory that is being questioned. Please keep them separate. When you question global warming you have to back it up with proof that the temperature measurements from the past century are wrong.
Okay. How about this?
Funny, I call it "the best hypothesis so far".
Sometimes "we don't know what causes that" is a better answer than "the fairies cause it with their magic". Maybe the latter is the "best hypothesis" but, more importantly, it's crap.
In my experience, undergraduate science students, at least in the US, are usually of the belief that they are being taught "facts". Maybe in an introductory class more emphasis is placed on the unknowns, but as they move into their specialties all but the most controversial or speculative ideas are presented as facts.
Generally as they move into graduate studies there is more emphasis on the quest for knowledge as opposed to the memorizing and understanding of facts.
As one of my professors said my first year of graduate school, "You're graduate students now...you're allowed to have opinions."
IMO, all science degrees should include a class in Philosophy of Science. Most undergraduate students I've talked to about this idea say something along the lines of "Philosophy has nothing to do with science."
-pete
However, because the people talking about 'Dark Matter' are actually scientists, they loathe this 'solution'. They quite rightly say 'Saying there's just some stuff out there we don't know about is not 'science'. Either it's there, and we need to find it, or it's not, and we need another theory.'
Everyone who thinks scientists are scoffing at 'Intelligent Design' because they are all evil athiests need to look at how they are treating dark matter. This is what happens where a perfectly good theory has a huge crack in it. Scientists run around wildly trying to prove both sides, usually ending up somewhere in the middle, which is probably what's going to happen here:
'Okay, so it turns out only 10% of the universe is invisible, according to these new equations we've figured out. And there it is, over there. See? Well, of course not, but look at these models we've prepared, which clearly demonstrate what must be there. Whew. Okay, we solved that one, we can all stop looking like idiots.'.
And the rest of the world goes...um, okay. Is this important?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I think that overall this is a good point, but I've seen many people who make their living doing hard science who, once they open their mouths, start putting their personal credibility where it does not yet belong.
Although I don't do it for a living, I'm dedicated to science and it's progress and I have a real love for both the process and the results. But I'm afraid that one of the biggest factors that has made science vulnerable to inroads by fundamentalists is that scientists have, of late, embrace three (admittedly hastily constructed) levels of credibility on scientific subjects:
1) We very strongly believe this is true because it has been repeatedly verified through controlled experimentation.
2) We very strongly believe this is true because it can be strongly inferred from existing verified data.
3) We understand that we don't have all the facts, but we are critical thinkers for a living and our theories are worthier than your theories.
Number 1 is where scientists should be, but in debates, articles, and various other discussions on the battle between religion a science I have seen prominent and credible scientists arguing 2 and sadly, much more often 3. I understand it, but many scientist should reign themselves in.
Understand, I'm not saying don't fight, just that we should fight from our position of greatest strength, which is being "fundamentalist" about the scientific method. If we can teach kids, or anyone, how it works and why we're devoted to it, all the while showing by example how to be scientific in thought, then we win. There's plenty of room for religion in the world even with hard science, and there's plenty of amazement and wonder to be had in science too. I just don't want to see scientists try to expand their own role in human exploration way beyond the data.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
I'm so happy this main reason for Dark Matter finally got explained with standard physics.
I didn't quite buy the whole idea of Dark Matter, it wasn't scientific enough. We took a stab and said that there were phantom particles that we couldn't see and they were causing our observations to be different from what they should be. It just seems like we assembled a mythos. DarkMatter, the God of the Slow Galactic Turn, floats unseen at the edge of all galaxies. 90% of all matter is dark matter, and no you cannot see any of it (short of one lensing effect from an unknown object). So verifying this theory is next to impossible. And after a while we took the leap to say that we were correct. Even though we just invented stuff to 'fix' the flawed equations. Not that we can't guess right the first time, but just inventing a solution with no basis shouldn't hit the nail on the head.
I think the comparison between Luminiferous Aether and Dark Matter is one of the most prudent ones I've heard in a long while. Making something up to force your data to fit is a pretty bad idea. We can't be wrong. There's something that we cannot see that exists (does some calculations)... here; that makes the data roughly fit. It might as well have been the law of invisible elves of slow rotation.
