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New Gravity Theory Dispenses with Dark Matter
Darkness Matters writes "According to New Scientist, a theory of modified gravity, which has no need of dark matter, has just explained why the Pioneer 10 probe is 400,000 miles off its expected course as it leaves the solar system. It sounds pretty convincing, although in dispensing with dark matter, they've had to utilize the theoretical particle, called a graviton, which appears from the vacuum of space wherever stars are densely packed, making gravity stronger."
Plain wrong : From TFA "critics point out that MOND cannot explain the observed masses of clusters of galaxies without invoking dark matter"
A more interesting article in NewScientist recently was their coverage of Heim Theory (a potential GUT, which includes Gravity Theory), Previously discusssed on Slashdot (With reference to another news source, not NewScientist).
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
"See I told you guys it wasn't flying monkeys! Turns out it's flying Unicorns!"
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
you're telling me dark matter doesn't matter?
GRAVITRON! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitron Damn that was a horrible ride.
4 posts and the link is dead.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
You know as a child I made up invisible things to blame and was told that was a bad thing to do. Only now I find out I was really a budding scientist...
This has been around for years. If a hypothesis involving gravitons is explained by experimental evidence, then this hypothesis could be elevated to theory.
Besides, didn't we use to shoot gravitons at that loud squiggly thing in Yar's Revenge?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Man, I hope this is real so much. I've always hated dark matter. You know what dark matter reminds me of? Aether. The whole idea of dark matter reminds me of a stupid hack -- which I suppose you have to deal with when it comes to topics like physics now and then.. its not like we can just go and look so readily ;P
:)
:D
Anyway, these "Gavitons".. I think I've had them in computer games for a while now, its about time we 'discovered' them. Aethe-- I mean Dark Matter was such a cranks idea anyway... anything has to be better then "OOoooh! There must be... some.. uh, invisible undetectable matter.. that uh, has mass. But you can't see it, because.. its dark! yeah thats the ticket." Given an unlimited choice of possibilities I could have came up with something better, and it probably would have been about as scientifically valid too.
Hurray for gavitons! Prepare the graviton pulse cannons!
--SD
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Who do they think they are, taking away dark matter? I need that to survive Zeromus' Big Bang attack!
Oh...graviton.
Prove it.
"Brian Peppers tried to rape me."
That's just disturbing.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Its funny how easy it is to explain something when you get to come up with your own theoretical items.
Lets see...how 'bout its off course cause the Universe has shifted due to a USABLE poll on Slashdot...
Well, at least we don't have to worry about Dark Matter critters lurking in deep space.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20040311.html
does anyone else feel the same way or am i the only one?
No, it's just you.
Couldn't they make up their mind?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
they've had to utilize the theoretical particle, called a graviton, which appears from the vacuum of space wherever stars are densely packed, making gravity stronger
.. very quickly that devolves into a flight of fantasy.
.. and who knows .. probably right. :)
Appears from the vacuum of space?
Since science has now moved into the fantasy realm, why not conjure up a bunch of pixies who can push objects around? I thought we were leaving that to anti-evolution "creationists". After all, if something couldn't come from nothing how did God come about?
It's good to make assumptions in science and theoretical predictions. I believe in gravitons as much as Einstein himself or the next guy. But it is an entirely different thing to make keep piling on assumptions upon assumption
That said, the theory is interesting
While the graviton has never been observered, it's not as wildly unlikely as that article seems to suggest. Of the four fundemental forces (strong/weak nuclear forces, E/M and gravity) only gravity hasn't had a "force mediator" particle (one which "carries" the force, for example photons for electricity and magnetism) observed in lab experiments. However, as gravity is the weakest force (by an order of I believe around 10^-28 times, or similar), this is not unlikely. However, it is extremely unlikely there ISN'T a particle which mediates gravity, ergo the (pretty reasonable) assumption of the existance of the graviton. Assuming it exists, further things can be predicted about it from other laws of Physics, hence we have a particle we've never seen but are pretty sure exists, with certain properties.
Nearly right : The theory posits that gravitons are created by all (massive) matter, it's just that near densely packed stars the effect is more significant.
Actually, no. The point the atricle is making is that the effect increases near large concentrations of mass at a rate greater the simple total mass would predict.From TFA: Plain wrong : From TFA "critics point out that MOND cannot explain the observed masses of clusters of galaxies without invoking dark matter"
The article isn't about MOND, it's about the scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG) theory. MOND was just mentioned as a competing theory...a theory that couldn't adequately explain the behavior of galatic clusters or the Pioneer spacecraft.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
> "See I told you guys it wasn't flying monkeys! Turns out it's flying Unicorns!"
Why not flying spaghetti monsters?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The way the post is worded, I think there is some misunderstanding what a "graviton" is. The graviton is the force-carrying particle of gravity, in a similar way to the photon being the force-carrying particle for electromagnetic phenomena. Although the graviton has not yet been directly observed, there is little doubt among physicists that it does exist. The current best theories we have (standard model of particle physics, etc.) strongly suggest that it exists.
The post makes it sound like suggesting that gravitons exist is outlandish... but this is rather accepted. Instead, it seems that their theory is a particular attempt to quantize gravity (there have been many attempts over time, with all ultimately being unsatisfactory). Whether or not their new theory is useful remains to be seen.
Also, in TFA, they say: "In this case, a hypothetical particle called a graviton - which mediates gravity - appears in large numbers out of the vacuum of space in regions crowded with massive objects such as stars." Again, it is generally accepted that in any reasonable theory of quantum gravity, gravitons will be the force-carrying particle for gravity. Where there is a large gravitational field, virtual gravitons will be exchanged to mediate the force (more info on virtual particles). This is nothing new. And in particle physics, virtual particles can always appear and disappear from the vacuum.
So again, I think we can't coment much on this theory without reading the actual paper (anyone have a link?). I would like to understand what is actually novel about their formulation. Also, they are not the first to try and reformulate the basic laws of gravity to get rid of the "dark matter anomaly" and none have been found to be consistent with all the experimental data.
Do you actually read the magazine, or are you just basing this on the occasional "new theory about dark matter/energy might do the job" stories Slashdot picks up on? There's a heck of a difference between the two.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
And you'd count that against it? I'm a mathematics undergraduate, and trust me, when solving maths problems (and physics problems at this level involve vast amount of maths) rediculous amount of creative thinking are exactly what you need. Inspiration for solving some of the harder problems in my course have often come while drinking.
And believe me, if you think this sounds rediculous, have a really good read up on some of the, umm, odder quantum effects such as entanglement.
If gravity isn't quite what it seems to be in terms of strength versus distance, then studies of planetary systems should show the effect. The relationship between orbital radii and orbital periods (and orbital path) would not be quite consistent with the 1/r^2 rule for Newtonian gravity. Admittedly the distance and mass scales of a our planetary system are far smaller than the galactic scales discussed in the theory, but our ability to make extremely precise measurements of planetary distances and orbits should compensate for that.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Scientists have actually calculated that Dark Matter is, in actuality, Chuck Norris. He recently flew to the west coast, and this threw off the Pioneer 10 probe by 400,000 miles.
Scientists have also not yet revealed the real reason behind the ban on human cloning. The real reason human cloning is outlawed is because scientists fear Chuck Norris being cloned. They theorize that two simultaneous Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks could possibly destroy the universe....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
> When the simplest explaination works, there is no need to look any further."
So you propose vapidons rather than gravitons?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If there's no dark matter, what's that stuff coming out of Nibbler?
Now we're going to see the inevitable parade of, "See, I knew dark matter was a stupid idea all along".
First off, dark matter, even if it ultimately turns out to be wrong, is not a stupid idea; it explains a wide variety of independent phenomena (and contrary to the eternal "it's just epicycles" cry among Slashdotters, it is testable, falsifiable, and predictive).
Second, this new work is, well, new. Only one of the three papers (other two: here, here) has passed peer review so far. When a theory like dark matter has amassed evidence in its favor over a period of decades, it takes a lot to overturn it.
Even if their STV theory does ultimately pan out (and there have been many alternate proposals in the past that have ended up failing), it will take years to be hashed out in the literature and subjected to far more tests; so far they have only passed a few of the observational tests that dark matter does, even assuming that their papers are correct, which no one has checked — there are no followup studies by other authors at this point.
Basic lesson: for every revolutionary new theory that works, there are a hundred that don't, and it can take a long time to decide which is which. New Scientist is not doing anyone a service by jumping on the latest unpublished preprint of the month and hyping it as the revolution of the century, as they tend to do.
Not really, I just find it amusing. If memory serves, I think the "Graviton" is also known as the "Higg's Boson"
Still, "Gravitons", "Dark Matter", "Strange Attractors", "Herpalhode(sp?) Curves",....sometimes it just makes me chuckle.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
This is depressing. All this arguing over theoretical physics. Let's just agree to disagree. Dark matter is a dark matter.
they've had to utilize the theoretical particle, called a graviton, which appears from the vacuum of space wherever stars are densely packed, making gravity stronger.
That sounds like positive feedback to me. Wherever there are large massive bodies, gravitons appear, gravity is enhanced, so we get more gravity and therefore more gravitons - doesn't that make a black hole rather quickly?
The real problem with this article is that it was published in NewScientist, which, as I discovered as an undergrad, is often full of incredibly exciting ideas supported by very little evidence and frequently go nowhere.
Yeh, I do sometimes suspect that physicists ask their kids to invent words for their new discoveries/sugestions.
Do you actually read the magazine, or are you just basing this on the occasional "new theory about dark matter/energy might do the job" stories Slashdot picks up on? There's a heck of a difference between the two.
To be fair to the original poster, New Scientist has been going downhill very fast for some time. It is now basically a science tabloid. Most of the lead articles are about highly speculative almost-science.
To exerimentally verify this go and buy one copy of New Scientist and one copy of Scientific America. Compare.
People think of dark matter as some misterious matter (it's dark!). But it's more simple than that .Dark Matter is a theoretical construct because no one knows what it is. It's just a bunch of mass that is needed to make the universe work in the current models. It could be dust, though one would need a lot of it. No one denies that the need for dark matter might show that the model is flawed, but the truth is, no one knows better either ATM, and this hypothetical additional mass would make it work. It isn't supposed to be true.
At least, not more true than imaginary time and super strings. They are just numbers that are needed to get the math to work. At some point, we might discover what dark matter actually *is*, and then it won't be dark anymore.
No one claims that dark matter will grant you favors if you go to church on sundays. There is proof of the existence of dark matter: it is needed to make an apparently very good model work on bigger scales.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
The post makes it sound like suggesting that gravitons exist is outlandish... but this is rather accepted.
IANAP [or a Cosmologist], but Pioneer 10 is pretty damned far out there at this point. So far, in fact, that it must take, what - several hours? several days? - for something travelling very, very fast [as in "The Speed of Light"] to get from here [that big fat gravity source called "our sun"] to there [the Kuiper belt, or wherever the hell Pioneer 10 finds itself these days].
Is not one of the big problems with "gravitons" that gravity appears to act more or less instantaneously at great distances? And isn't that a little troubling from the "Action at a Distance is Big No-No" point of view?
Or does the theory of "gravitons" come with some fancy-schmantzy geometric/topological intricacies which allow for the possibility that Pioneer 10 isn't quite as far away as we think it is?
Now we're getting somewhere. I was thinking about this problem the other day in the shower, and it occurred to me that perhaps gravity isn't continuous, but has discrete levels to it. That is to say, below a certain threshold, determined by distance and mass, the force of gravity would be so low as to suddenly be zero. The current theories of gravity average all the masses together to calculate forces, but what if its really the case that when an object gets too far away, its gravitational effect levels off because the force is discrete and discontinuous. That would mean from the vantage point of a particular star, other nearby stars would affect it, but the center of the galaxy, and indeed stars on the other side of the galaxy, would not. Also, does gravity have a velocity? If gravity moves at a finite speed, how would this change the dynamics of a galaxy?
Inventing a new form of unseen matter never set well with me.
Must they be trying to change the rules all the time? Soon we'll be able to outrun light...
NO! You cannot prove the existance of one thing by saying it's needed to prove something else. That is FLAWED SCIENCE! One does not say something exists because it's needed to prove something else. One says something exists and then shows how it impacts the world around it.
Oh and by the way, no church I have ever been to promised me anything or granted me anything for going there, so I don't know what kind of propaganda you've received about church.
if true, what would this mean for the possibility of an Infinite Universe, where mankind might go on forever?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Why is it that the slashdot community is so ready to dismiss concepts like dark matter in favour of much more radical physical theories? The fact that dark matter sounds like a makeshift solution doesn't take away from the fact that it is still a much simpler explanation of the galactic rotation curves than these more outlandish theories. OF the options presented on slashdot we have:
- Newton's force law must be modified (MOND)
- Gravity must be modified (many others)
- there's matter out there that we haven't observed directly yet
Of those three options, which one best satisfies Occam's razor?
