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CERN Physicist Says Dark Matter May Be an Illusion

Posted by timothy on from the lunch-dark-matter-doubly-so dept.

anonymousNR writes "A CERN physicist has a new theory explaining the rotational curves of galaxies. 'The key message of my paper is that dark matter may not exist and that phenomena attributed to dark matter may be explained by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum,' Hajdukovic told PhysOrg.com. 'The future experiments and observations will reveal if my results are only (surprising) numerical coincidences or an embryo of a new scientific revolution.' Given the many theories around explaining various observations in recent times, there seems to be a breakthrough on its way in our understanding of the cosmos."

13 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. no dark matter... by ak_hepcat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I hope so. Dark matter is the ugliest kludge to the standard model ever.

    It's worse than the Plus upgrade for Windows 98.

    --
    Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
    1. Re:no dark matter... by bky1701 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Scientists are convinced otherwise when evidence becomes available, and usually base their assumptions on factual information. Religions do not.

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      Great Intellect...
    2. Re:no dark matter... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Scientists SHOULD BE convinced otherwise when evidence becomes available, and 8/10 times base their assumptions on factual information. Religions do both to a much lesser extent.

      Fixed.

      There are plenty of scientists out there with pet theories that they will fight for to the bitter end.

    3. Re:no dark matter... by niklask · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Do you have a hard time stomaching neutrinos too? When they were first proposed they could not be detected. Still they solved the very real problem of explaining the beta-decay spectrum.

    4. Re:no dark matter... by IICV · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I've long thought that the concept of dark matter was a manifestation of the inability of some scientists to admit "Hell, I don't know".

      ..what? Dark matter is, by definition, little bits of "hell, I don't know". Fuck, we don't even know if it's bits or bobs or particles or globs! We have no idea what it is at all!

      I mean, why do you think we call it "dark matter"? That is literally all we know about it - we know it has weak electromagnetic interactions (i.e, it's dark), but strong gravitational interactions (i.e, it's matter).

      The thing you really seem to object to is that scientists will say "Hell, I don't know - but I'll put a name on it, and start narrowing down what it can and cannot be".

      I mean, what do you expect? That we'll admit "hell, I don't know" and just stop? And just give up right there? Hell no - saying "I don't know" is the first step of doing science, not the last step!

    5. Re:no dark matter... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No one would have a problem with the notion of such a God. It's when the God of all space and time starts setting bushes on fire and demanding that people vote Republican that people start to call bullshit.

    6. Re:no dark matter... by haruchai · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, but a new, untested theory doesn't automatically disprove an older, also untested theory just because it sounds more plausible or because you like it.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    7. Re:no dark matter... by Kjella · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Agreed. I have always had a hard time stomaching the theory that dark matter and dark energy exist. It seems far too much like aether, i.e. something made up to fill a gap in knowledge without much evidence backing it up.

      The problem is that the universe is pretty good at ignoring people's bowel movements, a lot of things are completely unintuitive. If I look at a wall it looks damn solid to me, my gut feeling would be that radio and wireless can't possibly work. And if you told me there are particles that'll pass through thousands of miles of earth and stone and lava without even caring that it's there, I'd say you were ready for a room with padded walls if only it wasn't true. In short, past experience has shown us that this is an area where the universe has a habit of not acting the way people expect.

      That said, we do know our understanding of gravity is incomplete at the quantum level, we probably will get a better understanding of it as we go along. But the unexplained gravitational effect seems variable, lumped together just like real matter and not always directly in proportion to it. I could accept that we might have had to adjust gravity by some sort of factor but it seems a bit too erratic to be just a formula adjustment. I at least am pretty confident that we've not found all the particles yet and that this will be at least part of the explanation.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  2. Yay for phlogiston and aether by istartedi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yay for phlogiston and aether. Dark matter might end up on the list of ideas that physcists turned to in order to explain things that had other explanations. La plus ca change...

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    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
    1. Re:Yay for phlogiston and aether by Interoperable · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Hopefully. Dark matter is a very inelegant solution to observations that don't agree with theory. Even so, working out what properties it must have, should it exist, is a useful exercise because it clarifies the problem more thoroughly.

      There seems to be a common misconception that incorrect theories were stupid ideas from the get-go. That's really not the case, until new evidence or new ideas come up the incorrect theories are every bit as valid as the ones that may turn out to be correct and the differences between the various competing theories may point the way to interesting new experiments.

      This new theory is probably wrong, but it's founded on an assumption that, while not currently accepted as true, is experimentally verifiable. That's the assumption that anti-matter and matter have gravitation fields of opposite sign. An experiment to determined the truth of that would be very interesting.

      --
      So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
    2. Re:Yay for phlogiston and aether by Baloroth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly. It was the development of the theory of the aether that led to many of the experiments surrounding the properties of light that allowed the theory of relativity to be developed. For instance, we knew if aether existed it would create a "wind" that would slow light in some directions as the earth moved. The experiment to test that wind helped found the theory of relativity (although, interestingly enough, Einstein supposedly hadn't heard of the experiment when he postulated the constancy of the speed of light.)

      Aether was by no means a stupid theory, but it required a number of new properties previously unseen in material bodies, and it was theorized solely as a kludge to explain the motion of light through a vacuum. The analogy with dark matter is quite strong. Dark matter, too, has never been observed, and possesses properties of matter previous unseen or indeed thought impossible, and exists solely to bridge a gap between our model of how things should behave, and how things actually behave. This does not bode well for it. However, the experiment to test for its existence is quite likely to lead to something interesting, even if we have no idea what.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
  3. Re:Can't see the quantum vacuum for the dark matte by Goaway · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What really surprises me is, despite this, so many physicists have jumped on the bandwagon.

    This is because it is the simplest theory which fits available data. There are simpler theories, but they do not fit available data, and thus are of little value.

    Average Slashdotters have been more skeptical of they dark matter theory than physicists, from what I've seen.

    This is because average Slashdotters do not have even the beginnings of a clue about astrophysics, but think they are expert at every subject they ever heard mentioned on the internet.

  4. Re:if you can't see it, it doesn't exist... by causality · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You can detect dark matter. If it exists, we have already indirectly detected it. We have not yet directly detected it, but that is not because it not possible to do so, just that we have not succeeded yet. We are currently trying to do so.

    Using similar methods, there was a time when you could "detect" epicycles, too. Like dark matter they were a theoretical fudge factor designed to prevent a cherished theory from falling apart due to its lack of successful predictions and explanatory power. In the case of epicycles, the cherished theory was geocentrism. You would have been ridiculed extensively (and quite possibly be in danger of the Inquisition) for questioning it, not because your own theory wasn't viable or couldn't also explain the observed results but because "everybody knew" how "well-established it is" that the earth is the center of the solar system...

    If they teach scientists about the history of these things as part of their normal training, they don't do a very good job. At all.

    --
    It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein