New Theory Challenges Need For Dark Matter

New submitter elsurexiste writes "An Italian Physicist came up with a strange way to explain anomalous galactic rotations without dark matter, instead relying on the gravitational effects of faraway matter. The article explains, 'Conceptually the idea makes little sense. Positioning gravitationally significant mass outside of the orbit of stars might draw them out into wider orbits, but it’s difficult to see why this would add to their orbital velocity. Drawing an object into a wider orbit should result in it taking longer to orbit the galaxy since it will have more circumference to cover. What we generally see in spiral galaxies is that the outer stars orbit the galaxy within much the same time period as more inward stars. But although the proposed mechanism seems a little implausible, what is remarkable about Carati’s claim is that the math apparently deliver galactic rotation curves that closely fit the observed values of at least four known galaxies. Indeed, the math delivers an extraordinarily close fit.' As usual, these are extraordinary claims that divert from the consensus, so keep a healthy skepticism. The paper is available at the arXiv (PDF)."

Comments

No

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but "gravitational effects" won't sell popsci books. For the sake of our royalties, let's stick to dark matter.

Re:No

[vandon]

Yes, I agree. Dark gravity deniers should be kicked out of their profession. Once a consensus is reached, it is recognized as FACT!

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Consensual reality? What the fuck bro?

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT SENATURS DID U BY?!?!?! wer owned by teh croprorashuns!!

Oh... were we not doing one of those? My apologies. Do carry on.

Re:No

[ilguido]

The parent post is more insightful than funny. Sadly it is more insightful than funny.

Re:No

[Hatta]

Sure they will. I've read all the dark matter/dark energy/string theory pop-sci I can stomach. There's not much point in reading another one until the issue is settled. A pop-sci book titled something like "Wild Goose Chase: The Debunking of Dark Matter", would definitely sell.

Re:No

[SecurityTheatre]

His model is less accurate than that which is predicted by dark matter. The fact that it does align with several known observations makes it at least worth consideration, but realistically, there are a dozen or more theories about this, most of which are a little crackpot.

To entertain alternatives because the consensus theory is still in doubt is healthy, but the consensus still represents to most scientists, the most plausible and will continue to drive current research efforts until a new model is proven fairly conclusively, to be more accurate.

This is how science works and it is not broken. I can clearly tell you are not a scientist and you also have issues with other science that may or may not have plausible alternative models, which may or may not match current observations and experimental results with more or less success, but which still haven't caught on because of gaps in their explanations of various observed phenomena.

The scientific method isn't perfect, but it serves us well in general and it is worthwhile to stick with it in order to attempt to explain our surroundings. Are you implying otherwise?

Re:No

[md65536]

Could it maybe be red matter though?

Re:No

[md65536]

I dunno, if you capitalize it, Faraway Matter has a certain charm to it.

Re:No

[Quirkz]

Only if a supernova threatens the entire galaxy, and a planet many minutes away at full warp can have Vulcan hovering in the sky above it, larger than a moon. In that case, yes, red matter is entirely plausible.

Re:No

[Curunir_wolf]

Whoosh!

Re:No

[techno-vampire]

Now, now, don't be too hard on him. He's only doing what the AGW people have spent years training him to do.

Re:No

[DesScorp]

Yes, I agree. Dark gravity deniers should be kicked out of their profession. Once a consensus is reached, it is recognized as FACT!

Heh. A few years back I was modded into oblivion when I stated that I thought Dark Matter was utter BS, a way for some scientists to make the math work despite any real proof. I think I said something like "They can't just come out and admit 'I don't know', so they pulled this out of their ass. 'The cause? Ummm. Ummm, hey, it's.... dark matter! That's the ticket!' ".

And that's pretty much what it is. The observable universe doesn't agree with their equations, so they made something up to make the equations work. And as someone else said, "you can't fight consensus, right?".

Re:No

[mc6809e]

"His model is less accurate than that which is predicted by dark matter."

Dark matter doesn't predict anything. Dark matter is a thing hypothesized to exist that might explain our observations.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

3 Faraway Matter. This is going to be my new catch-all term for "unknowns".

Re:No

[scotch]

Dark matter *is* the scientists saying "we don't know", actually.

Re:No

[jo42]

Dark matter is a thing hypothesized to exist

Just look between a Republican's ears to find dark matter.

Re:No

[drolli]

As a physicist: You are Idiot and uneducated in the history of physics. Lets take some instances of when people invented something "to make the math work" (uhm yes, thats what physicists are trying to do in the end.....)

a) Ether Wind. They made is up "to make the math work" as an alternative to "change the underlying euquations".... And the winner was "change the underlying equations". Without specific predictions from the Ether WInd Hyphothesis one could not have constructed the Michelson-Moreley Experiement

b) Neutrinos. Long predicted, because some momentum was missing. At that moment the neutrino was "dark matter". As we all know, Neutrinos exist. Is everybody would have believe that Neutrinos are utter bullshit because they "just ake the math work" nobody would have developed a theory for detecting them.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I modded you down for saying Republican. If you had replaced 'Republican' with 'Politician' I would have modded you to +5 funny.
tl;dr: don't bash a single subset of politicians, bash all politicians.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Think you need to take some classes in the Philosophy of Science.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's the scientists saying "we can explain the fact that we can't explain stuff by pulling some invisible shit out of our arse" instead of just admitting they can't explain it.

Re:No

[tenco]

The point is, they don't have to declare the existence of some new property of reality but maybe can explain it (if the physics and math hold) with existing properties. Occams razor.

Re:No

[tehcyder]

I modded you down for saying Republican. If you had replaced 'Republican' with 'Politician' I would have modded you to +5 funny. tl;dr: don't bash a single subset of politicians, bash all politicians.

No, some politics and some politicians are worse than others. I dislike David Cameron intensely, but I would still agree he's not as bad as Mussolini..

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

""They can't just come out and admit 'I don't know', so they pulled this out of their ass. 'The cause? Ummm. Ummm, hey, it's.... dark matter! That's the ticket!' "."

Looks like you have been reading mainstream non-science sources. If you'd have been listening to what cosmologists actually say about it (ie would have listened to science lectures - there's a shitload of those on the internet), then you'd know they do in fact say "we don't know".

What they do know is that there is an effect that existing theory does not explain. So they go look for a better theory but that doesn't mean they can't put a label on the effect that they don't understand. That label is "Dark Matter".

Dark Matter is just short-hand for "a gravitational effect at galactic and intergalactic scale that current theory does not explain".

In effect their saying "it's Dark Matter" is their way of saying "we don't know".

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, but it's more fun to go on some non-science website and make it seem as though you're smarter than scientists.

Re:No

[munozdj]

Don't forget Planck. He introduced quantization to make the equations match with the experimental data. He said it himself that he believed it was just a mathematical trick.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The ether wind hypothesis was not proposed "to make the math work." It was a result of developing a rational explanation to the observed properties of light. The current state of physics has no concept of rational cosmology only consensus and mathematics. Its propositions contradict reason and have little experiental evidence.

Re:No

[atlasdropperofworlds]

'gravitational effects' also doesn't explain the amount of gravitational lensing galaxies can cause.

Re:No

[Raenex]

A few years back I was modded into oblivion when I stated that I thought Dark Matter was utter BS, a way for some scientists to make the math work despite any real proof.

It's called a hypothesis, and it's one of the fundamental tools of science. They then do experiments and look for collaborating evidence to see if it's right. If you want to say dark matter is bullshit, you have to say why and argue the science. Being an armchair scientist gets you no credibility.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Dark matter doesn't predict anything. Dark matter is a thing hypothesized to exist that might explain our observations.

Yeah, but the problem is, dark matter theory smacks of the type of handwaving physics you get in a Michael Bay movie. "Uh, it must be one single thing that we can't measure or detect that has properties exactly like something that we can measure and detect, despite the fact that we can't detect it."

I've always interpreted "dark matter" to mean a long list of galaxy-scale gravitational and measurement issues that have yet to be discovered. Maybe this guy's theory accounts for 5% of it. Maybe it's just wrong. Who knows, but we will eventually figure it out and it won't be just one thing.

My 2c.

Re:No

[FhnuZoag]

Dark matter predicted the existence of things like the Bullet Cluster ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster ). I've yet to see a dark matter replacement that as elegantly results in phenomena like that.

Re:No

[arkane1234]

it worked for Catholicism, why not!

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I stated that I thought Dark Matter was utter BS, a way for some scientists to make the math work despite any real proof.

How else could the hunt for a constructive proof begin? Physics is a feedback graph, with theories, simulations and experiments feeding each other. The "utter BS" is the way science is done during this glorious time of computers.

Re:No

[drolli]

It was the last resort in trying to keep up galileo invariance for the sake of an old mathematical concept.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

. If you want to say dark matter is bullshit, you have to say why and argue the science. Being an armchair scientist gets you no credibility.

Nope! Don't wanna. It's their science, not mine. They have to defend it. Scientific credibility is not what wins hearts and minds.

Re:No

[SecurityTheatre]

I reacted that way because I gathered that GP was taking a swipe at "climate science" in the general tone of the typical ad hominem criticisms of the scientific method that seem to come out of that line of argument and that particular camp of folks.

My comments applied to many branches of science, without necessarily condoning any particular contested opinion.

what's going on in italy lately?

[Sebastopol]

faster than light neutrino measurements?

revolutionary-yet-pseudo-sciency sources of energy?

and now dark matter challenges?

coincidence or what?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[marcello_dl]

Maybe, with chronically insufficient funding, researchers work better. It'll be known as the Paradox Berlusconii.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

faster than light neutrino measurements?

revolutionary-yet-pseudo-sciency sources of energy?

and now dark matter challenges?

coincidence or what?

They'll do anything, absolutely anything, invent any figment, totally divorce the mathematics from natural philosophy, propose strange exotic forms of matter never observed, and claim their existence is "proven" because they have a favorite explanation among multiple explanations not requiring strange exotic forms of matter. They will do all of this, and more, to avoid admitting that "million degree gas" is conductive plasma and there is electricity in space and its attractive force is linear instead of following an inverse-square law, totally eliminating the need for any dark matter.

Both require some kind of leap of faith. Conventional leap of faith: this strange unseen matter exists and interacts gravitationally but somehow isn't available on Earth, cannot be created or observed or studied in a lab, and is proposed to exist merely to fix a broken theory that never predicted its existence but can't get the expected results without it (Karl Popper spins in his grave...). Electrical leap of faith: electrical processes explain the lack of mass through the electric force which is many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity and is more effective at long distances and is the only logical explanation for light-years-long jets of matter (Birkeland currents), can be observed in any laboratory with modest equipment and is known to scale both up and down, and through processes not yet understood there is enough charge separation in the Universe to provide the potential difference to cause these circuits to flow.

Or they can keep getting surprised, shocked, and amazed when they keep discovering celestial objects not predicted by their theories.

I wonder how long it will be before science is forced to throw out dark matter and embrace electrical effects. Ten years? Twenty? It definitely won't be the first time an idea was long ridiculed before the consensus collapsed under its own weight and was later found to be valid and embraced. They call it a paradigm shift. It only happens this way because of a lot of stubborn bastards who chase pet theories and grant money and don't teach new students about alternative theories. Halton Arp's compilation of galaxies with highly redshifted quasars _in front of them_ and _physically connected to them_ alone should have made them reconsider, but instead he is ignored because he doesn't fit the orthodoxy. I thought science was supposed to be different from religions with their orthodoxies and heretics and apostates?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[gstrickler]

Maybe it's the start of the another renaissance.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[gstrickler]

A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?

... a rant that explains why the writer believes one theory to be better than the prevailing one by reviewing the merits of both.

I know it's trendy to just look down your nose and condemn something without actually explaining what's wrong with it and why you disagree, and certainly it's trendy to avoid setting a better example by taking a position yourself that doesn't have the qualities you're complaining about... but don't you feel like a bitch when you do things this way? No insult intended, I mean "bitch" as in "bitching" as in completely non-constructive whining that doesn't fix or challenge or change anything.

If you think the Electric Universe theory is invalid, or that the conventional theories with their ad-hoc explanations and retroactive revisements to deal with failed predictions are better, or that the scientific censorship encountered by Arp and others who were denied telescope time and denied publishment in peer-reviewed journals (that certainly could find any flaws in their theories consistent with the entire purpose of peer review) is the right way to handle dissent in a supposedly scientific establishment ... feel free to explain why. Take your own position. Show why the previous one is lacking.

Be at least slightly respectable by bringing something to the table. Try it on for size.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[bucky0]

Conventional leap of faith: this strange unseen matter exists and interacts gravitationally but somehow isn't available on Earth, cannot be created or observed or studied in a lab,

Unless supersymmetry is RP-conserving.

Electrical leap of faith: electrical processes explain the lack of mass through the electric force which is many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity and is more effective at long distances and is the only logical explanation for light-years-long jets of matter (Birkeland currents), can be observed in any laboratory with modest equipment and is known to scale both up and down, and through processes not yet understood there is enough charge separation in the Universe to provide the potential difference to cause these circuits to flow.

If you're willing to believe that far off galaxies have ridiculous amount of charge separation (something we have no theories or experimental evidence for), then believing that there are weakly interacting massive particles or other forms of dark matter can't be a stretch. Electromagnetism is strong (relatively), there would have to be something really trying to hard to convince the different charges to keep apart

I wonder how long it will be before science is forced to throw out dark matter and embrace electrical effects. Ten years? Twenty?

It's not a matter of time, it's a matter of evidence. If you can come up with a self-consistent theory that explains these electrical effects and have predictable effects that can be measured then you can have your moment in the sun.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[omuls are tasty]

Don't forget the most unlikely event of them all - Berlusconi's gone!

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tragedy]

Just in case anyone isn't aware, the parent post is a rant about the "electric universe" "theory". Basically, it's pseudoscientific quackery. Not because of scientific snobbery, or some sort of conspiracy against the theory, but because most of it is quite obviously bunk. It's basically just a form of monomania.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Valtor]

There are no coincidences...

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[rainmouse]

A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?

To be fair, using mathematical models on stuff we can see and measure seems a reasonable idea as opposed to inventing an invisible, incorporeal, magical material that we have no direct evidence even exists in order to compensate for our lack of understanding in how the Universe moves.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[MinistryOfTruthiness]

I take it you're a member of the *resistance*? Get it? Heh, heh... er.. never mind. I'll sit down now.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[DM9290]

A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?

To be fair, using mathematical models on stuff we can see and measure seems a reasonable idea as opposed to inventing an invisible, incorporeal, magical material that we have no direct evidence even exists in order to compensate for our lack of understanding in how the Universe moves.

So reasonable in fact, it's a wonder no one has done it before, or maybe they have and they are keeping it a secret! .... it must be a government conspiracy!

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tragedy]

Remind me how the Electric Universe theory explains nucleosynthesis? If stars are actually just big balls of iron and nuclear fusion isn't powering them, where did the iron, and all of the other elements come from? Traditional cosmology explains it pretty well, and decades of observations of stars at all stages of development supports those explanations very well. How does the Electric Universe fit with all the existing evidence?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[bill_mcgonigle]

coincidence or what?

Don't forget - they also have geologists on trial for failing to predict the earthquake a few years ago. The Universe is merely seeking equilibrium.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Electric Universe theory has been debunked over and over and over. It's as real as orgone energy or homeopathic medicine or Scientology -- meaning completely quackery with no foundation in science or reality.

All crackpot theories have the same defense: that all of academia is making a group effort to discredit the theory because accepting it goes against too many well-established norms. And you said it yourself, everybody is teaching the "wrong" theories and ignoring the Electric Universe concept.

Also I'm pretty sure you are trolling, but can't say for sure.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[HiThere]

Somehow this argument sounds like the argument for continental drift before plate tectonics.

OTOH, I note that the another comment denies that the mathematical fit is all that good. This isn't really convincing, as I heard similar denials of continental drift before a plausible mechanism was discovered.

Still, if that it so you can expect it to continue to be rejected in a way that seems to you unreasonable UNTIL you come up with a plausible mechanism (for charge separation?). Personally I'd look at friction of intestellar gasses around the ejection plumes from black holes. Friction is well known for causing charge separation between, e.g., fur and glass. Now you've got to come up with your analogs to fur and glass...or come up with some other mechanism. But until you provide a plausible mechanism, this theory will be rejected without reasonable examination. Expect it.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[gstrickler]

You mean Mathematical models like the theory of gravity? Yup, sounds pretty reasonable.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remind me how the Electric Universe theory explains nucleosynthesis? If stars are actually just big balls of iron and nuclear fusion isn't powering them, where did the iron, and all of the other elements come from? Traditional cosmology explains it pretty well, and decades of observations of stars at all stages of development supports those explanations very well. How does the Electric Universe fit with all the existing evidence?

Eh what? Did you ever actually study this theory before deciding to comment on it? Of course not.

Two places to start: Holoscience and Thunderbolts.

Hint: they never claim stars are balls of iron. You deserve to feel like a moron for criticising something you do not understand. I doubt you have the objectivity and humility to admit fault here, though. You will probably take the coward's way out and assume I must be insulting you for no reason. Moving on...

They claim they are balls of ionized plasma (i.e. gas-like, not solid-like). Also, sufficiently powerful arc discharges can transmute elements. Also, EU theory doesn't say no fusion happens on a star. It says the star isn't powered by fusion. It would be more like the way we do fusion here on earth, by supplying energy (via laser beams typically) that causes the material to fuse. Just like here on earth, it isn't self-sustaining. It is powered by the energy of the sustained electric discharge.

This seems to be all that the EU haters bring to the table: demagoguery, misrepresentation, and straw men. Pathetic, even if unintended. It suggests you just heard something repeated a few times and ran with it and made no effort to validate what you believe. It's called drinking the kool-aid when people do this in the political arena.

If the above sounds harsh it's because I get tired of how misinformed and thick-headed many of you are. You are armchair critics who make no active effort to learn about something before deciding it must be total bullshit. Anyway, if you want to see the actual EU position on the Sun, please read this.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Electric Universe theory has been debunked over and over and over."

Citations needed.

"It's as real as orgone energy or homeopathic medicine or Scientology -- meaning completely quackery with no foundation in science or reality."

Citations needed.

"All crackpot theories have the same defense: that all of academia is making a group effort to discredit the theory because accepting it goes against too many well-established norms."

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. "crackpot" is generally a term used to designate a well qualified individual conducting research frowned upon by the mainstream so disdain by said mainstream establishment is a given regardless of the validity of the research in question. Your implied argument is that anything which is not accepted by the mainstream establishment implicitly has no validity is a BIG citation needed.

This all falls back to what I like to call the anti-conspiracy fallacy. It goes something like this. Non-mainstream believer, group, or idea X depends on a group Y acting inappropriately, this is obviously false because group Y is too large to coordinate such an effort and probably also lacks motive. This is a fallacy because group dynamics do not depend on concerted conscious efforts. Large group effects can be an emergence phenomenon that may or may not be intentionally seeded by key individuals. The fact that they are emergence phenomenon does absolve members of group Y for responsibility in the result.

The reason this cracks me up is the people who scoff at such an idea generally do so because of their unshakable belief in the quality of group Y's efforts... which is itself the same kind of emergence phenomenon they are pretending does exist!

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

All their good scientists are taking a tunnel to Switzerland.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[SecurityTheatre]

I have seen no other theories that properly explain both the galactic gravity phenomenon as well as the ever expanding universe paradox. They seem to be at odds with each other and no single explanation has ever adequately explained both, except for those that sound a little wacky (dark matter/dark energy, etc).

Thoughts?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll do anything, absolutely anything, invent any figment, totally divorce the mathematics from natural philosophy, propose strange exotic forms of matter never observed, and claim their existence is "proven" because they have a favorite explanation among multiple explanations not requiring strange exotic forms of matter.

The mysterious "Them"! A shadowy organization, nefarious and wicked.

They will do all of this, and more, to avoid admitting that "million degree gas" is conductive plasma and there is electricity in space and its attractive force is linear instead of following an inverse-square law, totally eliminating the need for any dark matter.

So Coulomb's Law is completely wrong just because PLASMA and ELECTRICITY IN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE!!! ? Why does nobody ever observe a linear attractive force for electric charge in the lab, under any conditions (including evacuated chambers and plasmas)?

And how does an incoherent shambling mess of a crackpot theory (the entire family of Electric/Plasma Universe wingnuttery) believed only by ignoramuses like yourself who don't even understand that like charges repel and opposite charges attract, a theory which has been disproven a thousand times over by real scientists doing real science, a theory which never gained any traction at all because it doesn't match how the universe observably works, solve anything at all?

Both require some kind of leap of faith. Conventional leap of faith: this strange unseen matter exists and interacts gravitationally but somehow isn't available on Earth, cannot be created or observed or studied in a lab, and is proposed to exist merely to fix a broken theory that never predicted its existence but can't get the expected results without it (Karl Popper spins in his grave...).

Nobody requires that you take a leap of faith and "believe" in dark matter. It's just the best explanation we've got right now, and last I checked, scientists are actively searching for both confirmation and disconfirmation of dark matter. If it were a faith industry, nobody would be doing either and that would be that.

Electrical leap of faith: electrical processes explain the lack of mass through the electric force which is many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity and is more effective at long distances

Trying to use the electric force to explain the observations which led to the proposal of dark matter is flatly stupid. Remember what I said just above about you not understanding that the electric force is only attractive for opposite charge? If you don't accept that, you are going against every observation of the electric force, ever. If you do accept that, then you've just disproven the electric universe theory, because the observed discrepancies from Newton's Law at cosmological scales are evidence of a consistently attractive force, like gravitation. If stars and planets and clusters and so forth were actually far enough from electrically neutral for the electric force to be a significant factor in their interactions with one another, you could never find a set of 3 objects which all attracted one another. Such objects are routinely found, therefore the electric universe theory is bunk.

So yeah, the EU theory requires a leap of faith: the kind of leap which requires you to ignore solid evidence which absolutely disconfirms the theory.

and is the only logical explanation for light-years-long jets of matter (Birkeland currents),

Calling LY-long jets of matter Birkeland currents is a perfect example of how EU true believers try to claim random phenomena as their own without rigorously linking them to EU theories. Birkeland's predictions related to the aurorae on Earth, not cosmological objects.

can be observed in any laboratory with modest equipment and is known to scale both up and down, and

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[rainmouse]

You mean Mathematical models like the theory of gravity? Yup, sounds pretty reasonable.

There are other more complicated but also more plausible and elegant solutions that exist without needing to introduce dark matter. The problem dark matter attempts to solve are curves witnessed in galaxy rotation that are inconsistent with our understanding of gravity and mass. The key hypothesis is that dark matter is a dipolar fluid composed from gravitational dipoles (in analogy with electric dipole, a gravitational dipole is defined as a system composed of two particles, one with positive and one with negative gravitational charge). the galaxy rotation curves can be considered as result of the gravitational polarization of the dipolar fluid by the gravitational field of baryonic matter.

This paper: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1106/1106.0847.pdf by D S Hajdukovic at CERN proposes that dark matter does not exist but its measured effect is merely an illusion created by the polarization of the quantum vacuum by the gravitational field of the baryonic matter.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you daring to question existence of phlogiston, that glorious celestial substance that suffuses the luminous aether?

Pistols at dawn, sir.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

Desperation runs innovation.

When you are hungry and there is only a cup of flour and a single potato you will be pretty inventive.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gravitational lensing has been observed in a bodies of dark matter... so we can see it too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Galaxy_clusters_and_gravitational_lensing

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Edmund Blackadder]

Electromagnetic force can be easily and cheaply measured here on earth and is thus measured all the time. I find it hard to believe that we have had the wrong formula all this time and nobody noticed. And if this is the case, and Electromagnetic force decreases linearly and not quadraticaly you should be able to provide experimental proof pretty easily.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[flappinbooger]

So reasonable in fact, it's a wonder no one has done it before, or maybe they have and they are keeping it a secret! .... it must be a government conspiracy!

Now there's an idea that can gain some traction! Bravo. Alert Alex Jones at once! Oh wait, Jones has been proven right on lots of things... hmmmm

Alert Alex Jones anyway!

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tragedy]

I've been around for a while and listened to Electric Universe proponents spout off about it for some time. I can assure you that, at one point, the party line in the posts I saw was that stars were basically just big iron-nickel anodes and cathodes in space surrounded by a relatively thin layer of plasma. Similarly, the trails behind comets weren't water reflecting sunlight, but were in fact an electrical aurora, etc., etc. Maybe such claims have been abandoned now, but they were there in the past. Electric Universe theory surely keeps changing just like most things. The only real constant seems to be that proponents insist that all other forces must bow to the electromagnetic force and that conventional physicists who don't subscribe to the theory are soulless minions of orthodoxy. Essentially, the entire point of EU theory seems to simply be contrarian.

In a lot of ways it reminds me of creationism. When I was a kid, dinosaur bones were just a few old bones that scientists had put together wrong and misinterpreted. When it became far too clear to everyone that only a complete idiot could really believe that, dinosaur bones because a trick planted by the devil. Today, dinosaurs are antediluvian life which didn't make it onto the ark... they're even mentioned in the bible!!! The creationists trail real science and keep changing their story, but never, ever, ever admit error. What they believe is always the absolute truth and always has been and if you remember having hours long arguments with them over something which they now believe to be the case but didn't then, your memory is faulty! The thing that's important to them isn't really any particular set of facts, it's that all those scientists with their fancy degrees aren't really so smart and are, in fact, actually stupid fools who can't see the truth, which is obvious to any of the superior (yet humble) believers.

Oh, gee. I am embarrassed to admit, I wrote the previous two paragraphs without reading the links you provided. Nothing but demagoguery and misrepresentation from me. I clearly never even your alternate theory a fighting chance. But, now I have read those pages and I am enlightened. In the spirit of enlightenment, I present an excerpt from this article which you linked to:

Stars formed in this way have an outer envelope of helium and hydrogen. Working inwards, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen will form the atmospheric middle layers, and iron, silicon and magnesium will make up the core, which is cool. There is no thermonuclear engine in stars!

Now, this is not exactly "big balls of iron" like I wrote (of course that was just what I'd heard from other EU proponents), but your response that "they claim they are balls of ionized plasma (i.e. gas-like, not solid-like)" after berating me for my idiocy seems a little disingenuous in light of what that article says. It seems to fit what I said a lot better than what you said. Solid core, lots of iron.

Fusion as a secondary effect of huge arc discharges doesn't seem like it would be sufficient to create all the higher elements in the universe given how ridiculously small the yield would be with plain hydrogen rather than tritium and deuterium like we do it on earth so, as far as I'm concerned, at present, the EU theory doesn't explain where all those elements came from. I'm sorry, I don't think that I'm drinking someone's poisoned kool-aid by finding EU theory to be flawed. I think I'm just looking at a heavily flawed theory and seeing it for what it is.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[ckaminski]

IF that's the best treatise they can put together to explain their position, they're fucking quacks.

Start off with persecution of your position, yadda yadda. Sounds like the free-energy conspiracy theorists.

Now this is just an adhoc opinion I've built based around the presentation (or non-presentation of their position) - and it will probably bias me against the EU theory...

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[cowboy76Spain]

DISCLAIMER: I am not a astrophysic, and I have the good sense to not to claim that the new theory looks like better (fits observations better) than dark matter. The scientific process will eventually sort it out (and not through an /. poll). This post is not about the theory but about the posts on it.

When Wegener postulated its theory, even if the underlying details were not fully understood, it was a scientific one because it answered to observation (size of continents, identical fossils found at different continents, etc.).

Fortunately, there was no internet then, because there would be a deluge of posts by uninformed people who didn't knew shit of what they were talking about, but felt that theory too "radical" and that they had to restore order (go read the GGP talking about "totally divorce the mathematics from natural philosophy").

The most funny things about those guys is that they would look at the abstract of a full scientific study and counter it with and abstract... "similar fossils? they have been spread by African swallows. Hey, that solves it, I am so sure that I won't ever check if this can be possible."

Nowadays, we have some amateurs who take several years of observations, heavy mathematical work and just threw out of their asses "I'd look at friction of intestellar gasses around the ejection plumes from black holes". Where is your data? Your correlation of the expected results with observations? Your predictions and/or experiments?If you have some of it, don't send it to me, publish the paper to help science, please.

Don't get my wrong, I am not annoyed by it. It could be annoying if those people were wasting someones time for this, but no scientific is going to come to /. searching for theories, so it is mostly harmless entertainment that brings a smile to my face :-)

The funny thing is that those nutjobs always leer in the same direction, opposing the "unnatural" posibilities. Are they afraid that the world is becoming too complicated? I feel there are too many camouflaged ludites out there.

And, finally, my goodbye present.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[ceoyoyo]

That's only ONE of the problems dark matter addresses. The others are conveniently not mentioned by dark matter alternatives, because the alternatives do not address them well.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's as real as orgone energy or homeopathic medicine or Scientology -- meaning completely quackery with no foundation in science or reality."

Citations needed.

>

You're asking for citations for those? You could have at least picked something more controversial and less established. Do you also need citations for how the Theory of Relativity has superseded Newton's classical mechanics?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tigersha]

Maybe it because, due to a lack of funds they cannot afford actual scientific instruments so they just suck stuff out of their thumbs?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[MattBecker82]

Still, if that it so you can expect it to continue to be rejected in a way that seems to you unreasonable UNTIL you come up with a plausible mechanism (for charge separation?).

I tried really hard to parse this sentence, truly I did, but I simply couldn't manage it.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[gtall]

Could you put all that science into something useful...errr...maybe a flux capacitor?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[vikingpower]

Italy is about to make the Euro zone implode. Correlation / causation ? Hmm...

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

coincidence or what?

Don't forget - they also have geologists on trial for failing to predict the earthquake a few years ago.

No, they don't. Those geologists are being sued because a number of people believe they significantly downplayed or underestimated the risks for and potential magnitude of an earthquake there.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[rich_hudds]

What has Alex Jones ever been right about that we didn't know anyway?

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tehcyder]

All crackpot theories have the same defense: that all of academia is making a group effort to discredit the theory because accepting it goes against too many well-established norms. And you said it yourself, everybody is teaching the "wrong" theories and ignoring the Electric Universe concept.

AKA the "they laughed at Copernicus/Newton/Einstein" argument. Hint: they didn't.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tehcyder]

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

No, but it also doesn't mean they are after you.

"crackpot" is generally a term used to designate a well qualified individual conducting research frowned upon by the mainstream so disdain by said mainstream establishment is a given regardless of the validity of the research in question

And "crackpot" is also a term used to designate an unqualified individual making theories up which are frowned upon by the mainstream because they are generally unfalsifiable.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tehcyder]

There is an obvious reason why the Electric Universe theory is wrong: it doesn't fit with the Time Cube.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[tehcyder]

There are no coincidences...

Not if you're insane enough, no.

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[hitmark]

Supposedly Max Planck has said that science progresses one funeral at a time...

Re:what's going on in italy lately?

[hitmark]

Supposedly Alice in wonderland was written to demonstrate what insanity would come out of irrational numbers.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Wow.

[Frosty Piss]

I'm envious of anyone who actually understands anything the summary is talking about.

Re:Wow.

[somersault]

It's pretty much high school physics. Spin yourself on an office chair and observe what happens as you move your arms or legs closer and further away from the center of your rotation. Admittedly the summary did phrase things such that I realised better why spreading out your mass changes your rotational velocity..

Re:Wow.

[bonch]

Don't worry, I'm sure another "Google is great" or "Copyright sucks" article is in the queue.

Re:Wow.

[FrootLoops]

To be honest, almost nobody here is qualified to comment on the actual story and paper. In a more ideal world there would be at most half a dozen comments from the few physicists who post on /. and are in the right specialization to discuss dark matter and galactic velocity curves. I have far more than the average background in physics and especially math, but I won't weigh in on the physics with my random crappy opinions. It seems like the article's author shouldn't have, either, though. The article offers no explanation whatsoever for the incongruity it describes (as quoted in the summary). To be fair, it does at least encourage some discussion of science, which is a good thing.

Re:Wow.

[hrimhari]

Hmm... that's not what I understood from the summary. That is, I didn't understand that the article talked about how galaxies with closer arms rotate faster than galaxies with stretched arms and why.