And for those who are quick to yell out "it's just like the aether" or "it's just like phlogiston", this seems much closer to another famous situation in physics. If you've done high school physics, you know that you can work out a two body conservation of momentum problem exactly. I.E. there's only one value for momentum that each body can have. When beta decay experiments were just starting out, however, experiments showed that despite the fact that the neutron seemed to decay into just a proton and electron, the products did not have a fixed momentum. They had to conclude that either there was a tiny neutral invisible particle no one could see, or else conservation of momentum failed. Some scientists argued the latter, but in the end the particle was finally found and named the neutrino. I see no reason why this situation will be any different
I came here for a good argument
The Higg's Boson (or God Particle) mediates the Higg's Field, the Graviton mediates the gravitational field - they are different things, although are related.
The Higg's Boson creates mass and the graviton turns mass into gravity, or something like that - it's not my area...
Actually, Edge's steal rate on such a high-level monster is so ridiculously low that's usually quicker to just let Rydia and Edge stay dead. The plus side is that Curaja will now fully-heal the remaining three members of your party in one go.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but here are, possibly, the scientific papers in question. Doing a search on arXiv for the names of the authors (Joel Brownstein John Moffat) provides a paper entitled "Gravitational solution to the Pioneer 10/11 anomaly" (warning: PDF).
I'm not an expert in gravitational theory, so I would appreciate others correcting any mistakes I make. The abstract to the paper says: "The theory allows for a variation with distance scales of the gravitational constant G, the fifth force skew symmetric field coupling strength (omega) and the mass of the skew symmetric field = 1/(lambda)."
I think this is quite a departure from what is conventional accepted about gravity. The gravitational constant, G, sets the scale for the force of interaction of gravity. It is normally assumed that this value is constant throughout the entire universe. They seem to be allowing that this value changes with distance, so that the interaction of gravity is different at small and large length-scales. That they are able to come up with a fit to actual experimental data is quite amazing... although so many bits of astronomical data have been computed assuming a particular (and constant) value of G, so to compare with "established facts" they will have to reconsider all of these previous calculations.
"The new theory is STVG"
WTF is STVG ? Star Trek Voyager?
7of9: "Captain, we should reconfigure the main deflector grid to emit a graviton pulse"
I highly suggest you read up on it if you like physics.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The professor had it right. I think its the graviolies.
To exerimentally verify this go and buy one copy of New Scientist and one copy of Scientific America. Compare.
Can't. Quit reading SA after they started publishing thinly vieled political hacks instead of science articles.
How is God a theory? God isn't even a falsifiable model.
English is easier said than done.
If there is actually any substance to this, the headline should be that someone has produced a GUT by working out a quantum theory of gravity.
Instead we get "we've explained away dark matter and explained the Pioneer anomaly".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
... and then there's the crouton, which mediates salads.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Soon we'll be able to outrun light... ...the Four Microsecond Mile?
Tag lost or not installed.
None of those claims have actually been examined or verified in the peer reviewed scientific literature. From a physicist's perspective, it's extremely difficult to find out what the Heim theory is (does it even have a Lagrangian? how is the theory quantized?), let alone what its predictions are and whether it's right. All you have to go by is a bunch of claims from an Internet "Heim appreciation society".
From Wikipedia:
Detecting a graviton, if it exists, would prove rather problematic. Because the gravitational force is so incredibly weak, as of today, physicists are not even able to directly verify the existence of gravitational waves, as predicted by general relativity.
Yoda: Hard to see, the dark side is.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
We already answered the questions conclusively years ago!
Welcome to the future.
I agree that there's a big difference between the two (I imagine many of Sciam's articles could make it into a journal if they had a few references added and analogies taken away), but New Scientist's not exactly trash yet. I do wonder at the change in the types of articles it carries, though, makes me wonder if they're being moved towards a different audience - one more likely to be enticed by "robot that thinks as we do" than "interesting discoveries regarding the evolution of cats".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What are you going on about? There is something "missing" from the current model of the physical universe, and so far the idea has been that "that something" is dark matter. No one is saying that's the end-all-be-all of the standard model, it's just a placeholder until we come up with something better. It's not flawed science because science is not about finding the exact answer every time. It can't be. Newtons equations of motion are provably wrong, but you know what? They work well enough in low-speed environments that there's no reason not to use them there. And we as a species did for a very long time, and still do. Those ideas led to better discoveries when it was found they couldn't accurately describe some observed phenomena.
Man, the fact that I even had to explain this shit is exactly why I get more depressed every day.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
They've been used by Starships for centuries now...
# graviton
http://www.startrek-voyager.info/dictionary2.html
Oh wait - that's not real....
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
"Hey, if you had been listening you would have heard that nintendos pass through everything"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's only a theory folks. We shouldn't be teaching it because it hasn't been proven. It's not a fact.
(For the humor impaired I'll give you a few moments to let the words sink in)
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
God is a 'belief' that is 'followed' as the basis of 'action', or how people live their lives.
So, seems to be, that God is a theory.
Could someone point me to a good reference (book or website) that can explain to a layman our current understanding of gravity?
My most frustrated question in high school physics was "How does gravity work?" It seems we don't know anymore today than we did way back when.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Everytime I give my wife a big bang, she has an afterglow. It's not too hard to account for...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The "After all, if something couldn't come from nothing how did God come about?" question is not a valid one. For an indepth explanation please read augustine, aquinas, c.s. lewis, I think descartes version of the ontological argument even hits on this, but really any book on christian apologetics will help you out. A very rough sketch of the arguement is that God, by definition, needs to exist without being casued. Everything in this universe needs a cause, so what caused it? For Aristotle it was the unmoved mover, for creatonists it is the Christian God. That which necesarily exists without needing to be caused. That is one of the attributes of the creationist God (or really anybodys God). To say what caused God, ok say x caused God then what caused x? It goes on forever eventually something must exist that needs no cause. That something is God. While I and many other christians don't agree with the creationists attack on evolution, it is a logical fallacy to commute one wrong step with all of christianity being false. As I can't prove it in depth in a post on /. please refer to any apologist, c.s. Lewis is my favorite for a more conclusive step by step account.
your friendly neighborhood philosophy student
Heh, I don't go to church, as you might imagine, but there are some very stupid churchs around there. There are some which will fix the problems caused to you by other people's envy, those who think talking to god will cure illnesses, etc. It was just a silly comment. But Dark Matter is not the same level of made-up-ness than the christian God.
On the other hand, experimental science is not math nor formal logic. Nothing is ever TRUE. There is only "very good chances it correctly describes our observations on cases not yet tried", "very bad chances it does", "not a clue", and various degrees of it. Karl Popper wrote quite a bit on this, you might be interested in reading it.
General Relativity is considered by most (rigourous, educated, thoughtful) scientists to correctly describe our universe. All of it's predictions have been either shown by experiments/observation (black holes) or not yet shown, but never disproved (frame dragging, gravitational waves, both of which are very fashionable these days). So, we are not desperate to dump a theory that has been correctly describing everything around us for half a century. Therefore, dark matter. Additional mass that makes the theory work. Nothing too crazy, IMO.
So, Dark Matter is "proven" to exist. It's not that it's actually there, it's that our since 1920's very reliable theory needs it to function. I'm happier to accept that there is some matter we can't see (hey, it's very far away) than I am to find out that GR is flawed. It's not that it can't be, but at this point, it's just a matter of confidence.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is a different meaning than how the word is used to refer to dark matter and gravitons, however, so your argument is entirely semantics.
English is easier said than done.
I know what you mean: First built by the Autobots, Graviton had such desire to conquer that he defected to the Decepticons, and eventually went solo, and is currently plotting to drag stars in to power his quest for power. Will Autobots and Decepticons form a temporarily alliance to stop him in this 3 part series: The Fall of Dark Matter, and the Rise of Graviton.
God spoke to me.
Holy cow, gravity is just a theory! Next person who says "Evolution is just a theory", I am going to push off a roof and yell "Hey, you aren't really falling, gravity is just a theory"...
Oh I think it is coming together together quite well. Attractive theory isn't it?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
This is a little off-topic, but since this story may attract knowledgeable people, I'd thought I'd ask: is there anything in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time that has been proven inaccurate over the last twenty years since the original edition (or the last few years since the 10th anniversary edition)? I read the book many years ago and loved it, and so I was planning to read it again, but am not sure if there's anything I should watch out for.
I notice that there is now a book called A Briefer History of Time which seems to be a drastic simplification of Hawking's original by Leonard Mlodinow. Worth reading?
I thought Dark matter effectively functioned like negative gravity so as to account for the accelerated expanding universe? How does the graviton explain this phenomenon?
Photons emitted (as from the Sun) which hit another piece of matter (such as a light sail) PUSH on the struck matter due to the transfer of momentum. For a particle to hit (or go through) a mass and cause the mass to go TOWARD the direction the particle came from, it would have to have NEGATIVE momentum.
What's even more problematic is that unlike any other particle I can think of, the graviton has its effect on matter, but isn't itself affected as it passes through. When Pluto is eclipsed by Jupiter (surely a rare event, but it demonstrates my point), the Sun's gravity affecting Pluto is NOT cut off. The idea from Einstein that mass warps space fits much better with this observation.
Tag lost or not installed.
Richard Feynman called his particles 'partons'... after Dolly :)
The existence of God is easily falsifiable. Just kill yourself and ask St Peter at the pearly gates yourself. If you don't want to perform this experiment then that's your problem. But it's certainly a lot easier than falsifying String Theory.
-- SIGFPE
I have never bought a copy of new scientist, but I see their articles posted on the web from time to time and almost without fail they are so far out there and not really based on hard science fact.
I think there is a HUGE difference between Scientfic American and New Scientist.
While its fun to think about self building space stations and the other possible but not probably science its frustrating reading the heading of an article, getting excited by it and then to realize that it is from New Scientist!
And I wish I could read the article, but it's slashdotted....
Field theories postulating a graviton aren't new. Experiments are potentially possible, but as yet there's been no empircal evidence.
Assuming this is a new theory, and that the deviations in Voyager are considered experimental arguments for it, are the anomalities in Voyager derived from unrelated fundementals?
Or is this a "curve fitting" exercise, where you postulate there's a constant, look at the observations (in this case, voyager), and use that to "measure" the value of the constant?
Not that the latter is invalid, but if that's the case, then "explaining voyager" is part of the theory, not a proof derived from the theory. To "prove" such a theory, you'd need to have a different phenomenon that's explained equally well using the same value of the constant that you derived from Voyager...
Man, I hope this is real so much. I've always hated dark matter. You know what dark matter reminds me of? Aether. The whole idea of dark matter reminds me of a stupid hack . . . Anyway, these "Gavitons".. I think I've had them in computer games for a while now, its about time we 'discovered' them. Aethe-- I mean Dark Matter was such a cranks idea anyway...
;)
I've actually always disliked gravitons because they reminded me too much of that old Aether! Less of a hack than dark matter, perhaps. But dark matter I've always just taken as "there's something else out there registering as mass somehow" instead of, yaknow, literally some kind of mysterious dark matter. Or more to say, I've accepted it as a lack of knowledge, actually a mystery I guess. Whereas gravitons have always been a bit sketchy of an idea, and the proponents always too quick to jump in exclaiming how it solved things and must, just must be true oh it's so kewl!!!
Not to insult you . . . I actually really liked your post, and you're quite right about how dark matter is quite the hack (and that this kind of thing does come up all-too-often). But right now I think there are just waaaaaaaay too many things unexplained in Physics for us to say much more than "dark matter." Alas, there's a tendency with people to take tentative hypotheses and act as if they were the whole truth, instead of keeping open minds. Thus the treatment of Dark Matter as if it was indeed some dark stuff that we knew was out there, instead of just a big unresolved question mark, a variable balancing an equation that we hadn't solved for yet.
(Sometimes I feel like a fundamentalist Christian waiting around for second coming, another Einstein to turn things on their head and explain those problems that nag at modern Physics! Any day now . . .
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Can't. Quit reading SA after they started publishing thinly vieled political hacks instead of science articles.
Don't tell me - they published an article pointing out that the oil is going to run out eventually and you took it as an attack on your entire political belief system.
Or was it something about global warming that offended you so much?
They had the name Graviton years ago. http://www.marveldirectory.com/individuals/g/gravi ton.htm
1. God needs to exist without being caused (P, proposition)
2. Therefore, God exists without being caused (P, same proposition again)
You don't really even have an argument there, you're just making an arbitrary fact claim with no evidence, and no argument. You can expand this and make it more fancy, but it's always reducible to this fact claim. Arguably the greatest mistake is fact claim "Everything needs a cause." Which is either correct, or incorrect, if it is correct, then god can't be uncaused, and therefore, accordingly to your logic the universe can't exist (deus ex machina not being allowed in proper logic), if it is incorrect, then god isn't necessary for the universe to exist anyway. God may exist, but by Occam's razor, it is the simplest explanation that it does not.
...would scrap a perfectly workable theory, construct a new theory, in order to explain a space probe being 0.0024 degrees off-course after traveling nearly 9 billion miles (Asumming the heliospher as our solar system boundry, 'cause I have no clue how far the probe has actually traveled).
"although in dispensing with dark matter, they've had to utilize the theoretical particle, called a graviton, which appears from the vacuum of space wherever stars are densely packed, making gravity stronger."
This is called "Ignotium per ignotious" - "explaining the unknown through the still more unknown."