And yes, if by some odd happening this gets peer reviewed dead... I still believe everything I said.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
[T]his article does not at all dispute the observations of global warming.
And, in fact, it says, "Greens say, rightly, that the best scientific assessment today is that global warming is occurring."
More below.
Otherwise, this is not an article that discusses specific scientific observations
You only found one instance of a specific scientific observation? The first sentence gives a specific instance of low temperature observations. The second paragraph discusses a span of recent large-scale global cooling. The sixth paragraph makes a general observation about the accuracy of global climate models. There are still more direct observations in the article.
Let's step back a minute. The point of bringing this article to light was to illustrate that the recent attention about global warming, and its proposed anthropogenic source, may be a bit precipitous, given the accuracy of the predictive modelling of global climate simulations. While I've seen results of global climate simulations that extend out 150 years, I've yet to see any good data that give me confidence that our accuracy is high enough to say more than "global warming is not much than a mildly promising theory." And specifically "global warming" = "anthropogenic causation of global warming". This was the claim that I was attempting to bolster.
I've been suggesting for years that "dark matter" is an unnecessary idea which only exists as a transitional kludge until we can uncover some more fundamental error in the theory of gravity, like planetary epicycles or what not. I have made this suggestion both on the internet and in person to some people I hang around with from my college's physics department.
While generally people have not agreed with me, I have never encountered what I would call "dogmatic" resistence; I never felt that people were upset at my suggestion or disrespected my opinion that this was a possibility.
Perhaps the reason why you have met with poor results expressing the same idea have more to do with the way in which you expressed the idea?
I find a lot of people seem to believe that if people disagree with them, it is automatically because of dogmatic resistence. Not necessarily, maybe it's just because you've not made your case very well, or because there are other factors to the discussion you aren't considering (for example, that asking a physicist to abandon the idea of dark matter would-- in the absence of a better explanation for anomolies in gravitational theory-- effectively require them to accept the idea that the galaxy is the wrong shape for no reason whatsoever).
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
That's because evolutions at it's heart is based on just one thing: "There is no Creator."
So the only possible counterpoint is: "There is a Creator."
And since using "God" as a counter argument doesn't fit into the Scientific Method you have the convenient fall back of dismissing the only possible counter argument as "not science."
So, if I may, I'd like to point out that the question of "where it all started" doesn't belong in a Science classroom. It belongs in a Philosophy or World religion classroom. If you are going to teach it in the Science class though, then don't use that as a convenient excuse to exclude the only possible counter argument. That's just Intellectual dishonesty. Evpolution as a non origin's study, if you can keep it that way, is perfectly acceptable in the classroom. It's not presented that way currently though, nor is there any discernable desire to do so.
You dont' know anything about evolution don't you?
Evolution is based on the principal that "traits that can be passed onto progeny(genes) that are also hetrogenious(not all members have the same genes) and mutable(mutations) in some way will result in groups of living things changing over time to response to selective factors(observed often)". The assumptions about god are immaterial. God may have started it, there may be no god. Neither possibility changes evolution.
Your idea about evolution is deeply deeply flawed. It doesn't reflect it's current form or any of it's previous iterations. You are operating under a deep logical fallacy. Evolution has nothing to do with denying a god, only explaining a mechanism for biological change. It is often used as evidence to refute the exsistance of a god how ever God is not an idea that can be directly refuted. I am in fact a christian but I don't beleive in this IS/creationist propaganda.
ID/creationism aren't scientific at all. They are a politically/religiously motivated PR campiagn to assert a certain religions dominance in the American society. They have nothing to do with science and outisde of the US they are not given any credience.
Like I pointed out, it doesn't matter if a alien species/God/FSM/cthulu/me came to earth, tampered with the genetic material and created man, because the basic mechanisms of evolution stand.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Your argument fails on the math, sorry. The black holes in the center of galaxies simply can't be large enough to explain the observered rotaitn rates, or they be so large we'd notice. Also, the rate of change of rotation rates as you move out from the center can't be made to work by adding mass just to the center, no matter how much you add. It's just the wrong curve.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Why is it more acceptable to make up a new type of matter, rather than deal with the idea that the fundamental forces may work differently than is believed?"