Instead, what I understood is more like when you stretch your arms, they keep your elbows and hands rotating around you with the same orbital velocity, regardless of this common velocity being faster or slower for the entire body. But since there are no real arms linking the galaxy's elements, the orbital velocity of an object far from the center should be slower than that of a nearer object, I guess making galaxies look like discs instead of stretching arms. Yet, that's not how they look.

The article then tries to explain it with gravity from faraway objects as opposed to dark matter.

I could of course have misunderstood it entirely.

Re:Wow.

[jd]

Not sure about the summary, but the paper is extremely simple. I'll summarize it:

It is commonly assumed that galaxies are evenly distributed. This would mean that if you picked any galaxy at random, you could pick other galaxies whose gravitational pull totally balanced out the effect of the first one. So, overall, no distant galaxy would ever affect anything.

What is observed is that galaxies are NOT evenly distributed. There is, indeed, left-over gravitational pull. Provided the distribution of galaxies is self-similar (which is what they mean by "fractal", since "fractal" itself has no meaning here) AND a few other constraints are valid, THEN the left-over gravitational pull would be enough to explain the rotation of the stars and gasses within the galaxy. The author's analysis of the galaxies over a relatively nearby region of space suggests to him that the distribution is indeed self-similar.

(Summary off, analysis on)

Is this a new theory? As a replacement for Dark Matter, yes. In any other context, no. Shepherding moons/asteroids dominate our own solar system, creating a dynamic that would be utterly unstable without them. Shepherding galaxies and super-galaxies is a new one, but if the physics is observed in other systems then the physics must be considered sound. The only question I see here is whether the distribution of galaxies is indeed self-similar. If it isn't, the theory is wrong. If it is, then dark matter - as it is currently understood - must be wrong because you now have left-over gravity and you have to alter the dark matter theory to allow for it.

Doesn't the dark matter theory fit things well as it is? No it doesn't. Dwarf galaxies and globular clusters exhibit NONE of the signs assumed to indicate the presence of dark matter. Some don't have high-speed rotation at all. Dark matter theory cannot explain either of these and the usual answer is to say that dark matter "isn't uniform" without ever explaining why it should be missing only with certain classes of structure and not others. It's actually much easier to say that "excess" rotational velocity is a function of residual gravity and that where you have little residual gravity you have no excess rotational velocity. It is also entirely plausible to argue that "null points" are backwaters and that this explains why you get relatively few major galaxies appearing at such points but do get minor multi-stellar structures.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation of abstract:

In space, gravity can pull on stuff really far away assuming we've done our math right. This could explain why galaxies are spinning faster than we would normally predict. Our math assumes that gravitational effects become irrelevant after about 1kpc (really far). We tried out calculating the speed of four galaxies with our method and it worked out pretty well. We also looked at two other galaxies that are pretty confusing, but our math seemed to work for them too.

Re:Wow.

[jd]

The paper is comprehensible to anyone who has completed O-Level maths or physics. The paper deals almost entirely with resultant forces and you can handle resultants if you can handle addition, Pythagoras' Theorum and Cartesian notation. There's very little complexity in the concepts.

The most complex part is what they call "fractal" (which should actually be called "self-similar"). A self-similar structure is one which is comprised of parts that resemble the whole. What they're using that for is to create a series. If you have galaxies placed at A, B, C and D, then you can figure out where galaxy E, F, G and H would be. And if you're really clever, you can sum the series to infinity. In other words, provided the pattern continues, you can calculate the net gravitational pull of all the galaxies along any given line. Understanding arithmetic and geometric series might be taught later in some schools, but any poster here over 18 who has studied maths and physics to that point will have covered them.

That's it. That's everything you really need to know to understand the paper. The rest of it (dealing with the specific equations used to figure out the specific gravitational pull on a specific particle, etc) is simply not that important outside of a physics lab. Insofar as Slashdotters or other outside observers are concerned, what matters is whether the resultant gravitational vector is zero (the current standard model) or non-zero (the model presented in the paper). If it's zero, dark matter survives the challenge. If it's non-zero, dark matter must be altered at the very least and may even be entirely disposed of.

Re:Wow.

[somersault]

No, I drew the same meaning as yourself, but it made me realize that despite your body rotating faster/slower as you move your arm in those situations, your hand's "absolute" speed for example might not change all that much.

Re:Wow.

[FrootLoops]

Here we go.... Dark matter is (conjectured to be) involved in much more than just stellar velocity adjustments. There are some posts in these very comments listing some of the other effects. To say that dark matter may be "entirely disposed of" because of this model is then apparently either quite ignorant or prematurely optimistic. That illustrates exactly my point. I could do just what you did, but I'd end up talking out of my ass out of ignorance. Sometimes that's fine, but here there are very few people qualified to correct such garbage. The last few sentences sound rather insulting. I don't mean them to be; sorry. My point is that very few people here have any serious background in dark matter, and reading the Wikipedia article does not count. Without that background, you're really just wasting everyone's time by discussing it.

On a separate note, I'd be surprised if calculations as simple as you've described (involving at the worst some geometric series, apparently) could be of any groundbreaking interest. I have not read the paper. I'm biased against arXiv preprints.

Re:Wow.

[jd]

I emphasize if it's non-zero, dark matter must be altered at the very least - ie: if there is residual gravity, then dark matter theories MUST compensate for the change in the gravitational field. It may be that no such solution exists - ie: in order to produce the correct values for other elements of the theory, you HAVE to have a gravitational field of such-and-such value which is in excess of what is permitted once the residuals are taken into account. This is where the remainder of "and may even be entirely disposed of" kicks in. If there simply isn't a solution that satisfies the system of equations, then the amount of dark matter is zero. It would be the only solution that works.

It is my contention that the paper is NOT of any groundbreaking interest, that at the very most it eliminates meta-stable solutions. (A meta-stable solution is a solution which is stable at specific points only. It is not stable if you deviate from those points to any degree whatsoever. Balancing a pencil on an infinitely sharp point where this places the centre of gravity and centre of mass on a perfectly vertical line from that point is meta-stable. If there is absolutely zero force, it will remain exactly where it is, hence the stable part. It is not unstable as it will not change state on its own. However, an electron passing through it would be enough to knock it over, hence the meta part. Any external force or field is enough to break the symmetry and produce instability.)

Now, I emphasize that "at most it eliminates meta-stable solutions". It doesn't do this if your series sums to zero even if intermediate summations are non-zero. Chaotic systems are not nice and you can make no assumption about the sum to infinity merely from examining a few data points. The paper has NO meaning if the sum at infinity is zero, whether it is zero because the components are zero or because the chaotic system happens to produce a zero.

I have read the paper and there is nothing wrong with reading arXiv preprints. That's where the proof of Poincare's Conjecture was published, after all. Not satisfied? Ok, is there anything in arXiv that is less reputable than anything you might find in the letters page in Nature? My guess is that the answer is no, since the letters don't include the reasoning. Yet most reputable scientists would consider the letters page to be extremely valuable secondary information. It's not peer-reviewed, but it IS important. arXiv is no different, other than having the reasoning as well. It should NOT be treated as equal to a peer-reviewed paper, it should be treated as a letter to a serious scientific journal. Nothing more, nothing less.

I consider bias to be a nonsense in science. Bias has no place in the study of things. Weigh things appropriately, but let no weight be zero or infinity. Correct weighting the evidence isn't bias, it is the elimination of bias by multiplying by the reciprocal of the noise.

Re:Wow.

[boristhespider]

Why are you "biased against" arXiv preprints? There is very little crackpot science allowed through to the arXiv these days - so it's what it was intended to be, a place for physicists to post their results before publication. What many do is post their papers after acceptance by a journal; others post them when they first submit. Both approaches are fine. Papers can (and generally are) revised along lines suggested by the journals' referees, or if the author simply sees a way of making something clearer, or corrects some mistake. Working in the field, I can assure you that almost all of us keep up with the literature almost purely via the arXiv.

Re:Wow.

[boristhespider]

"Nothing more, nothing less."

I disagree, it most definitely is something more. Most papers on the arXiv are "preprint"s - that's what the server is for, after all. It means they're posted before the journal publishes them. If you check most papers on the arXiv about five or six months after submission they're updated with a journal reference. It's a repository for papers. Some are unpublished, yes, and some are unpublished because they failed peer-review (although some are unpublished because for whatever reasons the author didn't submit them), but the vast majority are the same papers that you'd read in Physical Review or the Astrophysical Journal.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great summary, thanks.

If the Italian guy is right about the existence of a net pull in some direction, then as I see it he has to explain why the spiral galaxies are so flat. These galaxies are oriented every which way, so if there is a net pull in some direction, many of them should be dragged out into weird shapes. Or have I missed something?

Re:Wow.

[FrootLoops]

In retrospect, I agree with you about arXiv preprints--my bias is largely unfounded. It's based mostly on a handful of crackpot and retracted papers with extraordinary claims (though as you mention Perelman's bit of Poincare was posted on the arXiv, which was both extraordinary and correct) and ignores the bulk of them. My actual bias--and I believe this is the reasonable result of evidence--is against news stories with extraordinary claims that rely on arXiv preprints, and against those preprints themselves. They almost never come to anything.

Re:Wow.

[FrootLoops]

I wish I could have responded to both you and the person I was originally responding to simultaneously. In any case, in retrospect, I agree with you about arXiv preprints--my bias is largely unfounded. It's based mostly on a handful of crackpot and retracted papers with extraordinary claims (though Perelman's bit of Poincare was posted on the arXiv, which was both extraordinary and correct) and ignores the bulk of them. My actual bias--and I believe this is the reasonable result of evidence--is against news stories with extraordinary claims that rely on arXiv preprints, and against those preprints themselves. They almost never come to anything.

Re:Wow.

[elsurexiste]

You are informative, yet you got a +5 Interesting. Ah well, close enough. :P

Re:Wow.

[tehcyder]

Don't worry, I'm sure another "Google is great" or "Copyright sucks" article is in the queue.

Can I be the first to say that Google has produced some fine open source projects?

Also copyright infringement is not theft, as you are just copying information rather than permanently depriving the original owner of its use?

Thanks, you can mod me up even before the next articles even appear.

Re:Wow.

[tehcyder]

To be honest, almost nobody here is qualified to comment on the actual story and paper. In a more ideal world there would be at most half a dozen comments from the few physicists who post on /. and are in the right specialization to discuss dark matter and galactic velocity curves. I have far more than the average background in physics and especially math, but I won't weigh in on the physics with my random crappy opinions. It seems like the article's author shouldn't have, either, though. The article offers no explanation whatsoever for the incongruity it describes (as quoted in the summary). To be fair, it does at least encourage some discussion of science, which is a good thing.

Yes, let's just keep scientific discussion confined to the learned journals, what right have us plebs to talk about it on the internet?

Re:Wow.

[Raenex]

I'll mod posts as "Interesting" if I'm not an expert but the post appears to know what it's talking about. The distinction between all the "I" mods (Informative, Interesting, Insightful) is mostly useless anyways.

Re:Wow.

[boristhespider]

Thanks for the reply :) In that case, yes, I agree - there are still some crackpot papers that can come up (and there used to be a lot more before they changed the endorsement system; I remember my favourite was about ball-lightning being produced by primordial black holes), but journalists picking up some paper on the arXiv and running much further with it than the authors would have themselves, that's very irritating...

Re:Wow.

[FrootLoops]

I did say "To be fair, it does at least encourage some discussion of science, which is a good thing." I just advocate admitting ignorance and being silent in the face of uncertainty. The traditional response, especially with the techie crowd, is to cobble together half-baked ideas and parade them around as fact or well-supported opinion in the hopes of getting approval from others. I hate this response. It's the cause of a large fraction of the garbage that political commentators and 24-hour news networks spew.

Re:Wow.

[jd]

Now that's entirely fair and I'm happy to support you all the way on that. News vendors have an extraordinary talent for finding the most obscure and dubious preprints for the purpose of making "the discovery of the century"*.

*Until tomorrow, when a new discovery of the century will be made.

This need to sensationalize is absurd. Justifying it on the basis of readership is a bit naff since most people stick to news sources they know and don't switch brands for the purpose of reading crazier-but-truthier stories. The only value is in attracting totally new readers/viewers and you can do that just as well with decent promotion.

Also

[MrEricSir]

Also there was that Galileo guy too.

(Must be all the espresso they're always drinking.)

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

(Must be all the espresso they're always drinking.)

Hmmm... your espresso theory might explain some of the software made in the Seattle area in more recent years.

Re:Also

[mrmeval]

It's the beans, they feed them to camels and the phonons in the acid in the carbon in their digestive tract interact with the phenols in the beans.

I hear it's worth the 400/kg it brings on the brown market.

Re:Also

[Cragen]

Yeah, and why do they never sit down to drink their coffee? Hmmm? "Sip and Run" is all they do! Why, oh, why? Hmmm?

The Bullet Cluster

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this explain the gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster?

This is the kind of theory that could have be viable prior to August 2006. When the gravity isn't pointing towards the baryonic matter, we have to postulate that there's some dark matter for the gravity to point to. Or, as Sean Carroll put it

We have a useful phrase to describe new fields whose energy warps spacetime: “dark matter."

Re:The Bullet Cluster

[jpmorgan]

You have to distinguish between a theory, and a model based on a theory. "Dark matter" is a hypothesis/theory... this paper on the other hand isn't proposing anything new, it's just a different way of modelling galaxies that accounts for "far-field" interactions. The theory here is just general relativity, and the author claims that when you account for the relativistic effects of distant matter in your calculations, the unexplainable rotation curves that originally justified the hunt for 'dark matter' are now explainable.

Now this doesn't prima facie explain things like the Bullet Cluster; you'd have to redo the bullet cluster calculations accounting for these long distance effects. And of course, if it were simply the case that 'we did the math wrong and assumed something was insignificant when it isn't,' then it would be an enormous amount of egg-on-face for a lot of physicists and research groups. But personally I find it likely that the math was wrong AND there are still-not-understood dark matter/quantum gravity effects at work.

Re:The Bullet Cluster

[hazem]

I wonder if it should be really called a theory at all, but rather a hypothesis. I thought a key part of the definition of a scientific theory is that it explains all known observations.

It sounds to me like he has a hypothesis; and one that doesn't actually explain all the known observations.

Re:The Bullet Cluster

[evilviper]

Does this explain the gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster?

No, and it doesn't have to...

It's purely an asumption that dark matter is the cause of the bullet galaxy phenomenon, because it's something that happens to fit. But there have been many times in the past that scientific theories have been way off primarily because they encompassed either too much or too little various observed phenomenon.

For example, imaging how difficult it would be to come up with a theory about Gravity if everyone believed gravity was also responsible for magnetism...

So, maybe dark matter theory (such as it is) happens to be correct... Maybe this theory happens to be correct, and the bullet galaxy phenomenon is caused by something entirely different...

Re:The Bullet Cluster

[Rich0]

I think another thing to consider is the scale. From my limited understanding this new work is talking about galactic rotation, and the bullet cluster is talking about extremely rarefied intergalactic gas in a gargantuan structure. It is entirely possible that both results are right for different reasons.

Re:The Bullet Cluster

[Rich0]

Well, by that logic general relativity is just a hypothesis, since it is irreconcilable with quantum mechanics, and for that matter with large-scale gravitational observations like the ones that are the subject of this paper.

In fact, the whole point of this paper is to suggest that general relativity actually works better than we think it does, and obviously relativity itself is a pretty solid theory.

I think the real controversy is that it suggests that Einstein was actually right when people have been steadily becoming more convinced that he was wrong about it.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[canajin56]

The name "gravity" is prejudicial as it presupposes a connection between the alleged force and weight! "Intelligent Falling" is the preferred term.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't hold that against you in any way - intelligent gravity pulled your keys down to make you write the objection to it.

Yet another MOND

[Cyberax]

Yet another MOND which doesn't explain the Bullet Cluster and gravitational lensing curves.

Re:Yet another MOND

[MightyMartian]

Yup. Theories trying to handwave dark matter seem to pop up about once a month these days, and each and every time they seem to be in some sort of timewarp from before recent observations.

Come on, you lazy ass cosmologist-wannabes, read the flippin' literature before you try to declare "I've got rid of dark matter!"