And these guys get paid for this stuff. Where do I sign up?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It's not that difficult to figure out: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=63066& cid=5879462
One of the most significant pieces of evidence for dark matter is the rotation curve of galaxies. If the Universe functioned like we thought it did, the rotation curve of a galaxy should be a downward sloping curve - the further out a star is from the galactic center (where the mass of the galaxy is concentrated), the slower its orbit should be. This is what Kepler's Law tells us - that the orbital speed of an object decreases inversely with the square root of the orbital radius.
What we find, however, is that the rotation curves of galaxies are nearly flat, meaning that the mass distribution of galaxies must be nearly equal all the way through. This means there must be a large amount of matter that we don't see. There aren't enough dwarf stars, planets and other things like that to make up this mass. Of course we haven't counted or seen all of these, but if you do the math, there would have to be a ridiculous amount of these - more than is likely. Hence, we have dark matter.
This new theory says that the force of gravity should be stronger near the galactic core, where the stars are packed most densely. So the core is even more massive than we thought, meaning that the rotation curve of the galaxy should be even more skewed - far from flat. So either New Scientist seriously misrepresnted his theory, or it doesn't even deserve a cursory thought. MOND at least seems plausible.
No. van Flandern is a famous Usenet crackpot. He actually is an astronomer, and has done good work, but he has no understanding of general relativity, which is not his field. The speed of gravity has been measured to be equal to the speed of light (see the 1993 Nobel Prize). For a paper detailing van Flandern's errors, see here; there is a related discussion in this post. You can also Google on his name and "sci.physics.relativity" for archives of Usenet threads in which various physicists and mathematicians have (futilely) attempted to explain his error to him.
Gravity is an unproven 'theory' and as such shouldn't be given any more weight or teaching than other theories such as Intelligent Falling
Pffft, those crazy scientists and their insistence on silly ideas like "Dark Matter" and "Evidence".
The Evangelist crowd has had a dark-matter-free theory for gravity for years: Intelligent Falling.
Now it's just a case of getting this information into schools so that students can make an informed decision based on all the evidence.
I feel sick after saying that, I don't know how anyone could do it seriously.
We've all heard that the gravitational attraction between two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. What difference does it make if gravity is mediated by particles? If the attractive effect of individual particles were fixed (not decreasing linearly with distance, like the article suggests) then their distribution at any given distance would lead to the inverse square law we observe. An object twice as far away would interact with one-fourth as many gravitons.
Don't underestimate Croutons! http://www.haven.boston.ma.us/~kath/croutons.html
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
"More of the 'uh... well, it went away when you came in. It's only around when you're not looking. And it knocks things over when I'm the only one in the room' variety..."
This sounds more like the work of a quantum physicist.
or perhaps,
"At Graviton, we don't make the gravity. We make it stronger.®"
This space available.
"rediculous"? For fuck's sake.
I'm confused - my post doesn't show any negative moderation, and it was at +5 a minute ago. Is the /. mod setup crashing or something?
Actually this is more or less iron-clad proof of creationism. One of the big things that atheists smugly tease Christians about is the existence of all of these things in space that are like "millions of light years" away. Well what these new results show is that the speed of light in the interstellar void could be almost infinite and it is only in the presence of gravitons that it slows down. This would obviously mean that objects in space are not nearly as old or as far away as atheists have said they are (up to this point.)
In fact, a few back of the envelope calculations that I've just done (I'm on my lunch hour heh) shows that 6000 years seems to be an eminently reasonable estimate for the age of the observable universe. This being the case, look for the science establishment to do whatever it can to sweep this theory under the rug, ridicule it, and label its proponents as crackpots.
Occam's razor isn't always correct. Of course, if you want to stand by it anyway, then find the simplest possible explanation for consciousness. Physical sciences may get you there, I suppose, but it didn't work for me.
Second, that's not where Occam's Razor came from. That doesn't even make sense as a source, as it's pretty much the opposite thing: Holmes saying you needed to elimate everything that isn't possible, and Occam saying you shouldn't add complexities.
Occam's Razor rarely would work in detective stories, because detective stories don't work if answer is obvious. It often doesn't even work in real life crime investigation, because people often have strange motives and do odd things for no useful reason, and obviously criminals do their best to obscure things, so trying to figure out the 'simplest' thing is pointless.
And Holmes' rule doesn't work in physics, because they're trying to figure out the possible. If you ruled out 'impossible' things, you'd never get anywhere.
Dirk Gently's law is much more useful in physics. If you are left with two possiblity, one being completely improbable, and one being impossible according to the laws of physics...well, it just might be physics that is wrong. Of course, you have to repeat the experiment a few times to make sure.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm not sure where to find this information: Do we have any reason to believe that galaxies aren't flying apart?
This is clearly a far more important question than all that graviton nonsense, so here's the scoop:
The Yars themselves fired "Energy Missiles", which could damage the shield around the Qotile but couldn't harm the Qotile itself. The weapon used to destroy the Qotile was simply called a "Destroyer Missile", fired by the Zorlon Cannon. The Qotile's weapon was called a "Swirl".
Sheesh. Don't they teach the fundamentals in school anymore?
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Yea, I always get those two words freakin mixed up. Guess I need to cut down on my THC intake.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If the graviton exists we can make a new weapon, the Graviton bomb. That
would be a nuclear IMPLOSIVE. (think about that).
However, the problem is that if you are saying that, by definition, God does not have to have a cause, you cannot say that everything else does. Whenever someone makes that argument, that God is the first mover, it invalidates their own argument, because it both says and refutes that everything must have a mover, with a single argument. The argument of "first mover" thus has an inherent contradiction, and is not a valid logical argument.
High Bossoms deffinitely defy gravity
Like the gaseous sun for example?
In the future, you might refrain from accusing someone of karma-whoring, then complaining about your +5 not showing up right on that very post. Seems a mite hypocritical.
Yes, though his name is Peter Higgs, not Peter Higg's.
(This isn't me by the way)
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Some 6 years ago I read this theory (in a game, I think) which said that gravity is caused by neutrinos. As neutrinos fly through matter they interact with it (and lose a tiny bit of speed) and exert a force on it. The distribution of neutrinos is homogenous (is that the term? I'm Greek), therefore when you're getting them from all sides, the force is canceled out.
Now, when you're on a planet, it's so huge that it slows down neutrinos more, so it creates a negative force and the neutrinos coming from the other side push you towards the planet, so it's really the absence of neutrinos that is gravity. I think experiments have proven that neutrinos do interact with matter, and this theory would explain why the gravitational force is instant, but I don't know what the flaw is here. I can't see any, but I'm not a physicist.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Dark Matter causing distortions on pioneer's path as it leaves the solar system? I knew it was true. http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/features/science/61 501
"Push" (LeSage) theories of gravity don't work, because of the friction involved with the particles. (They are the most common gravity theory reinvented by laymen.) Neutrino theories are possible on the surface (using virtual neutrino interactions, not "push" theories), but they don't work. Feynman has a discussion of that possibility in his Lectures on Gravitation; I can't quite remember what they get wrong.
Someone played too many video games...
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
Karma? Don't care. The score of this post, which adresses a factually incorrect statement? Do care.
My karma has been maxed out since the days when they displayed a numeric karma score - I don't give a shit. I do, however, want something I said that I consider important to be seen.
dark matter / string theory == crap since day one. i've watched it grow from a "hey, what if we had an invisible and undetectable form of matter?" to today's astoundingly bloated "theory" that provides lots
of adherents with grant money and grad students, but still remains unverifiable. everytime somebody
makes an observation that contradicts it, they pile on another layer of fertilizer. it's the aether of our
age, and future generations of scientists will shake their heads when they're reminded of it (provided
science is still taught a generation from now) the same way we shake our heads now when somebody
brings up phrenology or phlogiston or intelligent design.
I've been reading about alternative theories of gravity, including MOND. Every day, there's at least one paper posted on http://arxiv.org/ dealing with MOND and other theories. To me, MOND seems rather ad hoc. At some acceleration a0 gravity acts linearly? Why? There's really no physical reason for it, though the mathematics work out. Dark matter, by comparison, is much less ad hoc, at least in the case of MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects). That at least invokes normal matter, though it can't account for all of the observed effects. I find WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) to be a little more ad hoc since unknown particles are invoked.
Dark Energy also strikes me as rather ad hoc, being the resurrection of Einstein's idea of a cosmological constant. I'm not completely up to speed on the concept, so I could be wrong though (I am not a physicist, but I have a degree in physics). I do find all this interesting, though, because it seems that no one really knows what's going on, which makes for interesting debates. It's like a cage match. MOND vs. general relativity! Two go in, one comes out. We'll have to wait a while before the dust settles on this one.
...it just looks bigger.
When you look at the sky you see mostly intact galaxies and very few ones in the process of disintegrating. Is direct observation not enough evidence for you?
Umm, isn't the new particle, the graviton, the dark matter we speaketh of?
rofl! You, sir, earn my admiration...
What you consider important is of no consequence to the moderators. That's why there's no self-moderation.
But Dark Matter is not the same level of made-up-ness than the christian God.
Actually, it's the EXACT SAME THING. Here's why.
Some 5000 or 10,000 or however long ago, people needed to explain their existance. They did this by inventing a "super being" which most people refer to as a God today. The super being explained why they existed. Although there is no *proof* of the existance of such a being, people believed it anyway because it explained why something was true.
Today, we use Dark Matter to explain why our calculations on gravity are true. We can't prove or disprove it's existance, we have no proof it's out there. Yet, physicists use dark matter in a similar way that people 5,000 years ago used God... it explains the answers to questions they can not scientifically answer.
Same shit, different millennia.
If one pictures our galaxy in terms of these little gravitational particles, 'gravitons'. Who's to say they do not follow the laws of entropy. Picture a large glass container of tiny bubble gum pieces that gets dropped and broken in the center of our galaxy. These tiny pieces will scatter from the center of our galaxy outwards. It is not the presence of these particles creating gravity, but adversly it is the absence. In areas where there are few 'gravitons', there is less effects of gravity... The 'gravitons', in a sense, push objects towards the 'low density' areas created the feeling of gravity.
Why do atheists always insist "The belief in god is not scientific, it is not falsifiable" (which is correct), then proceed to try to "prove" that God must not exist? If it is not falsifiable, then it can be neither proved nor disproved. Nor does Occam's razor cut as cleanly as you suggest. A world micromanaged by an all powerful being explains everything as simply as does a clockwork universe started by an absentee god or one generated by physical laws with no god at all. Unfortunately, in matters of theology, short of direct personal contact with a supreme being (which I don't expect to experience), there is no proof either way, nor are there adequate logical proofs. Oddly enough, asserting or denying a god are equally matters of faith (Objectivist claims to the contrary notwithstanding).
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
If gravity is manifest as a particle, why can't we shield against it?
Bounding box is too small so it gets culled before the physics engine gets a chance to do the intercept calculations.
And the fundamental particle of sociology, the recently described "person"
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
There's no such thing as Gravity, the earth sucks ...or in this case, the whole universe sucks.
(attributed to Bill Nye the Science Guy)
I prefer graviolis to go with the gravitons! Just don't put metal in the microwave at the same time.
If you do not understand this post, read #8 here.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's +5 now. Maybe someone modded you and then decided he couldn't resist posting. You got 20% negative mods, maybe they hit just before you looked. Maybe that was compounded by your custom score modifiers, if you have any.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Hmm, I would imagine that the friction of the particles is the reason why they *should* work. Thanks for the insight though, I guess the laymen part is true :P
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Dude, I really think you should be far more concerned with the more immidiate danger of the Sun expanding into a red giant star engulfing and completely VAPORIZING EARTH!
That's only 5 GYears away at most, guaranteed..
Once we figure out how to survive that, we'll have plenty of time to ponder how to live through the end of the universe itself.
I'd suggest Stephen Hawking's A Breif History of Time or The Universe in a Nutshell
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0511026
http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0511026
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507222
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0507222
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0506370
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0506370
And I'm an English graduate. It's spelled "ridiculous", monkey-fucker.
(Disclaimer: IANAEG.)
Nice FP man.
Thank you, thank you very much.
The really strange thing is my +1 karma bonus vanished - I don't think this was a result of moderation so much as a bug in /.
That's the main reason I was curious about it.
For those who applaud the end of dark matter, this sort of law-modification theory should really be much more worrying. Dark matter at least has a plausible explanation, is predicted by various theories, makes predictions, and is somewhat intuitive. (come on, how likely is it that all the massive particles in the universe just happen to interact electromagnetically as well? We know from measurements that some, at least, do not - e.g. neutrinos.)
Altering the laws of physics so that they do not behave consistently (specifically, they just happen to do something different when far away from our local experiments) and giving no explanation why this should be so except to fit the previous data is really a terrible way to do things. And if new observations topple your carefully constructed modifications? What are you going to do - change your maths again?
The analogy is seeing a red ball, and declaring not that there is a red ball, but that there is a subtle effect with optics that creates circular red blobs in your vision from time to time.
Just read J Moffats paper, http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0506021, and so i'm not supprised he can
describe correctly the three problems: galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the pioneer anomally. With enough free parameters you can always fit a curve to a data, and STVG has got lots a parameters:
its got ordinary gravity as GR
plus a cosmological constant
plus a repulsive vector field
plus 3 scalar fields
The scale fields describing how the strength of each of the forces varies in space (and time). He then curve fits his new equations with different free parameters for each problem, which you have to do because the strength of the forces varies from place to place. With 3 problems and 3 free variables its not surprising he can fit a solution. This isn't to say STVG doesn't make sense, it does, and fits in well with string theory for example. The problem is with that many free parameters its easy to fit a solution to any problem, but hard to make acturate predictions or disproveable assertions.