From the astronomical point of view, the answer is that both ways have been tried. Modified newtonian dynamics (MOND) is an effort to revise gravity (a failed one, it looks to me). Another one involved a much stronger galactic magnetic field (another failed attempt, since it does not reproduce available observations). And there are other attempts that involve magnetohydrodynamical effects to fool observers (the cited velocity measurements look at the interstellar gas, while the stars, with most of the galactic mass, might orbit at a very different speed).
On the other hand, the introduction of the idea dark matter have explained a lot of other observations, not only the flat rotation curve of galactic disks. It has succesfully predicted observations, and is able to reproduce results in other (quite independet) fields.
As a scientist, I do not like the idea of dark matter, at all. To me, it feels like a cheap hack. But the observational evidence is overwhelming. I just have to welcome the results presented in the article, and hope that they'll survive the challenges!
I've seen this sort of thing happen occasionally in widely used reference books and been guilty of it myself. With computer modeling so much more widely available and easy to use these days, there's less excuse for not being thorough.
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Within the jargon of science, "true" means "useful and predictive". Scientists sometimes forget that they have a nonstandard meaning for "true", especially if speaking casually. It's worth noting that this jaron definition of "true" is more useful and predictive than the standard meaning. :)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If it is indeed the case that all of the estimates of dark matter up until now were based on incorrectly calculated galactic rotational rates, then this was a monumental screwup. So noone was using general relativity for these calculations, and were relying on Newtonian physics? I am speechless. Just a quick Google search turns up about 10 experimental collaborations comprising about 200 physicists looking for dark matter, a topic which is funded so highly **because** of the galactic observations and not because of "gee whiz it would be neat to find dark matter". Assuming a cool $15M per experiment, that's $150,000,000.00 spent worldwide. And you'd a thunk some funding agency somewhere would have paid 0.01% of that for a study of galactic rotations in the full GR before plunking that down.
In GR gravity is not a wave or a particle. gravity is curvature of space and time. thus the question speed of gravity is a non starter, it is like asking the speed of a stationary hill. The common way to illustrate this is to use a sheet and a bowling ball. Stretch the sheet taught, place the bowling ball in the middle then roll a tennis ball at a tangent. The ball will follow the contour of the sheet. Pretty simple and no big deal.
Now when you start talking about gravitational waves you're actually talking about the waves induced when something with sufficient mass is disturbed. what people are wondering is how fast the waves generated by the perturbance are travelling not the speed of gravity.
Or think of it as a lake. The lake has no speed (we have chosen our frame of reference carefully) toss a rock in and measure the result of the waves. You're not measuiring the speed of water...
If the only way we observe Dark Matter has now been explained by something else, and it interacts with the rest of the universe in NO OTHER WAY, surely we can just assume it doesn't exist, whether it actually does or not? If it does exist it's not making any difference so everything is occurring in the same way as if it didn't.
I wanted to suggest a couple ideas. First, dark matter is a well-favored theory because there is a lot of evidence that supports it. Galactic rotation speeds is one important piece of evidence, but I also think that gravitational lensing provides strong evidence -- which may also be explained by the GR work done in this paper. I don't know but it seems possible. I'm not an astrophysicist, and couldn't (or didn't waht to) follow all the details of the paper. Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background is another piece of evidence for (cold) dark matter, though it gets complicated here. I don't think that the CMB directly requires dark matter, but dark matter models have been very successful here. I'm out of touch with recent CMB and cosmological accounting developments.
Anyway, the point is that the theory of dark matter kills a lot of birds with one stone. So it's very attractive from that point of view. And there are literaly dozens of yet-untested theories that can explain dark matter as exotic particles, compact massive objects, and so on. Many of these theories have been either disproved or damaged by careful experiments, but by no means all of them. So the existence of dark matter doesn't seem all that far-fetched either.
A second point is that a lot of this discussion has to do with scientific theories being "falsifiable", a term very much at the heart of the debate on creationism being taught in science classes. I don't think many people appreciate what the term means. Science cannot prove a theory to be true. You can only prove it to be false. Take "Newton's laws" example. It took somewhere around 250 years to prove those wrong, and relativity suffered a lot of ridicule from scientists still unwilling to let go of them.