Re:Yet another MOND

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be so quick to say that. While this certainly relies on magic constants backed into observational data, it deserves more thought than went into your knee jerk pair of posts. I think it'll fail on further analysis, but that's not a foregone conclusion, and not a threat to your meager funding.

Re:Yet another MOND

[Cyberax]

Nope. A theory which explains away the dark matter MUST explain the observable effects of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster Then it should explain discrepancy between small and large galaxies.

Only after it passes these two tests it could be discussed seriously. Yet another "I can haz explain rotation curves!!!" theory is definitely not interesting.

Re:Yet another MOND

[msauve]

"I've got rid of dark matter!"

Yeah. That's implausible. After carving up the turkey recently, the last thing left was the dark matter. Everyone seems to like the white matter better.

Re:Yet another MOND

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got rid of dark matter!

Hey, me too! And then there was this fluhing water sound.

Re:Yet another MOND

[Spykk]

Theories trying to handwave dark matter seem to pop up about once a month these days

Can you blame them? We found a bunch of stuff that doesn't fit our model for how the universe works so instead of invalidating our model we just assume that there is something invisible influencing our numbers. I won't pretend like I know what is really going on but blaming some undetectable third-party when your model fails feels like grasping at straws to me.

Re:Yet another MOND

[Fluffeh]

Yet another "I can haz explain rotation curves!!!" theory is definitely not interesting.

Gold, utter gold. I applaude you good sir!

Re:Yet another MOND

[MightyMartian]

The way you've written your post, I can't even blame you for knowing why cosmologists believe Dark Matter exists. It wasn't just invented out of thin air to explain a problem. Dark Matter, whatever it is, has certain effects identical, gravitionally, to any other matter. Since General Relativity has done such a damned good job up until now explaining a good deal of what we see when we look at a telescope, I'm curious as to your justification for throwing it out on the street because we have found indirect evidence for another type of matter.

Until we've eliminated all possibilities, isn't the proper thing to do to follow the most parsimonious explanation and stick with the prediction of some weakly-interacting matter than to simply throw out a century's worth of physics?

Re:Yet another MOND

[jd]

Recent observations fail to observe dark matter anywhere but do detect a provable absence of it around dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. This is a major problem for dark matter and may yet prove to be fatal to the theory.

Secondly, a theory should always be as simple as possible but no simpler (Bert Einstein) and should contain no unnecessary elements (William of Occam), which is essentially the same thing. Adding in variables is complexity and it is not merely rational but absolutely key to the entire basis of the Scientific Method (in which falsification is king) to attempt to produce models that are simpler but not too simple to actually hold up. It is NOT enough to test the theory directly, you MUST test the hypothesis that simpler theories that are just as accurate exist. It is only by showing no such theory exists that you can be satisfied that you have met both these key tests.

Your attitude is, I have to say, EXTREMELY unscientific and I am ashamed of being on a board with such totally immature minds.

Re:Yet another MOND

[MightyMartian]

Considering WIMPs are by their nature, if they exist, hard to detect, I'm not sure what your point is. Tossing out GR is not the simplest explanation, it is by far the most complex.

As to your last paragraph, well fuck you too.

Re:Yet another MOND

[jd]

Where, precisely, do I suggest tossing out GR? In fact, where in my post do I suggest tossing out anything other than poor practices?

Re:Yet another MOND

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless of course you can explain the phenomenon using century old physics without the need for dark matter, like this proposal does. Indeed it would be validating GR if that is all you need to explain the observable universe would it not? Isn't dark matter the one throwing out invalidations by asserting particles we cannot detect?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called Intelligent falling.

Seems intuitive to me.

[Max Threshold]

Isn't this basically the same effect that creates the L1 point?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[almitydave]

Well, THIS religious nutbar subscribes to the theory that gravity is really just the love felt between particles: just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, distance increases this attractive force, resulting in increased orbital velocities of stars.

Love makes the galaxy go 'round.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[msauve]

"I can't wait for some religious nutbar to claim that an "intelligent" gravity theory should be joined to any other existing theory in scientific discussion."

"Intelligent gravity" would be an oxymoron, since it's really comedy.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[ShavedOrangutan]

Your troll is about as insightful and useful as a First Post! or a Goatse.

"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[thegreatemu]

Disclaimer: I do experimental searches for dark matter for a living, so I may be biased in my judgement of these types of papers that crop up so often. There was a similar paper a few weeks ago from someone claiming that quantum vacuum polarization could account for dark matter PhysOrg link.

The issue with both of these explanations, is that they only address galactic rotation curves. Those are among the first and easiest to explain indications of the need for something like dark matter, but are not the strongest by a long shot. For instance, this guy's explanation can't explain things like the famous Bullet cluster , nor can they explain the evolution of structure formation or the spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background which, in the field, are considered much stronger constraints.

The Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory of cosmology fits all of the astrophysical measurements reasonably well, and has a nice tie-in to supersymmetric particle physics, which is one of the current leading theories. No one in the field will take any new theory seriously until it can reproduce ALL the phenomena at least as well as the current model (which of course is exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work!)

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[globaljustin]

hey thanks for your contribution...seems like you know what you're talking about

I want to respond to this:

"this guy's explanation can't explain things like X, nor can they explain Y which, **in the field**, are considered much stronger constraints."

I dont want to squabble about X & Y...but ask you if X & Y were re-examined in a context that was absent a need for Dark Matter of any kind, is it possible that the researchers of X & Y would find another way to explain the observations?

Of course, yes, we could find that observations of the Bullet Cluster can fit a model sans-dark matter once we apply a comprehensive understanding of black holes...or not.

My point is, Dark Matter is as Dark Matter does...if its not an option, those PhD dissertations on galaxy collision physics are going to get written anyhow, and whatever explanation we can find will be the best until we find something better...

sure the CDM Theory of Cosmology fits observations...we can reverse engineer ANY result we want with the data analysis tools available...the point of my post is simply to ask, "What is more important to you, volume of published research on a topic or mathematic/scientific fitness?"

Your answer to my question is also the answer to your own questions of the External Validity of Carati's equations.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Tomato42]

From wikipedia Bullet cluster:

At a statistical significance of 8, it was found that the spatial offset of the center of the total mass from the center of the baryonic mass peaks cannot be explained with an alteration of the gravitational force law.

In other words, the theory the guy is proposing is akin to Newtonian laws when we have Special Relativity. Non story.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't give up my electric universe theory until you pry it out of my cold dark matter.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[phatsonic]

But doen't the scientific process also mean, that we have to think about a theory and its possibilities before dismissing it?

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Paracelcus]

I have been (and am) quite leery of DM and I have my reasons for being leery, not the least of which is the complete lack of directly observable evidence (it's dark) just doesn't cut it, tenuous clouds of heavy molecules, blah, blah what ever. When the main reason for a theory is the (follow the leader) effect and not so much a gravetic signature of ambiguous origin, I'll call all the current theories not much more than mental-masturbation.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Bigby]

I've never believed in dark matter or dark energy. Physicists made it up to explain something that could not be explained by our current theories. The fact that they needed to be made up shows that our current model of the universe is wrong. It is patchwork science. It may work for now, but the more patches you add, the further you will get from the real truth.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Fuji Kitakyusho]

I read the quantum vacuum polarization paper, and was intrigued by it. Anti-matter particles having negative gravitational charge is definitely a leap, but I wonder if this could explain more diverse phenomena. The author does mention the Pioneer anomaly in the paper.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Alomex]

No one in the field will take any new theory seriously until it can reproduce ALL the phenomena at least as well as the current model

Just a nit pick: not necessarily ALL, but certainly MOST.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[jd]

Supersymmetry is problematic as the simplest forms are now falsified by the LHC. You have to assume a more complex form - which is valid, but I have seen no evidence that the CDM theory has been re-examined to see what the impact of the LHC observations is.

The Bullet cluster obviously needs explaining, but I saw nothing on the Wikipedia page that indicated why Dark Matter was needed as a part of that explanation. There is clearly a drag effect of some sort, but there are plenty of potential causes of drag. Which ones are viable depend on the precise angle of each galaxy at the time of collision and the probability based on known classes of stellar object of various types of high-pressure event occurring. I would imagine that such work has been done but Wikipedia showed none that I could see.

CMB is a problem because certain fluctuations could potentially be the result of specific multiverse theories being correct. Due to the lack of ability to see multiverses, CMB alone is not a valuable indicator because you cannot test the different hypotheses. There's no means of distinguishing a valid model from an invalid one. I am not saying CMB isn't a demonstration of dark matter, merely that it is only suggestive of being a demonstration of dark matter. Until such time that enough observations have dark matter as the only common suggested solution to all of them, the best you can say is that CMB allows for the possibility of dark matter.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[cowboy76Spain]

"this guy's explanation can't explain things like X, nor can they explain Y which, **in the field**, are considered much stronger constraints."

I dont want to squabble about X & Y...but ask you if X & Y were re-examined in a context that was absent a need for Dark Matter of any kind, is it possible that the researchers of X & Y would find another way to explain the observations?

So, you get one model that explains X & Y & Z, and when a paper tries to explain Z differently you think the new model is better? And that you need another models for X & Y (and that don't affect Z, either).

Listen, I know the idea that there are things "out there" that don't work like they do "down here" is scaring. Every time some of these theories appear, there is always the crowd of "but there has to be a simpler explanation" (astronomers tried for long time to fit orbits in circles until they had to admit defeat). But that should not mean that people should embrace every faint possible alternative as a life-saving opportunity. Ok, you can do, but in the end it won't mean a thing.

OTOH, I realize that the scientifics are partly to blame for this, and I am very serious about that. I mean, "dark matter" sounds menacing and strange. Had they called it "candy matter"(*1), there would be less people stressed about scientific data that they don't understand.

DISCLAIMER: I am not an scientific and I know nothing more than a few paragraphs about dark matter and all those others things. Maybe it is a valid theory, maybe future observations will discredit it. I don't give a shit about it, because it is scientifics work to find out. But I find very laughable how uninformed people are so capable of dis/liking theories they don't know about.

*1: In case the change of name sticks, I hereby reclaim royalties for the use of the "candy matter" term.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[ckaminski]

What about the Bullet Cluster needs explaining?

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[theshowmecanuck]

I curious, isn't the term 'dark matter' just a modern way to say 'aether'? I mean, a long time ago people thought that space was composed of aether because they didn't know what space was comprised of and needed a label with which to call the unknown unseen 'stuff'. Now they're saying space is full of 'dark matter' because it is thought there has to be something and they need a label to call this unknown unseen 'stuff'. So why not just call it aether? I just think it is kind of funny because it looks astrophysicists (or are you called cosmologists?) have come full circle back to aether.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[ceoyoyo]

Aether was a proposed all-pervasive medium through which electromagnetic waves propagated. Dark matter is not all pervasive. The two concepts are about as distinct as you can get.

So no, the term "dark matter" is not a modern way to say "aether."

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[theshowmecanuck]

I guess the way I looked at it was that they seem to the layman to be terms made up as a handle to something not understood and used to plug the gaps in knowledge. In the old days they needed something to help explain certain observed behaviour that wasn't understood so they said space contained aether (something they couldn't show observe or prove it exists). Now you folks needed some way to explain observed behaviour that isn't understood, and some guy said "it seems space is full of stuff we have no idea what it looks like or can even prove it exists, we'll call it 'dark matter'." I know you guys infer it, but I know there are some people who don't believe in it either. It does seem like a conveniently made up idea to jam into holes in existing understanding (same as I understand how they came up with 'aether'). I am interested in this stuff and like hearing about new discoveries, but am a cynic (less of one now than when I was younger) and can't help look at things this way. Sometimes even as rocket scientists guys will make up things to make it easier when nothing else seems to fit.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Anonymous Coward]

If the then current theories were lacking, of course they made up something new. They tried several new theories, and the theory that so far has been on top is dark matter.

I don't get why so many people ask for a new theory, but then complain about dark matter being just invented to fix the problem. That is what a new theory is.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[jd]

The Bullet Cluster exhibits a distribution of stellar objects and gasses that would not be expected in a routine collision provided certain assumptions are correct, where those assumptions are:

a) That we are interpreting what we are seeing correctly (case in point: irregular galaxies turned out not to be - they were just galaxies of other classifications seen from very odd angles)

b) That the phenomena being observed cannot be explained by standard means (case in point: we're only now understanding the range of high energy jets from stellar objects and new types are being discovered all the time - a new type was found just a week or so ago)

So far, the astronomers seem content that they are indeed interpreting what they see correctly and that the phenomena cannot be explained by standard means. This is why they think dark matter may be involved. The use of dark matter is an "explanation" of what they are seeing and how to reconcile the observable with the theoretical. That is what "explanation" means in science. You do know that, right?

What I have so far failed to see is why dark matter should be part of the explanation at all. I see nothing in any description that I can find that requires that dark matter be the variable and not something else. There may be such a reason, but no sane or rational scientist will ever accept a theory as being sound unless such a reason can be put forward. Nobody needs direct evidence, but they DO need to know what such direct evidence would look like so that when the observations become possible the hypothesis can be tested. (The Big Bang could not be tested at the time it was put forward, but it was a valid theory because it said how you would test the theory once the means became available. A good many of these tests have become possible over the decades and the theory has stood up well to them. That is the mark of GOOD theoretical work.)

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[IHateEverybody]

I curious, isn't the term 'dark matter' just a modern way to say 'aether'? I mean, a long time ago people thought that space was composed of aether because they didn't know what space was comprised of and needed a label with which to call the unknown unseen 'stuff'. Now they're saying space is full of 'dark matter' because it is thought there has to be something and they need a label to call this unknown unseen 'stuff'. So why not just call it aether? I just think it is kind of funny because it looks astrophysicists (or are you called cosmologists?) have come full circle back to aether.

The idea of the aether came about because it was believed that light behaved the way that waves of water or sound do - that is that light needed to travel through a medium. Just like waves must propagate through water and sound must propagate through air, so too light had to propagate through aether. And it was a perfectly reasonable theory until it was proven to be wrong.

So you are right in the sense that dark matter is a label which is being applied to something we don't completely understand in much the same way that aether was. But what invalidated the theory of aether was the Michelson-Morley experiment which tested an important prediction of the aether theory. Since Earth moves around the Sun and the Sun moves around the center of the Galaxy, it should have been possible for Michelson and Morley to detect an "aether wind" with their experiment as Earth moved through the aether. Instead, Michelson and Morley found nothing or at least not enough to justify the existence of an aether. And thus the aether theory faded into history as a failed theory.

The modern equivalent of the Michelson-Morley experiment for dark matter would be if there were some way to measure the strength of gravity (and thus the amount of mass) in a galaxy or cluster of galaxies. And in fact we do have a way to do that through gravitational lensing in which the light of background galaxies is distorted by nearby galaxies. So if we could find a region of space with a large cluster of galaxies distorting the light from other background galaxies and if there was a great deal of gravitational lensing coming from a region of the cluster are which has no visible galaxies, it would be considered fairly compelling evidence that dark matter exists. And that's why people keep bringing up the Bullet Cluster. Because the Bullet Cluster is just such a galaxy cluster where most of the gravity and thus most of the mass can be detected outside of the visible galaxies of the cluster. And while this isn't conclusive proof of dark matter's existence, it is a fairly compelling piece of data and since the Bullet Cluster was discovered there have been other similar observations which make the existence of dark matter seem more likely. So unlike the aether which failed its experimental test, dark matter has for now passed its test and continues as a viable theory.

Any alternative to dark matter would have to explain phenomena like the Bullet Cluster at least as well as dark matter does in much the same way that Einstein's Theory of Relativity simplifies into Newtonian physics when we deal with speeds significantly slower than that of light.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Toonol]

If the explanation is a correct application of gravity to galactic structure, then it's right. It doesn't need to explain away all unexplained large-scale structure and motion. It just needs to adequately and convincingly explain one part. That shrinks the unexplained domain that justifies dark matter.

It is entirely possible that there are more than one mechanism at work here. Even if dark matter exists, it may not be the answer to all unexplained phenomena here. It almost surely isn't. It doesn't need to be replaced by a comprehensive theory that explains everything; it can be refined over and over by new theories that each explain just one thing.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[Rich0]

I tend to agree, assuming the explanation is correct. Dark matter started out as a way to explain galactic rotation.

I think that once a theory starts to gain acceptance it tends to get applied more broadly. Perhaps if the original purpose of the theory of dark matter no longer applies we might find other explanations for other things.

There are a lot of ways you can try to explain things - and obviously scientists try to explain everything with the smallest number of theories. Once dark matter is an accepted tool in the toolbox we'll tend to apply it anywhere we can make it fit. If that tool starts looking not so useful, perhaps we'll find that it isn't actually needed in many other areas where it is currently used.

Or we might find that dark matter does exist, but that it isn't responsible for rotation curves, etc.

Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only

[ceoyoyo]

That's the way science works. You observe something that doesn't fit and you modify the theory to account for it (or make a new one). It's not "making things up" it's thinking of possibilities. Then you look for evidence to help you decide between those possibilities.

There were lots of different aether models. Various observations ruled out some. The famous Michaelson-Morely experiment ruled out a bunch that predicted the speed of light would be affected by Earth's motion. Of course, we still have the basic concept of the aether - we just call it vacuum or quantum fields today.

Neptune was postulated to explain irregularities in Uranus's orbit. The neutrino was "made up" by Pauli to explain where missing momentum went in certain fusion reactions. Then later we observed them directly... well, sort of. We can't actually see neutrinos, just the things that are produced when they slam into something. Quarks were postulated by Murray Gell-Mann, who insisted for years that they were just mathematical abstractions. Except with modern particle accelerators we can "see" them, just like neutrinos.

Sometimes the theory needs to be modified. A planet was also predicted nearer the sun to explain Mercury's orbit. Those anomalies were eventually explained by general relativity.

In the case of dark matter, modifying the theory (MOND) didn't work. It could explain galaxy rotation curves really well, and galaxy clusters pretty well (but not both at the same time), but fails to explain things about the cosmic microwave background and observations like the bullet cluster. Dark matter works for all of these.

So right now we're in the stage where dark matter is by far the most likely solution but we haven't yet observed the actual particles. People are looking though.

Why So Implausible?

[A. B3ttik]

I don't understand why this theory is "implausible" and why the article is so dismissive of it. Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it. So an entire new classification of matter that no one has ever (or can ever) seen, felt, or observed was created to satisfy this one anomaly. And yet, this is the industry standard, that 90% of all matter must be Dark Matter just because someone screwed up when calculating orbital momentum.

What's more implausible, that 90% of matter is something that we'll never observe except, conveniently, through the orbital momentum of stars, or that galaxies have a noticeable gravitational pull on objects in nearby galaxies over billions of years?

Re:Why So Implausible?

[Statecraftsman]

This. I think the author of the article is actually using dismissiveness as a device to disarm people. If he downplays it people perhaps won't feel as threatened. "It's crazy" but maybe it's true.

I would like some confirmation though that there really is NO other evidence of dark matter.

Perhaps even if this theory doesn't stand the test of time, it will highlight the actual reasons dark matter has grown to become so accepted in our understanding of galactic mechanics.

Re:Why So Implausible?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it.

As it happens, the post immediately above yours indicates otherwise; there's a lot of other evidence for it, or at least, there are a lot of other observations which fit nicely with the theory. Be careful about saying "there's no evidence" or "there's no other evidence" about pretty much anything in science, really -- there is so much new data coming in all the time that there's a good chance you're wrong.

Re:Why So Implausible?

[bucky0]

There is NO other evidence for it. So an entire new classification of matter that no one has ever (or can ever) seen, felt, or observed was created to satisfy this one anomaly. And yet, this is the industry standard, that 90% of all matter must be Dark Matter just because someone screwed up when calculating orbital momentum.

What's more implausible, that 90% of matter is something that we'll never observe except, conveniently, through the orbital momentum of stars, or that galaxies have a noticeable gravitational pull on objects in nearby galaxies over billions of years?

Which one is it? Also, the guy below beat me to the observations.

Re:Why So Implausible?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
-Niels Bohr

Re:Why So Implausible?

[radtea]

I don't understand why this theory is "implausible" and why the article is so dismissive of it. Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it.

False. So completely and entirely false that I really can't see you being anything other than a troll, but on the theory that sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from malice, I'll point out what several others have already done above: the Bullet Cluster, various details of the CMB, and at various aspects of large-scale structure in galaxy clusters, up to and including the closure of the universe itself, are all evidence for Dark Matter of various kinds.

So all you've done here is declare, "I am completely ignorant of almost all of observational cosmology and THIS is my opinion on Dark Matter..."

After reading the first half of that sentence no one who knows anything about Dark Matter is going to be the least bit interested in what you have to say in the second half.

Re:Why So Implausible?

[Black Parrot]

Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it.

Actually that is *not* the only reason the dark matter hypothesis exists.

And even if it was the only anomaly that needed explaining, it still *would* need explaining.

Re:Why So Implausible?

[ceoyoyo]

You know, a while ago there was this little problem with nuclear reactions. A very good model supported by lots of observations showed that some momentum was missing in fusion reactions. Some physicist (his name was Pauli) created an entirely new particle that no one had ever (or can ever) seen, felt, or observed to satisfy this one anomaly. And yet, it became accepted throughout physics that these "neutrinos" actually existed.

Just like neutrinos, dark matter WAS postulated to solve a particular problem, but as we looked into it, the concept solved lots of OTHER problems as well. No other theory solves all those problems as well. So just like the neutrino, most of the people with a clue are pretty sure that dark matter is real... we just don't know the details of what exactly it is yet.

In fact, neutrinos have most of the right properties to be dark matter, except that other observations rule them out.

Re:Why So Implausible?

[bucky0]

In fact, neutrinos have most of the right properties to be dark matter, except that other observations rule them out

their masses are way way too small to account for dark matter. I remember a back-of-the-envelope calculation that shows that if you packed enough neutrinos into galaxies to account for the missing mass currently accounted for by dark matter, their interaction cross sections would end up being large enough to be observable. We don't see anything spraying off those interactions, so that can't be the explanation

Re:Why So Implausible?

[ceoyoyo]

MOST of the right properties.

The point is, non-baryonic dark matter isn't really some magical substance with previously unheard of properties. Neutrinos exhibit all of the required exotic properties.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait for some anti-religious nutbar to claim that religious nutbars are going to claim that an "intelligent" gravity theory should be joined to any other existing theory in scientific discussion.
 
Oh, Wait!
 
Seriously, is that the most you can add to the conversation is a cheap shot at religion? I will agree that if such a claim is made it should be picked apart but can we just hold off the hostilities until it happens? For once?

Here's my theory

[Anonymous Coward]

The Big Bang produced a shock wave comprised of dust and stuff (or a gravity wave?) that has lots of mass (oh, the missing mass you say?) that is expanding away from the center of the big bang explosion faster than the speed of light (so we can't see it). This globe-shaped expanding shock wave is massive enough to have a gravitational effect on the galaxies that are being pulled towards it with the galaxies farther away from us accelerating faster and the galaxies closer to us more slowly in accordance to the inverse square law of gravity. I predict that as the farthest galaxies get close to the shock wave they will exceed the speed of light and DISAPPEAR FROM VIEW.

That's my theory.

Remember, you heard it first here on /.

If this is already a known theory then I agree with it.

Re:Here's my theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bogart that joint, man!

Re:Here's my theory

[Rockoon]

that is expanding away from the center of the big bang explosion

There is no such thing as the center of the big bang. Until you at least understand that, perhaps you shouldn't waste your time coming up with cosmology theories.

Re:Here's my theory

[Black Parrot]

Uhm... the big bang wasn't an explosion. Space itself is expanding: there's nothing for a shock wave to pass through.

Anybody want's to wager?

[quax]

This is based on Einstein's field equation using perturbation theory to construct a solution for the examined case.

My bet is on general relativity once again delivering the goods. Quite a strike against the case for dark matter.

Re:Anybody want's to wager?

[Anonymous Coward]

My bet is on general relativity once again delivering the goods. Quite a strike against the case for dark matter.

But the only citation for the methods used is the author's own previous work. IOW, the previous work is either too new and untested or too incorrect to have even made it into a review article.

Re:Anybody want's to wager?

[quax]

Nope, not a native speaker. Shocking, isn't.

Re:Anybody want's to wager?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. The relativistic temporal differentials between high gravity galactic and low gravity intergalactic space would probably have a compressive effect on galaxies (could also be one explanation of the OBSERVED accelerated expansion of the universe), and it would be likely that particles inimical to gravity and the like would be more common in the intergalactic reaches which would probably add further compressive forces to the galaxies (and the OBSERVED accelerated expansion of the universe).

Dark matter and dark energy have never impressed me as solutions. I mean, you could have simply put it all down to the fairies at the bottom of the garden with equal validity.

Show me the evidence, show me the results ... don't invent something that conveniently fits the observations, that hasn't been proved by any experiment of observation, and tell me to accept something on faith. That's religion and mysticism, not science.

So called scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

These so called scientists, all these long words and complex equations and they still have yet to make a working hyperdrive!

Gravity and the Casimir effect

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading some time ago that gravity isn't a pull, but a pushing effect. Essentially, gravity is a macro version of the Casimir effect.

Re:Gravity and the Casimir effect

[Cyberax]

That's a rehash of theory created by Fatio in collaboration with... Newton!

Yes, the idea is that old. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage's_theory_of_gravitation

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

There is other evidence.

[pavon]

I don't understand why this theory is "implausible" and why the article is so dismissive of it. Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it.

There is lot of other evidence for non-baryonic Dark Matter:
* Lack of MACHO gravitational lensing
* Existence of unexpected gravitational lensing in Bullet Cluster.
* CMBR measurements
* and more.
It isn't hard to modify equations to match the galaxy rotation curves, and if that was the only evidence for dark matter it wouldn't be so strongly favored.

Re:There is other evidence.

[khipu]

* Lack of MACHO gravitational lensing

The MACHO-based argument is that there can't be enough of those objects around in order to explain galactic rotation. But this paper, in effect, says that you don't need them. So that observation seems consistent with this paper.

* Existence of unexpected gravitational lensing in Bullet Cluster.

The Bullet Cluster result shows that some form of unobservable matter exists. But we already know that: brown dwarfs, rogue planets, etc.: that kind of "dark matter" has been observed, just not in the amounts to explain galactic rotation.

It is not surprising that somewhere in the universe, you might get very large clusters of such objects. The bullet cluster might just be composed of such objects. And at those distances, you couldn't observe baryonic dark matter. In fact, if you rip out most of the hydrogen from a cluster, it is perhaps not surprising that you end up with a lot of cold, dark lumps of baryonic matter.

* CMBR measurements * and more.

You have to separate explaining observations from testing hypotheses. CMBR measurements can be explained within the framework of non-baryonic dark matter. But that does not necessarily imply that they provide evidence for non-baryonic dark matter, since there are many other possible explanations.

I'm not saying that this paper is true or not. But if you want to argue against it, you need to sharpen your arguments.

recent years?

[Anonymous Coward]

When has the Seattle area actually produced good software?

(Yes there are some very good engineers there, but they're just the extreme of the bell curve and somehow manage to find work.)

Re:recent years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you implying that Seattle espresso is not as good as Italian espresso??

Re:recent years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. ANY Coffee in America is overroasted dog shit

Re:recent years?

[Anonymous Coward]

coffee makes me poop alot

Re:recent years?

[Anonymous Coward]

"When has the Seattle area actually produced good software?"

In fact, when has the Seattle area actually produced good expresso?

Re:recent years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have some Zoka coffee/espresso the next you're in Seattle. You'll shit yourself and this time it'll be because you'll be surprised at how wrong you are and not because you opened your mouth to talk.

Re:recent years?

[vikingpower]

Actually, not. ANY coffee in the USA ( which is not congruent to "America", I am sorry to break the news to you ) is overrated horse piss. QFD

Re:recent years?

[CSMoran]

In this context, http://www.quantum-espresso.org would probably be best.

Re:recent years?

[arkane1234]

I don't know of any other country in the world named America, do you?
If you want to get pedantic, then you can call it The United States of America. However, for shorthand it's nearly always been called America.
Whether you like it or not.

Re:recent years?

[MrEricSir]

"Yes. ANY Coffee in America is overroasted dog shit"

If you're talking Starbucks, Peets, etc. I'll have to agree.

But "any" espresso? Here in San Francisco, all the major local roasters do really light roasts. If you try Blue Bottle or Four Barrel coffee you won't find dark roasts at all.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Seriously, is that the most you can add to the conversation is a cheap shot at religion?

It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.

I will agree that if such a claim is made it should be picked apart but can we just hold off the hostilities until it happens? For once?

Hostilities were opened a long time ago. Your objection makes as much sense as saying to the captain of a US Navy ship, "I agree that if that Japanese ship over there shoots at us, we should blow them out of the water, but can we just hold off the hostilities until in happens?" in 1943.

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[account_deleted]

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file error on viewing

[statsone]

Downloaded twice. Got an adobe error half way through the article.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

Odd how the fanatical, radical athiests get away with trolling so easily, and sometimes get modded up. Athiesm takes as much of a leap of faith as belief in a diety or dieties. More if you've actually experienced a diety. It's sad how so many athiests think religion is anti-science, and how they somehow think that you can have science or religion but not both, when over half of scientists are in fact religious.

I wish everyone would stop the damned trolling. It annoys me and detracts from slashdot. This thread is no place for a religious discussion. And if they don't believe in a diety why do they even mention one?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[jensend]

Translation: "I'm not bright enough to think about orbital dynamics, so I'll just try to start an offtopic religion-bashing troll thread instead."

Don't know anything about Physics

[Oswald McWeany]

Granted, I don't know anything about physics so my comment is probably unwanted and useless; however.

I just want to say- what little I do know, I've always disliked dark-matter. It always seemed to be a case of "we can't explain 'x' - so let's claim there is dark-matter and that will make our hypothesis match what we observe."

OK, it's more than just that- and from people way more knowledgable than me; however, I've always wondered if it was just a stop-gap explanation that would one day be disproven. (which it hasn't been yet).

I'm grabbing my pop-corn, turning on physics Pay Per View and cheering on the anti-dark matter brigade in this fight. I'm hoping dark-matter turns out to be false. Not that I'm matterracist.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[cje]

I just want to say- what little I do know, I've always disliked dark-matter. It always seemed to be a case of "we can't explain 'x' - so let's claim there is dark-matter and that will make our hypothesis match what we observe."

But you should realize that this technique has been used throughout the entire history of modern science, and its track record is actually quite good.

Back in the late 1700s, after the discovery of the planet Uranus, astronomers made careful calculations of its orbital elements and published a table the position of the planet in the sky over the years (and decades). As the years (and decades) wore on, they discovered a curious thing: the actual position of the planet was beginning to diverge from what had been predicted.

At this point, there were a few different explanations:

1) Perhaps the initial orbital elements were incorrect.
2) Perhaps our fundamental laws of gravity and motion were incorrect.
3) Perhaps there was a massive, as-yet-undetected eighth planet whose gravity was influencing the orbit of Uranus.

Most astronomers fell into the third camp; after all, the observations of Uranus's orbit had been made with considerable precision (for the time) and there was little reason to believe that the fundamental laws of physics would start to break down as you move further away from the sun. And so they made their calculations and narrowed down the location of this hypothetical planet to a fairly small window in the sky. After that, it was just a matter of pointing a telescope there and looking.

This is the story of the discovery of the planet Neptune.

Astronomers did not find this planet by accident. It was not discovered by a kid in the backyard with a streak of cosmic good luck. (In fact, many observers from antiquity had seen it, but had not realized what they were looking at.) They found it because they knew it had to be there.

Now, you might think that this comparison is a bit of a stretch. But it's just one example; there are countless more. Back in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli was studying beta decay in atomic nuclei. He realized that the process, as he was seeing it, could not possibly be happening unless there were (again, hypothetical) particles being emitted as a consequence. If there were not, then all sorts of fundamental principles of physics were being violated (e.g., conservation of matter / angular momentum / etc.)

This particle, eventually named the "neutrino", remained hypothetical and undetected for more than a quarter of a century until it was finally detected -- in 1956.