A friend of mine (who had done quite a bit of acid, by the way) once suggested that all weight is caused by gravitons. Gravitons are little particals that attach themselves to objects moving at speed, and the faster they move the lighter they become.
This is why planes need wings. The larger the surface area, the more gravitons it can hold so the lighter it becomes, eventually lifting it off the ground.
If you don't believe me yet, hold out your arms and run around in circles as fast as you can for five minutes. You will actually FEEL lighter! What more proof do you need in this post-scientific neoconic age?
.....While I and many other christians don't agree with the creationists attack on evolution....
Many Christians have also bought into the one fundamental tenet of evolution. That is the immense periods of time evolution requires to accomplish its work. Of all physical quantities scientists can measure time is more accurately measured than any other physical quantity, yet nobody REALLY understands its true nature. All measurements of time (clocks) require some kind of constant, repetitive motion. Until recently, man has used the regular motion of the earth and other heavenly bodies to mark off times and seasons. Nowadays we use the motion of atoms, such as the cesium beam clocks and radioactivity to date rocks and other things. The motions of all clocks are governed by forces and interactions of gravity in the former and the forces of electrodynamics in the latter. It is the ASSSUMED constancy of these forces that governs the constancy of the clocks. If either of these forces change, then the clocks based thereon will also change. The equations of gravity to not contain any units referenced or related to time, whereas the equations for the electrodynamic interactions do, such as Planck's constant h or c, the speed of light.
Modern science is based on the BELIEF that these "constants" have never changed. As a Christian you can read in your Bible (1Peter 3:3-10) a little hint from God Himself, penned by the Apostle Peter that things have not always been and will not always be as constant as many assume or would like them to be. There have been and will be again, major discontinuities in both the physical creation which scientists can study and also even more so in the spiritual dimensions that can only be grasped by faith.
Constructs such as as dark matter are needed only because of this underlying belief in the unchangeableness in the "constants" of nature. God doesn't change, but that doesn't mean He who came up with the laws of nature by which evolution operates, cannot adjust these laws of nature as he sees fit. God tells us in many places of the Bible that He has in the past and will in the future change how nature operates in some very fundamental ways.
All theory is gray
I love riding the Graviton when the fair is in town.
And if the Universe has many Gravitons, good for them.
Also I personally can testify that the Graviton adds much Gravity.
The world is flat... It's being carried on the back of four elephants who are themself carried on the back of a giant space turtle... Every sane person knows that...
And what does the turtle stand on? Another turtle. It's turtles all the way down.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Two downmods and the karma bonus on that post is gone, doesn't matter what other mods there are.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
A philosopher says, "I think, therefore I am." A Quantum Physicist says, "I am, I think..."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
As I understand it, the Higg's Boson only gives rest mass to fundamental particles (at least most of them, I don't think they give mass to Majorona particles). As you know from relativity, energy and mass are equivalent and gravity couples to this mass-energy. For example, the mass of the proton is much greater than the constiuent masses of the quarks inside. Most of the mass of a hadron comes from the binding energy of the strong nuclear force between the quarks. You can think of the rest mass of a particle as just the length of its energy-momentum 4-vector, E^2 - p^2= m^2 with gravity coupling to the E part.
...and there is also the Moron, responsible for Battle Fields.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I was not aware of that - thanks for the heads up!
wrote about a theory that sounds a lot like this in his excellent novel "the Genesis Machine"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/074343597 4/sr=1-1/qid=1138221672/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-7250775-9 459838?_encoding=UTF8
Recommended
No, that's your mind on drugs.
A quantum physicist would say:
"Sometimes it's over here, sometimes it's over there. In a thousand measurements the average is () and the variation is (), so we can say with x% confidence that it's between () and ()."
Yeah, it's not funny. Sorry.
So let me see if I've got this straight; you're reading less and less in an effort to gain a more broad and impartial view of the world?
Let me know how that works out for you...
Are the effects of these less-sparsely appearing gravitons enough to effect my own mass' ability to produce gravitons? Will my accelleration or speed affect the gravitons between me and the closest large mass?
Namaste
To give some historical perspective, John Moffat published a paper that claimed he was able to predict the measured oscillation of SN1987A (which turned out to be coming from nearby a TV monitor). His "modifications" to general relatively were so open ended that it can predict anything. It's hardly scientific, and I'm surprised that anything he writes is published.
Read up on the theory of relativity. Irregardless of the speed at which two objects are moving relative to each other, the speed of light is constant between them. Frequency, however, is another matter...
I am surprised anybody can take MOND seriously since it breaks the principle of equivalence. Just introduce a mass that causes the acceleration (of the original test mass) to exceed a0, or else reduces the acceleration below a0. If you explain this away by saying its the individual contributions that matter not the total acceleration you have got an even bigger mess. Presumably this new theory breaks the principle too (anybody know) but finding that the principle of equivalence is a classical limit is not nearly as bad as throwing it away altogether.
Squirrel!
by Brian Greene that he thought it might be possible to detect a graviton using CERN's Large Hadron Collider when it is completed. This may also help to substantiate some of the ideas of string theory... namely that the energy of a particle (string) is inversely proportional to its "size". Gravitons may be "large" enough to be detected when the particle smashing fun begins! I really enjoyed reading this book BTW. Recommended reading!
I liked it better when nerds weren't cool.
Continuous Gravitation, rat on!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Although the existence of God is not a posteriori falsifiable, it may be a priori falsifiable. God (as we commonly consider Him) is defined as an omnipotent being. One could make a case that the very concept of omnipotence is contradictory. For example, can God create an object too heavy for him to lift? No matter how this question is answered, we have an example of something that God cannot do, therefore he cannot be omnipotent.
Also, we can make a case that a disproof of God is not necessary. If we allow ourselves to consider the existence of God, why do we not consider the possible exitstences of infinite other metaphysical entities? For example, little fairies that disappear whenver anyone looks for them along with any evidence that they were ever there. Just because God is offered as such a powerful being is no reason to give it any more credence then any other metaphysical consideration. As Occam states, "Do not multiply entities beyond necesity."
Oddly enough, asserting or denying a god are equally matters of faith...
I agree that they are both matters of faith, but to state that they are equally so is laughable at best.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Sounds like we have the beginning of a theoretical underpinning for the Zero Point Module.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
man I feel dumb.
I couldn't even make a push theory that I liked to follow a 1/r^2 kind of pattern.
didn't know what to google for.
thats a problem with "crank" physics. There are so many out there its hard to find the exact one you just came up with so that you can read about how its been disproven or deiscredited.
and not understanding the subject on a mathematical way either, i take your explanation to be equivalent to sound. That is, why can't we make anti-sound? Simple, silence isn't the *opposite* of sound, it's the absence of it. Thanks to the beastie boys, whose song from ill-communication i quote. Tickles me to think there would be the slightest connection :).
.jro.
That said, there is no 'silence' wave or particle, and thusly, supported by this probably weak analogy, there is no "anti-gravity" wave or particle, there is just the absence of gravity.
How'd i do? any mathies want to step the comparison up a bit?
That means we say goodbye to the book/movie "His dark matters"...
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Could we use it to clean up nuclear waste?
While this comment may be better placed in the currently raging ID debate over here, I feel that this highly emotional topic needs to be addressed in a more sane forum. Still probably the wrong place, I know, but oh well.
What strikes me funny about the issue of dark matter/gravitons is that they are theories based on effect rather than direct observation (in fact, most quantum theory is). This has striking similarities to the Intelligent Design theory, which many people claim is not even scientific since you cannot disprove it (among other reasons).
I think that the real problem is NOT the lack of lack-of-proof (or any of the other reasons).
Let's leave the "spirituality" argument alone and say that the Intelligent Designer is made of dark matter (or noodles). The real problem is that with ID, you have to assume not only the supreme being, but a supreme standard (otherwise, why would this being care about designing us in the first place?). All of a sudden the theory has moral implications. This presents two problems to the average rationally-minded scientist (or Slashdot reader); he/she rails against a) anything that is irrational (such as touchy-feely morality), and especially b) any moral standard that comes from outside that individual's own perspective.
Ultimately, the resistance to ID is because the morality issue has real-life implications regarding that person's behaviour, usually in a way that is somewhat disagreeable and uncomfortable. Unfortunately, rationally-minded or not, everyone has emotional tendencies and thus get upset when "forced" to do something against his/her will. That is the trouble with arguing any side of any moral issue - it is nearly impossible to convince someone to change behaviour unless they actually desire to (usually at the risk of personal pain if the old behaviour continues).
The funny thing about this is that more people will accept the possibility of alien life (especially microbial alien life), just as long as that alien life does not preach to them about how they shouldn't be sleeping with two Orions at once.
The graviton is the force-carrying particle of gravity
This is slightly off topic, but I'm curious to know: What is the speed of gravity? For example, light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth. If the sun instantly disappeared form existence (e.g. the FSM took it), we'd still see ligth for 8 more minutes? But if the sun is gone, does its gravitation effect disappear at the moment it disappeared hurtling the Earth off into space, or would the planets continue to orbit the void for 8 more minutes?
Touche! If only more people wished to find out the 'easy way'. We'd definitely have less of a population problem...
Mind you, there are people who claim to have met God while dead and then woken up. These claims are verifiable - they were clinically dead. The only niggling problem is that it's hardly quantifiable to prove that they actually saw God, since after all they are human... Makes you wonder (if you're not a Christian) why on earth people would believe in a God without direct physical evidence. Then again, you won't know if you've never tried. Funnily enough, I've found that most of the people that discredit 'God' have never actually tried to find him... how unscientific is that?
That's almost really funny. Seems something is missing though.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
That's very interesting, but it begs the question...
...WTF did you just say?!
Mais avec moi elles sont *toutes* ravies au lit :)
It fails to explain the cosmic background, according to the very article quoted, "critics point out that MOND cannot explain the observed masses of clusters of galaxies without invoking dark matter, in the form of almost massless, known particles called neutrinos." So no, it doesn't do away with dark matter.
You are making the mistake of equating validity with an adherence to highly structured rationalization. If all that is real to you is what can be quantified using simple rule sets, nothing I say next will be meaningful to you. Too bad.
As many people pointed out, the issue of God deals with the why, while science deals with the what. The realm of philosophy is to ask the purpose, while science identifies the cause. The two are linked, however, and one must use both to understand life or the universe fully.
As for God's omnipotence being a logical contradiction, this applies only if you are attempting to define God incorrectly. The problem is a "category error," common among atheistic thinking that limits understanding to only what can be structurally defined. The questions you ask don't make sense in light of what God is.
Quotations from this paper:
Sadly(?), we now have two terms in the cosmological arena for two, different, unknown causes.
Dark matter is needed to explain a number of different observations that point to an excess of gravitational influence that can not be reconciled with the amount of mass that is detected by radiation. Ideas for the nature of dark matter have ranged from the normal (stellar corpses and/or failed stars) to the exotic (undiscovered elementary particles like the neutralino). Current observations and theories seem to be converging to rule out a normal matter explanation. Dark matter could also be explained by an aspect of gravity that we don't understand yet, but the scientific jury on that is still out despite the "scientific" press assuring us that any one new, barely-published hypothesis as the solution to all our woes. (Sorry, couldn't help myself...)
Dark energy is posited to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as measured by the latest observations of the structure of the universe. This is the term that is described as a negative pressure that counteracts the influence of gravity at large scales.
I agree. To argue that "god can't create a stone he can't lift" proves a lack of omnipotence is akin to saying the sentcne "This sentence is false" proves that logic is invalid.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
I do not believe that all that is real can be quantified by using a simple set of rules. But when someone makes a claim such as "God is omnipotent", they make a specific logical statement. As such, it is subject to rational inquiry.
"God just isn't the kind of thing that can be caused to exist. So asking 'Who caused God?' is like asking 'what does yellow smell like?'. The colour yellow just isn't (and indeed no colour is) the kind of thing that can have a characteristic smell. Neither is God the sort of thing that can have a cause."
How is it that theists can say "It is meaningless to ask what caused God" but demand from others that a cause for the Universe be explained? I side with the positivists on the question of what created the universe by saying "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."
As for the argument against the argument against Omnipotence, I don't think it works. I agree that naming some external logical contradiction as something that God cannot do (such as "Can God create a square cirlce?") does not argue against omnipotence as no "thing" has been named. However, the example I gave is different. It goes to the heart of what it means to be "omnipotent". After all, the answer to "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?" is "mu" as a Universe simultaneously containing an irresistible force and an immovalbe object is impossible as this leads to a logical contradiction. I'd argue that in the same way, since the concept of an Omnipotent being leads to a contradiction, such a being cannot exist. Your quoted article states The only difference being that one of the two already exists - namely God. when talking about God and the stone with nothing more to back it up with than "Because we assumed God exists, God must exist."
And, yeah, I've thought a lot about this stuff. :)
Happy people make bad consumers.
You might want to get rid of your free iPod/Mac Mini spam from your signature if you don't want to get frequently modded down.
That's just guesswork.
Can we actually measure whether galaxies are flying apart or not? I'd like to know.