Well, even though there's no way to really prove a theory to be correct, a theorist still has to start somewhere -- put their faith in some basic assumptions before any progress can be made. The choice of these assumptions is mostly a matter of taste, and a little bit of cleverness -- how can you keep your set of assumptions as small and palatable as possible?
General relativity is a really nice theory, and has stood up to a great deal of testing. It is thought to break down only on small scales far beyond our experimental reach, and there is no compelling reason to suspect its accuracy on even cosmically large distance scales. So it makes for a nice starting assumption for astrophysics. I guess the point of this paper is that some details have been forgotten about when modeling galactic rotation. It was thought that because of the small speeds involved, and weak gravitational field, that newtonian gravity (which is much easier to deal with computationally) was a perfectly good approximation. The author of this paper realized why it was not, and points this out.
I can only imagine that, if the math is correct, this will have a huge impact on the astrophysics community. For example, they mention why newtonian gravity works so well for our solar system still, but I'm not sure any more that it would work well for cloud collapse and star formation models. If it affects these models, it will probably also affect cosmologists modeling the evolution of structure.
Actually, about a month after this article was submitted another paper came out saying that the proposed model is not physical as it requires the disk generating the gravitational field to be singular. Although I did skim the Cooperstock article (he was my prof for GR, so I have a bit of a bias), I didn't read the other article.
I would be surprised if the Cooperstock & Tieu model completely dispells dark matter. For starters, we know that only about 5% of the mass (actually, density) in the universe is baryonic matter (normal matter) from Big Bang baryogenesis models and the match to cosmological observations (WMAP). We also have some confidence (also from WMAP, but also from BOOMERANG) that the Universe is very nearly gravitationally flat (this result is independent, IIRC, of assumptions about dark matter). This means that 95% of the mass/energy density in the Universe is something else. Current models and observation suggest that dark matter makes up about 35%; the remaining 60% is 'dark energy'.
However, if a simple re-application of GR can make at least some of that dark matter disappear from the models, that makes life interesting.
Actually I've studied it a great deal. As I said... If you can teach it without going into how it is an explanation for origins then feel free to teach it without it's conterpoint. When you go into a school however and listen to the curriculum it is all about origins. And if you insist on teaching origins in that setting then you better be prepared for the counter arguments. Evolution does indeed exist as a method for biological change. It is observable. It is not however the only possible explanation for "the origins of all life" and if you intend to present it in the classroom as such then don't get upset if someone want's to present the only possible counter argument. I can see where you got confused though.
I wasn't referring to evolution the observed phenomena. I was referring to Evolution (The proof that we don't have a creator). If you don't think it's taught that way then your either blind or self-deluded.
Here is your problem, you havent' assualted the theory, you only state you object to it's implications. This has nothing to do with the science behind it, only your inability to accept it as part of you belief system.
It does in fact give a possible origin of life. The exact origin is nebulous. Either life evolved here on earth, or else it evolved else where and was transported here via meteor. As far we know both cases are equally valid. There is somewhat mroe unlikely possibilities that is was intentially transported. Biologists/chemists have been workign on the viability of it just happening and according to our modern organic chemistry, over large periods of time it is very likely.
This does not say that god didn't create it all, since the universe is apparently deterministic and that at some point it was "created" he/she/it problably set it up so that life would be favorable. You can't prove or disprove that though so it has no place in science.
Your problem isn't with "evolution as a origin theory" your problem is that you need to have god directly intervene to create people or else your religion has somewhat less meaning. You can't just say "well evolution is a origin story so it must be lumped in with other origin stories". The chinese origin story abotu a lotus blossum on the sea of the universe is a quaint story, evolution is a well supported branch of biology. Not theory, it's a whole freaking branch. It's actually the lions share of biology.
I wasn't referring to evolution the observed phenomena. I was referring to Evolution (The proof that we don't have a creator). If you don't think it's taught that way then your either blind or self-deluded.
Evolution explains a mechanism. This mechanism removes the need to have a "origin" story or to have direct divine intrvention. This upsets you. This does not however change anything. God is God. Whether he used evolution to create things or he blinks them into exsistance with the wriggle of his/her/it's nose is of no consequence. You are argueing for confusing and denying a valid scientific idea because it doesn't fit with your particular brand of theism. This is stupid. Evolution should be taught, ID/creationism should not. If you deny there is a god and use evolution to support you claim fine, I'll simply state that god works in mysterious ways, and that since the universe is deterministic it meant that the liklihood of some external force causing it all to happen is not provable/disprovable and that I will continue beliving in a god thank you very much.
You however must have some sort of weak assed faith that folds like a house of cards when faced with uncomfortable facts. I suggests you try and find truth instead of comfort.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I think this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific research. Any real scientist will tell you they're wrong more than they're right.
You start with an observation, come up with a reasonable hypothesis to explain it, then test it.
Eventually your hypothesis fails at some level. So based on your observation, you create another reasonable hypothesis....
That's scientific progress. Each step along the way we learn more. And often, we get led down the wrong path, for any one of many reasons -most are not evil.
As a scientist, I can tell how I think many things work. Of course that leads to the question, "Don't you know for sure?" from a non-scientific public who wants to know that the levy will hold or the vaccine will protect them from disease and not cause it.
No, I don't know for sure. But that's not what anybody wants to hear. And that's not what anybody will report in the press. That's not what politicians base decisions on. The overwhelming majority of times you see science misused as you stated above its by companies/politicians/people taking scientific data and theory and restating it as scientific fact. Its rarely the scientist doing the study who says such things.
Agreed. I wish I had mod points.
I am being schooled in philosophy right now, and my emphasis is in the philosophy of science and epistemology. I always loved the physical sciences, but find them to be overly dogmatic and non-questioning, or non-self-questioning. Philosophy must exist to keep an eye of the sciences to keep them on track, since the sciences do not meta-analyze themselves enough, or ever. Science seems to think it discovers certanty at certain junctures, which is hubris, since there were many historically certain theories which were later proven completely wrong, we might have to accept ANY of our current understandings as wrong as more emperical date comes in.
Emperical data is king though, no theory is worth much without a backing in reality.
One of my friends at ASU doing Physics/Math and I have very nice conversations about such things. Nothing is more intellectually rewardsing that conversations between scientific disciplines and philosophy (not to say that aspects of phi cannot be scientific). Through both we realize a grounding. Philosophy is here to teach others humility, and to show the limitations of logical systems.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I think the bigger question in my mind is why hadn't someone tried to do this before now?
Science isn't truth, and it isn't fact. It's a process that, over time, results in a gradual and constant tendency towards truth.
If you get into a debate with religious folk about "creationism" versus "evolution", one of the tactics almost invariably tried is to disprove some facet or other of evolution through some form of deductive reasoning. The basic idea is to prove that Science is somehow wrong, and then assume that creationism wins by default once that's done.
It's easy to see the fallacy: disproving evolution (even if they can) doesn't prove creationism.
But, scientific theory is always undergoing review and clarification. Newtonian gravity works, in limited scopes. It was revised and improved with relativity theory, which is itself being revised and improved today with multidimensional, superstring theory. It's this recursive process of deduction, testing, and review that advances science.
We should be ecstatic! Despite our incredible efforts to find it, we've uncovered NO evidence that this has ever happened before in the multi-billion year history of the universe!
People are stupid, and we have to acknowledge that. Our intellect barely rises above our other urges, the urge towards sex, the blindnesses caused by our tendency to suspend reason (A.K.A. "Faith") and follow the leader 'cause it's easy. And, truly fresh/new approaches to problems are rare, and hard to find. Most any "new" thought is merely an extension of a previous thought. We're creatures of habit. But, so long as we continue to try, so long as we continue to be willing to challenge our assumptions, and take the time to do so when somebody DOES come up with something new, then the process of Science progresses, and life continues to get better.
Schools today don't teach science. They teach "facts", like "water vapor absorbs light, but absorbes blue light the least, and thus makes the sky blue". They don't ever teach the method of science, the passion of science, beyond making you recite the "gather facts, form hypothesis, test hypothesis, draw conclusion" which is only minimally how science works.
Children are BORN scientists. As they explore with their hands, and their minds, the world around them, they perform hundreds of experiments a day, every day. Where do you find frogs? What bug is making that buzzing noise? What happens if you clap your hands near a grasshopper? How many blocks can I stack up before they fall over?
So, what do we do? We lock them up in a sterile environment, where they're told not to question the teacher, and never to talk to the kids next to them. We prevent their natural curiousity, and instead, browbeat them into performing tricks like a circus animal. The apathy of the schoolchild is both detrimental and obvious.
And after that's done, after the child's natural, scientific curiousity has been conquered, that's when we introduce the wonders of science in the most boring, unimaginably unflattering way possible, by forcing him/her to regurgitate "facts" that they'd be ridiculed to question.
The real wonder? How does science advance at all in the face of this educational travesty?
It's pretty obvious that scientific curiosity is built into the very fiber of humanity, or how else could still be advancing despite our incredibly expensive social efforts to prevent it?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Based on the moderation that followed, I would say that "some people" don't like it when popular theories get questioned. Which just goes to show you--once a scientific "fact" has been established, our attachment to it becomes as dogmatic as any theological notion...
You're exactly right. This is also why our scientific ideas - like our theological ideas - haven't changed in thousands of years.
This comment is geared towards other professional physicsts, even though few might see it. The Cooperstock paper is clearly wrong, although the reason turns out to be subtle. See astro-ph/0507619.
OK, not really. Just thoght it would be fun.
I've read a bunch of comments on this thread, and noticed that many of the highly rated ones share a common theme:
"Maybe it's just me, but when I first heard about dark matter, my immediate thought was the ether. I'm ever-so-smart."
Listen, morons:
History of the Ether: "Light travels. Anything that travels has got to travel through something. Let's call it ether."
History of Dark Matter: "Direct observation consistently reveals more gravitation than is explainable by plugging the currently detectable mass into the current equations. Either our current equations are wrong, or there's more mass than we can currently detect."
One of these is science. The other is a conclusion based on a false assumption which in turn was made with no backing evidence. Can you, being ever-so-smart, tell which is which?
Get over yourselves. You're not smarter than the physics community, no matter how many Slashdot nerds think that your post is "+5 informative".
I think the comparison between Luminiferous Aether and Dark Matter is one of the most prudent ones I've heard in a long while. Making something up to force your data to fit is a pretty bad idea. We can't be wrong.
Except this has happened many times in physics with successfull results. The neutrino was a predicted particle that interacts weakly with normal matter. It was predicted in 1931 by Wolfgang Pauli to explain the result of experiments measuring beta decay. The particle wasn't actually detected until 1956. Does this mean Dark Matter must exist? Obviously no, and if this new calculation pans out it most likely doesn't exist. But that doesn't mean that proposing something new to fit your data is bad science. It obviously is good science, just make sure your prediction can be falsified.
AccountKiller
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Dark Matter is far from an accepted Hypothesis". It is certainly not far-fetched to imagine that there is some quantity of matter, perhaps substantial, that does not "glow" like stars do. This is why it is "dark". The original problem was one of galactic rotation curves --- matter in the outskirts of galaxies rotated around the center in a fashion exactly mimicing what it would do if there was a spherical distribution of matter extending beyond the glow of the visible disk. The hypothesis that there was just such a distribution that we cannot see is not so far-fetched. It has been admittedly difficult to identify the "conventional" bodies that could be responsible for the lion's share of such a halo. Upper limits on the numbers of brown dwarfs, Jupiter-sized objects, and small black holes have shown that no one of these are primarily responsible. Still the search continues, as it would in any good scientific theory. Any of these possibilities are seen as a simpler approach than modifying our most basic models of gravitational behavior, especially when there is no similar pattern of deviation from known laws on different scales. And, as shown by the follow-up paper in the archives, there is a real possibility that the authors have made an honest mistake.
Look up this: arXiv.org. It seems these guys made a crude mathematical error in their calculations.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
I'm pretty glad to hear of your experience. The Copenhagen institute has a mythical quality for those of us looking at the last 100 years of science. Niels cast a pretty big shadow. I'm glad that it's still pretty open and free.