I could go on, but the point is that postulating the existence of something hypothetical in order to explain deviations between theory and observed results is part of the best traditions of natural science. It's not hand-waving or charlatanism. And it works more often than most people might think.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[Carnildo]

I just want to say- what little I do know, I've always disliked dark-matter. It always seemed to be a case of "we can't explain 'x' - so let's claim there is dark-matter and that will make our hypothesis match what we observe."

It was discovered in 1933 that if we add up the mass of all the stars in a galaxy and run it through either Einsteinian or Newtonian gravity, there isn't enough of it to explain the paths of those stars. "Dark matter" simply means any form of matter that doesn't emit light (the Earth, for example, is a lump of baryonic dark matter), and originally it was expected that there were enough cold gas clouds, failed stars, stray planets, and the like (collectively known as "baryonic dark matter") to explain things.

The problem with dark matter is that astronomers have since gotten a fairly good idea of how much baryonic dark matter there is, and there's nowhere near enough. Thus, the various suggestions of non-baryonic dark matter and modified gravitational theories.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Look. You have to attempt to explain new observations in terms of known physics before you go off and invent new particles or a new type of matter. I like this paper. I like it because it attempts to explain unexpected behaviour in terms of General Relativity - a well known and well tested theory. If this paper holds up, these results would be a tremendous validation GR.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[bjorniac]

To be fair, the flip side to the Neptune story is that of the perihelion advance of Mercury, which until the GR calculations came along, was thought to be the influence of another planet, closer to the sun. Geekgasm trivia: Due to the temperature that the planet would have to endure at such proximity it was named "Vulcan".

Wikipedia actually does a pretty good job of telling the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)

Of course, no planet was found, and modifying the theory of gravity Newtonian -> Einstein was what got the right answer in the end.

All that said, you're 100% right - dark matter is the simplest explanation, and we made a prediction from it in the form of gravitational lensing outside colliding galactic nuclei which is realized in the Bullet cluster. This is how science is done! You notice something unusual, come up with a simple, plausible explanation, make a prediction based on that hypothesis and test it. Dark matter fits well within this framework, but sadly outside of cosmology (even within physics) it seems that its name alone ensures it is treated as deus ex machina.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Look. You have to attempt to explain new observations in terms of known physics before you go off and invent new particles or a new type of matter. I like this paper. I like it because it attempts to explain unexpected behaviour in terms of General Relativity - a well known and well tested theory. If this paper holds up, these results would be a tremendous validation GR.

You don't seem to have noticed that dark matter theory also involves no modification to GR.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it was discovered by TFA that if you add up the mass of all the stars in all the galaxies and run it through Einsteinian gravity, there is enough of it to explain the paths of those stars. Isn't that something interesting! Almost worth discussing the possibility of. Instead, we get 200 posts of 'oh not another MOND' and 'Bullet Cluster - hah!'.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[Oswald McWeany]

Be that as it may- there are also equal or more cases where the "unexplained" other that is made up turns out to be false.

For your "Uranus" I bring out "Planet X" - the planet that "had to be there" - but was really just a miscalculation.

Also, "Ether" trying to explain how "there must be something in space".

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[c6gunner]

Bravo! That was the best damn explanation I've ever seen. If you're not a science educator, you should be.

Re:Don't know anything about Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

What I did notice is that the paper seems to explain the observables in terms of GR without the creation of some type of new matter. If the conclusions hold up, don't you think that is a better explanation? In other words, isn't an explanation in terms of GR better than an explanation in terms of: GR + some new type of matter nobody has directly observed?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Warwick Allison]

Indeed, stupid scientists made a big complicated theory about forces proportional to masses and then after doing experiments and finding that things fall the same regardless of mass, they cover up their error by adding even more factors!

Occam's Razor requires us to believe that stuff all falls at the same rate because God decided that was the best rate.

Why this rate? When God created the world, He made the rate of fall exactly enough that we could walk on two legs, while all Lower creatures cannot because the Falling Speed is not tuned for them. If Falling was even slightly slower or faster, your feet would hit the ground out-of-step and would not be able to walk - co-incidence? No, proof that God made the world for Man.

Show us the math

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Just show the math and how it correctly models modern astronomical data.

I'll give you a hint, it doesn't even come close.

Re:Show us the math

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I believe the theory op is talking about, but Ptolemaic astronomy was much better than Copernicus' original heliocentric theory as far as modeling "modern" (at the time) astronomical data. It wasn't until Kepler came in and proposed eliptical orbits that heliocentric models started fitting real data better than traditional Ptolemaic models that assumed the Earth was at the center of the universe and the heavenly bodies all rotated around it on epicycles.

All I'm saying is, models don't have to fit existing data well to be right.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[ShavedOrangutan]

If someone told me they pray to the tooth fairy, I'd smile and hope that it brings them peace and happiness. There are a lot of atheists here that could use a deity to teach them not to be an asshole.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, no one has ever heard that one before.

Good

[Layth]

I am in the same boat as you.

Dark matter always sounded too far fetched for me.
The same is true for superstring theory.. it's not something I can get behind.

Maybe I have just contemplated the presence of a void for too long.

consensus???

[khipu]

Science is not made by consensus, it is made by logic, mathematics, experiment, and observable facts. If you cannot provide clear, correct, and reproducible experiments and math, you aren't doing science.

There is no "consensus on dark matter", since nobody knows what causes galactic rotation to be the way it is. Any ideas of what dark matter might be at this point is just guesswork. You are entitled to your preferences, but just because a lot of people have certain preferences doesn't make those preferences "science".

This wrong-headed notion of a "consensus" in science has increasingly polluted science. I think it started with soft sciences like sociology and climatology, both of which lack simple, reproducible experiments, well-defined theories, and mathematical theories. Instead of providing those, "scientists" with political agendas then just ended up saying to politicians "we can't really prove it, but we are the experts; believe us". From there, this has spread to other sciences, including, sadly, physics.

Re:consensus???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep all it takes is one guy going this sounds logical and everyone automatically goes ohhh thaaats how it works. If there were some requirement for repeatability for instance well that would be consensus and we know that's not how it works.

Re:consensus???

[jamesh]

What are you saying? That just because enough scientists believe something it doesn't make it true???

I kind of wish that they'd teach the principles of science properly in school, and starting really young. I remember in primary school science the teacher talking about a hypothesis and observations etc but never about why they were important. Maybe it's too tricky for the young mind to grasp but a basic understanding of scientific principles has to be more important than a whole load of the experiments that they teach.

In high school we did an experiment about convection currents in a liquid causing the contents to be mixed around, so we put a few drops of something colourful in a jar, and in another jar too as a control, then applied a heat source to the bottom of the first jar and sure enough the contents mixed around, but then we looked at the control and it was mixed around too. The teacher just brushed that aside because the sun had moved and was now shining on the control jar, causing convection currents in that jar too. She was probably right about that, but it completely defeated the point of having a control and completely violated the scientific method.

Re:consensus???

[c6gunner]

Like it or not, consensus is, and always has been, part of science. You can deny that until you're blue in the face, but it won't change anything.

You can have all the "logic, mathematics, experiment and observable facts" you want, but if your experiment can't be replicated by others and your data can't be verified, it'll never make it into the scientific literature, and only fools will take you seriously. Likewise, if only you and 10 other like-minded cranks are churning out data that shows X, and everyone else is running experiments that show Y, you're going to end up ignored by everyone except the lunatic fringe and people looking to support their political talking-points.

Consensus is a part of science, and it's an important part of science. It doesn't mean that nobody can question the consensus view, or that the established models cannot be overturned - it only means that once we have suficient evidence for a given theory, it becomes established as the standard explanation, and anyone looking to change it needs to make a convincing case for why it should be changed. Which is how it should be. Anything else would be ridiculous.

My pet theory posted sci.physics 6-11-2011

[Anonymous Coward]

Eliminate singularities, inflation, dark matter, dark energy and dark flow -
posted sci.physics 6-11-2011
****

1. Singularities in black holes don't exist because at the center of the
black hole is near zero gravity and this would cause the material
to pull back leaving a bubble.

That gets rid of the ONLY known singularity in the present universe.

2. In the past, the expansion of the universe could be reversed to a single
point causing a singularity. This can be got rid of if two massive black
holes collided at high speed creating the universe.
Each black hole did not have within it a singularity.
So no singularity even at the beginning of the universe existed.

That gets rid of the ONLY known singularity at the birth of the universe.

3. The two original giant universe creating black holes had a head on
collision at many times the speed of light such that the entire
material universe from each black hole had to go through each other
creating uniformity and a debris field that for a short time expanded
at a speed greater than c. This was no inflation as such but has the same
outcome and eminently suitable for simulations.

4. The bulk of this material that exploded is still in the periphery
like in all explosions as invisible droplets of black hole material.
They are probably the average size of current black holes
because we know the galaxies formed around black holes
and not the other way around and they existed way back
at the birth of the universe for the galaxies to form around them.
If they existed a few hundred thousand years earlier, then nearly
all of them would be at the periphery of the universe.
These numerous giant black hole droplets of material is now pulling
all the material at the center giving the impression
of an accelerating universe full of dark energy.

So dark energy comes from the pull of the outside shell of 'droplets'
of black hole material that got ejected at the first stages
of the big bang event.

5. If there is vast amounts of material at the periphery,
then there is a gravitational pull from the periphery which is yanking
at all objects such that local gravity is added to an all pervasive
and existing uniform gravitational field that comes from the periphery.
We could be mistaking this field for dark matter.

6. Dark flow implies the two black holes that crashed into each other
to make our universe were of unequal mass. This implies that we are
not at the center of mass of the entire system and so we are being
pulled towards the center of mass; and this can happen without
there being a need for a second universe out there.

So thats just 6 paragraphs to explain away singularities, inflation,
dark matter, dark energy and dark flow.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Nimey]

You jest, but

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal#First_Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal.2C_November_13

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Mikkeles]

I can't wait for some religious nutbar to claim that an "intelligent" gravity theory should be joined to any other existing theory in scientific discussion.

Well, how else could the singularity have known that it was 'time' to become the Big Bang other than by self-awareness?

Remember this Slashdot story?

[Guppy]

Remember this story on Slashdot from 2005?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/05/10/10/1052224/good-bye-dark-matter-hello-general-relativity

"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?"

Impressive sounding claims that raised a big hoo-ha on Slashdot (and are echoed in similar replies to this story), until it was pointed out that the equations contained a mistake, such that the galaxy they modeled behaved as if it had a disk-shaped singularity embedded in it. A mistake that accounted for the observed effects in the model.

This sort of physics paper is exactly the type of preliminary result that needs to be mulled over before it front-page attention. It's pretty close to being flame-bait (and thus just ends up making everyone look stupid, except for the handful of physics experts who knew what they were talking about).

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[MiniMike]

When God created the world, He made the rate of fall exactly enough that we could walk on two legs, while all Lower creatures cannot because the Falling Speed is not tuned for them. If Falling was even slightly slower or faster, your feet would hit the ground out-of-step and would not be able to walk - co-incidence? No, proof that God made the world for Man.

Finally the long awaited proof that Ostriches are the work of the devil!

Lets look at some possibilities

[PhilHibbs]

The factors in an orbit : the current velocity body, and the force acting on it (and how that velocity and force change over time). If the velocity is perpendicular to the centre of mass, and if force is just right, the body will orbit in a circle. If it is too strong, it will fall in on an elliptical orbit, and if it is too weak or the object is moving too fast then it will fall outwards on an elliptical orbit or hyperbolic escape arc.

So, presumably we know the velocity of the stars at a particular distance out, but our calculations say that at that speed they should not be in a stable orbit at that radius.

Firstly, who says that they *are* in a stable, near-circular orbit? If they are already in elliptical orbits, then they will mostly be going faster than they would if they were in a circular orbit at that position.

What do we know about the velocity of the stars? Do we just know their speed? Do stars weave about as they go around the galaxy, caught in a complex dance with all the neighbouring stars? Could this account for faster apparent motion than a simple orbit around the galaxy?

What about relativity? Half the mass of the galaxy is 30,000 light years away, does that mean that its gravitational influence has to take into account this 30,000 year time delay in the gravitational influence reaching us? If you figure out the gravitational effect of the galactic core based on where we were 30,000 years ago, does that change the force vector? Or, am I just being simple-minded in thinking of gravity travelling like that?

Re:Lets look at some possibilities

[dak664]

All good points. Add to that there is no closed solution to N body gravitational interactions.

There has been some success in modelling the density of spiral arms through pertubation theory. Galactic rotational speeds are of course inferred from measurements of very small doppler shifts and when you get close to noise funding bias starts to dominate, but the windup of spiral arms does not indicate all that many classical Newtonian revolutions. Occam's razor does not extrapolate very well over a few orders of magnitude. Personally I think it's a mishmash of observational error, relativistic effects, electromagnetic effects, statistical gravitational effects, and physical constants not.

Galaxies' speed equals light?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm genuinely interested, how is it established that galaxies speed equals that of light?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[gazbo]

I'm guessing your god knows how to lose weight fast?

big problem

[Black Parrot]

Galaxy rotation is only one of several phenomena that dark matter is needed to explain. In fact MOND does a better job, if that's *all* you want to explain. But it completely strikes out as an explanation for the other stuff.

If this only addresses rotation curves, it will strike out too. Are the authors so ill-informed that they are unaware of this?

direct mechanical detection of dark matter

[peter303]

There are couple of experiments out there waiting for dark matter particles to directly collide with ordinary matter and trigger a piezo-electric charge certain ordinary matter setups. These collision are predicted extremely rare due the emptiness of ordinary matter. Soem of the experiments claim to have detected some such collision already.

I've been looking for you...

[gr8_phk]

Disclaimer: I do experimental searches for dark matter for a living

So if the "expected galactic rotation curve" is based on Keplers laws then we have a problem. My own calculations do not support a decline in velocity with radius based on simple newtonian gravity. Every time I google the topic Keplers laws come up, which simply do not apply to stars in a galaxy. Is this reliance on Kepler real, or does everyone dumb it down by referencing something we all learned in first year physics?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[DM9290]

If someone told me they pray to the tooth fairy, I'd smile and hope that it brings them peace and happiness. There are a lot of atheists here that could use a deity to teach them not to be an asshole.

what if it makes them miserable? would that make the tooth fairy less real?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[DM9290]

It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.

What is the difference?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[SecurityTheatre]

Athiesm takes as much of a leap of faith as belief in a diety or dieties.

In exactly as much as Russel's Teapot does as well.

I am willing to take the leap of faith that proclaims... THERE IS NO TEAPOT!

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[md65536]

Occam's Razor requires us to believe

Or what? He'll cut us?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[ShavedOrangutan]

what if it makes them miserable? would that make the tooth fairy less real?

Does it matter?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[SecurityTheatre]

uhm... I think his point was that fighting started BEFORE 1943.

I think you were agreeing with him?

No quite sure....

Don't listen to me, I just work on Dark Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so you're able to explain galactic rotation curves. So can MOND. What about the bullet cluster? What about the CMB? ... This is not news.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Quirkz]

What if it makes *YOU* miserable?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[hrimhari]

Does it matter?

Only if it's dark.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Nimey]

It was meant as an example of just that sort of confusion. The American commander let the Japanese come right up to them, had all the advantages, then let the Japanese shoot first.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

Occam's Razor requires us to believe that stuff all falls at the same rate because God decided that was the best rate.

Which sounds funny until you find there is a fundamental gravitational constant whose value "just is".

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

"Intelligent Falling" is the preferred term.

That's called bungee jumping, you insensitive piece of rubber!

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

Odd how the fanatical, radical athiests get away with trolling so easily, and sometimes get modded up. Athiesm takes as much of a leap of faith as belief in a diety or dieties.

That's "deity". And atheism requires no leap of faith. Just the opposite, it's a lack of faith in things which require faith.

More if you've actually experienced a diety.

Nobody has. Yes, I know you'll probably claim you have, but I don't believe you. Religious nutters always love to talk about how their relationship with god has transformed them, but on closer examination the supposed relationship is always rather distant, so much so that the most plausible explanation is that the nutter is inventing it in his or her own mind. We know enough about human psychology to understand how the mind can delude itself into creating a relationship with a being that doesn't really exist.

It's sad how so many athiests think religion is anti-science, and how they somehow think that you can have science or religion but not both, when over half of scientists are in fact religious.

It's sad when anyone otherwise dedicated to science decides to compartmentalize their mind so they don't insist on the same standard of proof for the existence of god as they do everything else. But not unexpected given that scientists are members of society, and society is soaked in god delusions.

Nevertheless, scientists are significantly more atheistic than the general population. To be successful at science, you must at least partially integrate the logical, empirical view of the universe which is the backbone of science. Anyone with that philosophical orientation who also allows God out of that don't-think-about-this-logically mental compartment quickly notices that science has eliminated the need for a god to explain anything, and how laughable the evidence for every human religion is. This is a fast track to atheism, or religious-in-name-only (identifies as religious, but doesn't really believe, attends services irregularly for social value and lingering love of the ritual).

You don't have to be a bona fide trained scientist to notice those weaknesses either. I deconverted from Catholicism because the religious and scientific instruction in their own schooling got me to notice what a shaky foundation the religion had. (I include the religious instruction because so much of it was concerned with how much better and more logical Catholicism was than other religions, yet it was easy for me to see through the apologetics and realize that the criticisms actually cut both ways.) 20+ years later, with a much more sophisticated understanding of all the issues I first explored at age 13, I still have not found a reason to believe in any god.

I wish everyone would stop the damned trolling. It annoys me and detracts from slashdot. This thread is no place for a religious discussion. And if they don't believe in a diety why do they even mention one?

Oh noes mcgrew can't handle that other people disagree with him about the existence of his magical sky daddy. He wants unearned hands-off don't-go-there respect, the respect religion has gotten for millenia just because It's Religion! And therefore Untouchable!

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[williamhb]

It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.

Oh, come come -- this is a story about how many of us scientists don't just believe in invisible tea-sets in space (Russell's accusation of religion), we believe there's more invisible tea-sets (dark matter) than visible matter! And bet millions of dollars of research funding on that belief. While the chap who's saying "maybe there's no dark matter" is fighting an uphill battle. Trying to knock religion isn't going to do anyone many favours in this thread.

Hostilities were opened a long time ago. Your objection makes as much sense as saying to the captain of a US Navy ship, "I agree that if that Japanese ship over there shoots at us, we should blow them out of the water, but can we just hold off the hostilities until in happens?" in 1943.

An utterly misleading analogy -- to make it more realistic you'd need a large number of sailors to be simultaneously on both boats and (same study) only a small minority of the US Navy ship's crew to be actively hostile to the Japanese ship.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[turbidostato]

"Athiesm takes as much of a leap of faith as belief in a diety or dieties"

Yes. And not collecting stamps is as much of a hobby as collecting them.

"It's sad how so many athiests think religion is anti-science"

Maybe because, well, it is. While science can't accept the 'argumentum ad auctoritatem', it is the only valid one for (theist) religion.

"if they don't believe in a diety why do they even mention one?"

It might be because people like you don't stop talking about it.

The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[overshoot]

The Bullet Cluster result shows that some form of unobservable matter exists. But we already know that: brown dwarfs, rogue planets, etc.: that kind of "dark matter" has been observed, just not in the amounts to explain galactic rotation.

Ummm ... No.

The Bullet Cluster result shows that some form of matter that does not interact with baryonic matter except through gravity is present. The "dark" in "dark matter" doesn't just mean that we can't see it, it means that it doesn't interact with baryonic matter in any way except gravitationally. It not only doesn't emit electromagnetic radiation, it doesn't absorb it, and furthermore it doesn't even collide with it.

In the Bullet Clusters, two interpenetrating clusters are radiating furiously in the X-ray wavelengths due to gas, dust, etc. collisions at intergalactic velocities. The amount energy lost to these collisions is enough to actually slow down the clusters. And yet the gravitational lensing from the clusters shows the majority of their masses separate from the visible clusters. This is exactly what we would see if the majority of the cluster mass is nonbaryonic, and quite the opposite of what we would see if the mass was cold baryonic matter.

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[khipu]

This is exactly what we would see if the majority of the cluster mass is nonbaryonic

It is also what you would see if the majority of the dark matter is MACHOs, and you can't exclude MACHOs for the Bullet Cluster by observation because it's too far away. The reason we don't use MACHOs to explain all dark matter is because we would expect more microlensing events in our neighborhood and because that would be more baryonic matter than we'd expect to have been produced in the big bang. Other than that, MACHOs are perfectly good explanations for "dark matter" observations, and neither of those objections apply if we just need MACHOs to explain the occasional faraway oddity like the Bullet Cluster.

So, we have two hypotheses. (1) Both galactic rotation and the Bullet Cluster are explained by non-baryonic dark matter (but we have no idea what that might be). (2) The paper is right and galactic rotation is explained by standard gravity, while the Bullet Cluster is explained by some kind of MACHOs. If the math in the paper is right, I personally find (2) a lot more attractive than (1) because it doesn't involve inventing new physics.

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[ceoyoyo]

"It is also what you would see if the majority of the dark matter is MACHOs"

No, it's not. In the bullet cluster all the regular, baryonic matter we can see (which is not just stars but also gas and dust) shows a drag effect. By looking at gravitational lensing we know that the majority of the matter actually does NOT show this drag effect. The majority of the matter in the cluster is behaving as if it doesn't interact with anything, except through gravity.

MACHOs definitely do interact through forces other than gravity, and behave just like baryonic matter (because they ARE baryonic matter). You're sitting on one, after all.

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[khipu]

In the Bullet Cluster, it is mainly the gas that is affected by the drag effect. Stars, just like hypothetical dark matter, are only affected by gravity during the collision, since they are too massive to be subject to significant drag. And the same is true for MACHOs (in addition, black holes are also MACHOs). People say that "baryonic matter is separated from dark matter" in these collisions because most of the baryonic matter in normal galaxies is actually gas, but that is sloppy language. What you end up with in these collisions is a region of "invisible matter and stars" and the gas is left behind. (And, of course, the separation is far from perfect.)

The primary argument against MACHOs is that there would have to be too many of them if the Bullet Cluster had the same ratio that we observe around us. But this may simply be the second collision, and much of the gas already got stripped out in the first collision.

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[ceoyoyo]

The primary argument against MACHOs is that so much extra baryonic matter doesn't fit into the big bang models and observations of the CMB are also evidence against it.

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[khipu]

Did you even bother to read what I wrote? Or is your thinking really that fuzzy?

So, we have two hypotheses. (1) Both galactic rotation and the Bullet Cluster are explained by non-baryonic dark matter (but we have no idea what that might be). (2) The paper is right and galactic rotation is explained by standard gravity, while the Bullet Cluster is explained by some kind of MACHOs. If the math in the paper is right, I personally find (2) a lot more attractive than (1) because it doesn't involve inventing new physics.

MACHOs can't explain our galactic rotation. But they can explain the Bullet Cluster.

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[ceoyoyo]

I read it. I'm not sure how it's relevant to my statement. I suppose it's possible that MACHOs could explain the bullet cluster, far field gravity could explain galactic rotation curves and non-baryonic dark matter explains all the other observations like the CMB and galactic cluster behaviour. But you still haven't succeeded in getting rid of non-baryonic dark matter.

But it's pretty cute that you're resorting to personal insults.

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[khipu]

I read it. I'm not sure how it's relevant to my statement. I suppose it's possible that MACHOs could explain the bullet cluster, far field gravity could explain galactic rotation curves

Good.

non-baryonic dark matter explains all the other observations like the CMB and galactic cluster behaviour. But you still haven't succeeded in getting rid of non-baryonic dark matter.

You still seem to have trouble with the distinction between "could be explained by" and "provides evidence for".

But it's pretty cute that you're resorting to personal insults.

Nothing cute about it: I don't think you are a good scientist (if you are a scientist at all).

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[ceoyoyo]

The ability to explain observations is most certainly evidence in favour of a theory, particularly when you're choosing between two theories, one of which explains more observations than the other.

Yeah, sorry, your assessment of my fitness as a scientist doesn't really sting much. Perhaps you'd like try something else? Maybe mom jokes? Speculation about my personal hygiene?

Re:The "dark" in "dark matter" isn't just "dim."

[khipu]

The ability to explain observations is most certainly evidence in favour of a theory, particularly when you're choosing between two theories, one of which explains more observations than the other.

By that reasoning, believing that an almighty God makes everything work out the way it does should be the best scientific theory of all, because it explains all observations. That's not how science works.

Yeah, sorry, your assessment of my fitness as a scientist doesn't really sting much.

It wasn't supposed to; it was just an observation.

Skepticism

[Anonymous Coward]

"As usual, these are extraordinary claims that divert from the consensus, so keep a healthy skepticism"

Doesn't the consensus merit healthy skepticism too?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to nitpick your nitpicking, because there's some really objectionable stuff in it.

Oh, come come -- this is a story about how many of us scientists don't just believe in invisible tea-sets in space (Russell's accusation of religion), we believe there's more invisible tea-sets (dark matter) than visible matter!

That's ridiculous. Russell's tea-set analogy was to illustrate how a person who believes in religion does so without any positive evidence or reasoning. The hypothetical believer in space teapots believes in them in spite of the fact that not only have none been found wandering about the solar system, there's no reason to expect them to be present in the first place.

Dark matter does not fit that criticism in any way. It's an attempt to explain an interesting conundrum:

1. We think we know a lot of physics. Relativity and quantum theory aren't unified, but they each work very well in their respective domains.

2. We've been finding that there isn't enough visible mass (where by visible I mean "in the electromagnetic spectrum", not just the human range of visibility) to account for the observed gravitational interactions between many cosmological objects.

Dark matter is one possible answer for this problem. There might be matter which is hard or impossible to observe via EM spectrum emissions, so the only way we can notice it at cosmological distances is its gravitational influence on other matter. This is in no way analogous to Russell's teapot, because it is a hypothetical explanation for an observed fact, not a context-free irrational belief in a ridiculous notion.

And bet millions of dollars of research funding on that belief. While the chap who's saying "maybe there's no dark matter" is fighting an uphill battle.

This is nonsense, because the "maybe there's no dark matter" side has in fact been able to get funding. So far the "there's probably dark matter" side seems to be winning. That doesn't mean there's a religious belief in DM, just that it seems to fit the observable facts reasonably well, while the alternate theories proposed to date (modifications of existing physics, such as MOND) have generally failed to pass basic smell tests (such as whether they can reproduce well known experimentally verifiable phenomena).

What else..

[formfeed]

If there suddenly isn't any need for dark matter anymore, what are we going to do with all that dark matter?

Yes, yes...

[Patchw0rk F0g]

Nothing to see here.... please keep moving. Mind the lights....

Article is misleading

[Jookey]

The paper linked in the summary is essentially a rehash of this written in 2008:
http://www.mat.unimi.it/users/carati/pdf/atenemissing.pdf
This article essentially states that the far field gravitational effects of distant galaxies are not negligible. This is the essential meat of the idea.

From the article linked in the summary:
"In the literature, there are several papers which illustrate different ways in which the distribution of matter can be estimated, starting for example from the measured distribution of luminosity of the galaxies. We take instead the simpler path which consists in assuming a functional form for [local gravitational potential], with a minimal number of parameters and then trying to determine these parameters by a best fit with the observed rotation curves."

This part really bugs me. Why does the author completely ignore the luminosity distribution of the test galaxies. At the very least this means that all the pretty graphs you see when scrolling through the pdf are misleading.

Re:Article is misleading

[ceoyoyo]

"Why does the author completely ignore the luminosity distribution of the test galaxies."

Just guessing, but perhaps because it doesn't match what's require to explain the rotation curve?

I just skimmed the paper itself, but on a quick reading it sounds like they started with the (interesting) question "can we get the observed rotation curve by arranging other galaxies around our target galaxy, at a long distance?" That was a bit too hard so they simplified it to "can we get the observed rotation curve by creating a varying gravitation field throughout the galaxy that could be caused by a particular arrangement of mass at a long distance."

They then took their model and fit it to the observed rotation curves for a few galaxies. There's no indication that their fitting was in any way constrained by the actual observed distribution of galaxies.

Re:Article is misleading

[Jookey]

They should at least have a graph that shows the mass distribution from there model compared to a mass distribution from the luminosity distribution.

Re:Article is misleading

[ceoyoyo]

It's quite possible they don't know what the required mass distribution is. From the sound of it, they didn't actually fit a mass distribution, but rather a gravitational field. Working back to a mass distribution may well be non-trivial.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean "Intelligent Acceleration"

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[7-Vodka]

I do not think you know what the word 'translation' means.

It's ok, I expect it from people who can't do any critical thinking and believe in fairy tales in the literal sense.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[kievit]

I can't wait for some religious nutbar to claim that an "intelligent" gravity theory should be joined to any other existing theory in scientific discussion.

You mean "intelligent falling"?

Dark matter is supported by other evidence too

[GospelHead821]

Recall that the effect on the rotation of galaxies is not the only observation ever made that supports the dark matter theory. There was an article on Slashdot a while ago - I couldn't find it here but I found another summary of the same findings. Astronomers observed a region where two galaxies had collided and found gravitational lensing occurring in a region of space where the visible matter was not located.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[DarenN]

It's because Atheism is a religious position. Thus, having taken a religious position, they do what many others who have a religious position does, a rubbish everyone else. The joke is that it seems most athiests don't recognise this.

On the other hand, I'm agnostic so I just laugh at both sides.

Bollocks

[damburger]

Two things lead me to dismiss this immediately:

1. It is very easy to fit rotation curves to data. The errors are quite large. There are many, many theoretical rotation curves (caused by dark matter) that match the data.

2. Even IF this guy can explain rotation curves, he doesn't explain how galaxies form in the quantities we see (which based on current data requires dark matter) and what causes gravitational lensing. He would have to propose an entirely separate mechanism for these things.

Re:Bollocks

[anphany]

Reply to point 1: The paper is merely pointing out that theoretical rotation curves NOT derived from dark matter also matches the data. In other words, (if these results hold up) an application of General Relativity alone can match the data. Be honest now - and stop being so dismissive - which explanation should be taken more seriously: an explanation involving GR alone, or an explanation involving GR plus a postulated new form of matter? Reply to point 2: He HAS explained the rotation curves. And he has done so in terms of known physics. Dark matter does no better, and further, makes no new predictions to separate it from GR alone. In spite of major efforts to mainstream it, dark matter is still an hypothesis. If we find we don't need it, we as scientists, are obligated to drop it. This paper may merely be the starting point and in time other applications of far-field GR to galaxy formation and gravitational lensing may offer an explanation. Because the author of this paper doesn't have everything doesn't mean he has nothing. It is after all only one paper, and you have to address the claims made, not the claims not made. I find your arrogance disturbing...

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Anonymous Coward]

Some atheists may not be agnostic. Most intellectual atheists are agnostic. There is no difference in practice except those "agnostics" who focus on pedantry in order to hedge their cowardly position, e.g. the craven.

Bullet cluster looks frame dragged

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we sure we have correct estimate for frame drag's attenuation range? What happens when two frames collide, interference dragging? Galaxy rotations could also be result of it.

No to the "No"

[Dr. Manhattan]

Here's what an alternative to 'dark matter' must explain.

Hopefully this helps you understand where the idea of 'dark matter' came from. (Hint: arses don't seem to be an element.)

Re:No to the "No"

[TopherC]

You've hit the nail on the head with that link. Glad you were modded up!

My take on this is that alternative theories to dark matter are always welcome but they have a lot of explaining to do. If there is no dark matter then how else can we explain the galactic rotational velocity profiles, gravitational lensing maps, AND cosmic microwave background fluctuations fitted to cosmological models. For me the strongest evidence is found in the lensing study of colliding galaxies. The mass (dark matter) distribution has separated from the visible light distribution.

In science, it's particularly exciting when new theories are proposed that not only explain previous observations but predict new, unknown phenomena that can be tested. Sure that doesn't always happen even with good, valuable theories but this dark matter alternative theory falls well short of the "exciting" mark because it fails to explain the bulk of the existing evidence for dark matter. It also smells strongly of computational error. Being able to investigate and rule out or reveal computing errors is probably what best separates mediocre scientists from great ones these days.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[azalin]

And I always thought the intelligent part would be to either a) not fall or b) fall and not hit the ground [HHGTTG]

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[tehcyder]

I bet Pastafarians aren't too bothered by dieties.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[tehcyder]

If someone told me they pray to the tooth fairy, I'd smile and hope that it brings them peace and happiness. There are a lot of atheists here that could use a deity to teach them not to be an asshole.