I've been following cosmology for ages, and the current mainstream ideas seem like an exercise in being exotic for exoticness' sake. I've been singularly unsurprised at information coming back from Spitzer and the like that we're still finding normal galaxies 13.3 billion light years away. I've been reading some of the material from the 30's and 40's, and quite frankly, we haven't addressed their concerns very well in the intervening 65+ years. But I digress :)
Quantum Mechanics is pretty amazing, all things considered. No matter what weird experiments have been thrown at it, including Einstein's objections, it just works. It's freaky and awe-inspiring that the universe has an utterly "invincible" underpinning that isn't about actual waves or particles of matter or energy, but probability. Do your probability wave math, run the experiment, and watch the statistics pile up. I must admit, I still don't know how to absorb the fact that you can get individual electrons seemingly "interfering with themselves".
It's a little embarrassing that we really have no idea what quantum mechanics means. If Nick Herbert's summary is still valid, we have four, completely separate mathematical ways of looking at quantum mechanics and eight major camps of interpretation. All of the mathematical means (Feynman's sum-over-histories, Heisenberg's matrices, etc.) are utterly indistinguishable. It's an embarrassment of riches in the 'possible explanations' department.
Personally, though, I'll take the options that don't require some airy-fairy "consciousness" as the only observer that can 'collapse the wave function', making consciousness mystical instead of an extremely complicated but theoretically understandable biological process, and options that don't prevent further questioning (I don't want any "the theory is all there is" bits like with, ironically named considering the open atmosphere, the Copenhagen interpretation :).
Nick Herbert's book, albeit some 20 years old now, is still excellent. I just finished it recently, and reviewed it on my blog.
It's a sobering thought that so many 'realities' could describe what's going on in quantum mechanics.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
Actually, there is a rival theoretical framework -- MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics), an extended form of GR. Which said that for very low accelerations (less than the gravitational acceleration any body in the Solar System would experience), speed would be faster than in standard GR.
Perhaps, the more gravity the less the speed of light and the more gravity the slower the speed of light is.
Sort of. The more gravity, the more space is curved, which makes light travel a longer path and thus appear slower. Once gravity exceeds a certain limit, light is curved in on itself.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Making the data fit the equation isn't necessarily always as bad as it sounds, assuming the equation tends to accurately predict the results. Many times in physics, the equations will predict the existence of particles that aren't yet known about and only through asusming they exist, they are later found. It goes further than particles as well, Einstein assumed his equations were wrong because two particles couldn't possibly be connected and have instantaneous "influence" on each other at any distance... sure enough though quantum entanglement was discovered and proven to exist, and is now performed all the time now in universities and corporate labs working on next generation research. If it wasn't for the scientists assuming that the equations were right, they would have never discovered quantum entanglement.
Regards,
Steve
Even though this is disappointing from a philosophical point of view, the result that the model is unphysical is good because it saves astronomy a lot of trouble. I think that it is really important to stress here that the evidence for dark matter does not come only from flat rotation curves alone, but that there are many independent methods to determine the presence of gravitational mass, many of which do not depend on any Newtonian assumptions. Had the original result been true, the non-existence of dark matter halos of galaxies would have implied that most of these other independent experiments showing the presence of dark matter, e.g., in galaxy clusters, are be wrong as well. And that would have shaken the foundations of most of modern cosmology.
Name one prediction that has come to pass.
Here's the one I was talking about: link. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Also, I'm not aware of any competing theories.
Couldn't it merely be that instead of a common ancestor, we have a common creator?
Who cares? You can't test that, falsify it, or make predictions based on it.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Ah but "we don't know" is true, but not testable. Saying, "the fairies cause it with their magic dust", allows you to test whether there are correlatiions between color of pixie dust and outcomes. The bullshit theory is bullshit, but it is a step towards developing a Law, whereas saying, "well, it's a mystery" is just standing still.
Just to remind, at the beginning of the last century, many people considered atoms and their particles a mere abstraction, not necessarily representing the way things actually work, but rather serving as a model close enough to do meaningful calculations. You could say the same about dark matter here.