If religionists were all perfect and atheists were all assholes, you might possibly have a point.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[tehcyder]

An utterly misleading analogy -- to make it more realistic you'd need a large number of sailors to be simultaneously on both boats [amazon.com] and (same study) only a small minority of the US Navy ship's crew to be actively hostile to the Japanese ship.

The majority who weren't hostile, or tried to be on both boats at once should, of course, have been summarily executed as traitors. During a war, if you're neutral you're helping the enemy.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

Why should anyone else's beliefs make you miserable? Does not compute.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[tehcyder]

Translation: "I'm not bright enough to think about orbital dynamics, so I'll just try to start an offtopic religion-bashing troll thread instead."

Bashing religion is never off topic in a scientific discussion. Personal delusions have no place in a discussion of the objective truth.

Ecrasez l'infame.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

True. A lot of athiests are good people, and a lot of churchgoers are assholes+. Example: Newt Gingrich. How big an asshole would one have to be to divorce your wife for another woman while your wife is dying of cancer?* And how in the hell can anybody even contemplate voting for this toilet scum?

The GP probably thinks all athiests are assholes because of assholes like Richard Dawkins, and the assholes on slashdot who have to interject their faith that no diety exists, in every goddamned thread, and in the most disrespectful way possible.

I say if you have a Jesus fish or a Darwin legfish on your car, you should drive with the utmost courtesy so as not to make your fellow Christians/athiests look bad (guilt by association).

* I don't believe Gingrich is a Christian, I think he pretends to be one to get the evangelical votes.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

How would a being intelligent enough and powerful enough to create an entire universe NOT?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

The absense of a deity is as unfalsifiable as the presence of one. The existance of neutrinos was unfalsifiable in the 17th century. When one has experienced a thing, one can no longer deny that thing's existance, scientifically falsifiable or not.

Going on evidence alone, the only logical choice is agnosticism; "I don't know" considering that there are witnesses to this unfalsifiable phenomenon.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Quirkz]

Not the beliefs, but the actions they take based on those beliefs or the restrictions they place on your own life based on those beliefs most certainly can. An overused and cliche example, but if their beliefs say I need to be burned at the stake for being a heathen, I'm pretty sure that's going to make me miserable. Not terribly likely in the modern day, I admit, but there's plenty of things that do.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

"Athiesm takes as much of a leap of faith as belief in a diety or dieties"
Yes. And not collecting stamps is as much of a hobby as collecting them.

That's an argument (and a valid one) against saying that athiesm is a religion, which it obviously is not, although many athiests (e.g., Dawkins) are evangelical in their anti-religion; like a man who wants to outlaw the hobby of collecting stamps. It isn't an argument against the fact that disbelief needs as much faith as belief.

"It's sad how so many athiests think religion is anti-science"
Maybe because, well, it is.

Then please explain why over half of all scientists are in fact religious?

While science can't accept the 'argumentum ad auctoritatem', it is the only valid one for (theist) religion.

No, in fact it isn't for everyone. Anyone who seeks God will find him, but you'll never find what you're running away from. And what's not to like about the ten commandments and loving one's neighbor? What's to not like about a religion that worships life itself (Bhuddism)? What's not to like about teaching people to love their enemies and do good to them that harm them (Christianity)?

Science asks and answers "how." Religion asks and answers "why". One why I don't understand is why anyone would lead such a meaningless existance? Sooner or later you will die. Sooner or later there will be no trace you ever existed. Sooner or later the human race will become extinct, as all species do. Sooner or later (ok, much later) the sun will go supernova and destroy half the solar system. What's the point in living if that's all there is to life?

"if they don't believe in a diety why do they even mention one?"
It might be because people like you don't stop talking about it.

It was an athiest who started this very thread with an anti-religious rant. In fact, about the only time I see religion mentioned at slashdot at all it's an athiest bashing it for no reason and usally completely off the topic. The one exception I can think of is a troll named "preacher jake" or some such nonsense.

But when someone bashes my religion, by God I'm going to defend it.

I will admit that there is one thing wrong with all religions -- slimeballs who pretend to be religious (Newt Gingrich, Osama Bin Laden, that guy in Florida who demonstrates at soldiers' funerals, Pat Roberston, etc) to further their own agendas and spew shit that isn't in the bible (or Koran or other texts) at all.

Re:ANY coffee in the USA

[DocSavage64109]

You should include a condition in your statement if you don't want to be seen as a liar, unless you've drank every coffee in the country. Maybe you meant any chain's coffee? I'm sure you know that there are plenty of ethnic restaurants from all over the world in most major cities.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

Without proof either way, yours is the only logical position (note that some of us have been shown proof, albeit not scientific proof, and it's nothing we can show others).

I journaled about my friend Amy last week, she's the kind of agnostic that wants to believe but hasn't really met God. Her boyfriend, Tim, was an athiest who actually did find God a few Sundays ago. They're both homeless, staying at the Salvation Army shelter. One of the requirements is they have to go to church (even though they're athiest and agnostic). She was telling me that something hit him hard in church, he started crying, now is almost evangelical. "Seek and you shall find".

He's also been sober since then; oth of them are horribly addicted to alcohol.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[arkane1234]

Atheism is as much of a religious position as being homeless is another housing choice.
Not joining the game in no way means you are part of it.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

Well, that depends on the religion, and the problem is that many of the "religious" really aren't, they go against their own religion for their own gain while merely pretending to be religious, the "wolves in sheep's clothing" as it were. Pat Robertson and that guy from Florida who demonstrates at soldiers' funerals come to mind. I'd bet Pat Robertson has converted far more Christians to athiesm than Richard Dawkins could ever dream of converting.

These people piss me off too, probably more than they piss off an athiest. Take these anti-gay "Christians", for example, who don't read their own bible. "God hates fags?" No, God may not like homosexuality, but he loves gays as much as you love any program you write. The ones who bash gays in the name of Jesus who turn out to adulterers are the worst; self-seekers who haven't read "take the ceiling joist out of your own eye before you try to remove the speck from your brothers' eye". Homosexuality is little mentioned in the bible (mostly in the old testament), but adultery is one of the biggies as far as Christian-Judeo sin is concerned, one that Moses brought down.

The "conservative Christians" are the worst. Conservatism goes against everything Christ taught. Tea party tax haters? "Render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's." Welfare for the poor? "It is better to give than recieve."

Anyone who tries to restrict your actions based on their own morals is far from a Christian. "Judge not, lest you be judged yourself". Hell, the very foundation of Christianity is forgiveness. If you can't give it, how can you expect to receive it?

The stake burning is a good example. Nowhere in the bible does it say you're supposed to burn wiccans, but plenty caught fire a few hundred years ago. "Thou shalt not kill", but there are plenty of these fake Christians who are both war hawks and for the death penalty. How could a real Christian possibly be for the death penalty? They may say "well, deuteronomy says stone adulterers", but the new testament says to forgive them ("let he who is without sin cast the first stone"). Why are these bible thumpers not eating a kosher diet if they're all so old testament on everybody?

The Bhuddists worship life itself, but when I was in Thailand two separate Bhuddist stuck guns in my face. Meanwhile, one woman chastised me for killing a fly. But that's just how people are.

There's nothing on earth that can't be used for evil.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[Quirkz]

Ah, so I think we're almost on the same page. It appears you're assuming people *should* keep their personal religion personal, in which case I agree with you entirely that whatever crazy ol' belief they have is perfectly fine by me (barring some child abuse, etc.). From my slightly more practical approach that people often don't keep personal religion personal, and tend to let it overflow into their politics and other aspects of how they treat others, it definitely can be a problem, and then I do consider it my business to push back some in self defense.

skepticism wins in science

[globaljustin]

interesting...you said

>>>I mean, "dark matter" sounds menacing and strange. Had they called it "candy matter"

I know that just because you are using an ad homonym attack on my argument via contextualizing my perspective as 'afraid' doesn't mean you don't have an important point to make.

So, disregarding your ad homonym dicta, I found this (paraphrased):

>>Just because the simplest explanation tends to be the best doesn't mean it is always the best

That's something I can address. You can't fight my balanced approach with unbalance and rebrand it as 'the balanced approach'...you are advocating going against confirmed observations. That's progress, of course, but it must be accurate, precise, falsifiable, and verifyable (among other things...ethics...)

Just because you can make a spreadsheet and modeling software output the result you want doesn't mean you get to turn science on its head in an instant.

Let me be clear: Dark Matter research is interesting and helpful, but its significance is out of proportion to the level of scientific rigor relative to other science that it contradicts.

So that's balance. My approach is skeptical yet open and optimistic and its the right approach.

Dark Matter researchers or researchers intersted in Dark Matter, or whoever should do all the research you want and I will look at it with interest. BUT I DECIDE when it is the best option on the table.

The only thing I am 'afraid' of is that your perspective might be the prevailing perspective in many academic and research institutions.

Re:skepticism wins in science

[cowboy76Spain]

>>Just because the simplest explanation tends to be the best doesn't mean it is always the best

Uh... were in my post did I write that text? Why are you quoting me falsely (and falsifying my argumentation)? Are you answering to the voices in your head?

Normally I would have stopped answering you after that, but it is so easy and funny that I will proceed anyway.

That's something I can address. You can't fight my balanced approach with unbalance and rebrand it as 'the balanced approach'...

No! YOU can't fight my balanced approach with unbalance and rebrand it as 'the balanced approach'! Now repeat. :-p

you are advocating going against confirmed observations. That's progress, of course, but it must be accurate, precise, falsifiable, and verifyable (among other things...ethics...)

Just because you can make a spreadsheet and modeling software output the result you want doesn't mean you get to turn science on its head in an instant.

Let me be clear: Dark Matter research is interesting and helpful, but its significance is out of proportion to the level of scientific rigor relative to other science that it contradicts.

Read carefully. I did not say DM was right or wrong. I am not advocating anything, because I know nothing to advocate anything. I just made fun of some know-it-all who just take a position without knowing anything at all. Again, you are not answering to my post but to something else.

So that's balance. My approach is skeptical yet open and optimistic and its the right approach.

Can you cite any reference that qualifies you as the best judge of your opinions? The thing is, no matter how wrong your oppinions are, you'll find them good enough (because they are yours, of course). Same to everyone, of course.

Dark Matter researchers or researchers intersted in Dark Matter, or whoever should do all the research you want and I will look at it with interest. BUT I DECIDE when it is the best option on the table.

The only thing I am 'afraid' of is that your perspective might be the prevailing perspective in many academic and research institutions.

You can too DECIDE what will be the numbers winning your local lotto, or the value of the C constant. What I say is that id DOES NOT MATTER at all what you DECIDE.

The only thing I am 'afraid' of is that your perspective might be the prevailing perspective in many academic and research institutions.

Bad news: The prevailing perspective in many academic and research institutions IS NOT asking your opinion. They observe measurements, propose theories and perform experiments. When it comes to peer reviewing their work, they don't ask you or me but generally ask to people who know the issue at hand. OH NO WE ARE DOOMED!

Hey, to write "I am right because I say so" you did not need so many words...

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[williamhb]

I'm going to nitpick your nitpicking, because there's some really objectionable stuff in it.

Ah, the myth that "I object" is equivalent to "there's some really objectionable stuff".

Oh, come come -- this is a story about how many of us scientists don't just believe in invisible tea-sets in space (Russell's accusation of religion), we believe there's more invisible tea-sets (dark matter) than visible matter!

That's ridiculous. Russell's tea-set analogy was to illustrate how a person who believes in religion does so without any positive evidence or reasoning.

Which itself is a false claim, and well-known to be so. There's a very good argument to say that Russell's teapot is a crock and has always been so -- empty rhetoric derived from the false notion that "I don't rate the evidence or reasoning they are using" is the same as "they are not using evidence or reasoning". But here (and in the long paras I snipped) you are essentially pretending it's not ok for beliefs you like but is ok for those you don't like -- to the point of using "...belief in a ridiculous notion" later as part of your argument as to why you think it's ok to apply to religious beliefs. That's the false logic "if I like the conclusion the steps must be ok."

This is nonsense, because the "maybe there's no dark matter" side has in fact been able to get funding. So far the "there's probably dark matter" side seems to be winning. That doesn't mean there's a religious belief in DM, just that it seems to fit the observable facts reasonably well. That doesn't mean there's a religious belief in DM, just that it seems to fit the observable facts reasonably well, while the alternate theories proposed to date (modifications of existing physics, such as MOND) have generally failed to pass basic smell tests (such as whether they can reproduce well known experimentally verifiable phenomena).

I didn't say there was a religious belief in DM -- read the post again. I said that scientists had sufficient belief in DM to bet research money on it (we don't often spend our limited funding on research we think will fail), not that nobody was betting the other way. The uphill battle the chap betting the other way has to fight is that there's a prevailing consensus belief the "undetectable explanation" (and an undetectable explanation can always be constructed to fit the data perfectly -- we can imagine what we like -- whereas his explanations, being detectable, have to face the higher bar of both being empirically testable and fitting the data). That means, whether he's right or wrong, he has a tougher furrow to plough.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[turbidostato]

"It isn't an argument against the fact that disbelief needs as much faith as belief."

Except that it is. It doesn't require faith to disbelieve what hasn't been seen, can't be reproduced and can't be articulated into a coherent theory. Saying that believing that there's somewhere an almighty though invisible flying spaghetti monster is no more an act of faith than not believing it is the same kind of argument than saying that not collecting stamps is a hobby. But, anyway, it's an analogy so if you don't think it to be a proper one, good for you, I don't give a damn.

"Then please explain why over half of all scientists are in fact religious?"

Cognitive dissonance produced by early exposition to young brains.

"what's not to like about the ten commandments and loving one's neighbor?"

This is twice a non-sequitur. On what hand, what has to do the virtues of the ten commandments with the fact that the god that the bible describes is a reality or not? On the other hand, what has this to do with the fact that a theist religion is the supreme argument by authority which is the absolute opposite to anything acceptable by science?

"Science asks and answers "how.""

But not every path to find the answers is a valid one for science and the path of "this is so because god told me and command it to be that way" is absolutly out of scope.

"What's the point in living if that's all there is to life?"

That's the trade of the philosopher and I for one don't find a satisfactory answer to be "god knows".

"I will admit that there is one thing wrong with all religions -- slimeballs who pretend to be religious"

Why does this seem to me so much like the "true scotchman" fallacy?

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[SecurityTheatre]

That's probably because he was not entirely competent, not because he was unsure of hostilities. :-)

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[SecurityTheatre]

The logical conclusion is "I don't know"

However, like Russel's teapot, the logical inference is... that without evidence, we should assume something extraordinary doesn't exist.

I proclaim there is a large human settlement on the dark side of the moon that is invisible due to advance cloaking technology provided by an alien race that arrived in 4000 BC to help Egyptians to build pyramids.

This... is equally as plausible (scientifically speaking) as the God of Genesis (or Brahama of the Mahapuranas). Must I run around giving "equal treatment" to the potential existence of this colony, or should I presume, lacking evidence, that is probably doesn't exist.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

Ah, so I think we're almost on the same page.

Yes, it seems so to me. I'm as annoyed with Jehova's Witnesses as any athiest is. That "Jake" troll annoys me to no end.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[mcgrew]

However, like Russel's teapot, the logical inference is... that without evidence, we should assume something extraordinary doesn't exist.

I find that a universe coming into being from nothingness, complete with creatures sentient enough to wonder where stuff came from and how stuff works to be pretty unbelievable. I find that eyeballs wired to a brain to come from evolution alone to be pretty unlikely.

It also seems that a universe coming out of nothingnesss from nowhere violates the laws of thermodynamics.

Re:"Intelligent" gravity force

[SecurityTheatre]

It also seems that a universe coming out of nothingnesss from nowhere violates the laws of thermodynamics.

So does a dude in a white toga making it appear with a sneeze.

I find that eyeballs wired to a brain to come from evolution alone to be pretty unlikely.

We were made in God's image. Where did his eyeballs come from? SuperGod?

You have to believe in a big "appearance" at some time, no matter what it was that was appearing.

Given which "big bang" is more plausible... one that produces a superbeing that happens to have two arms and two legs and eyes and things... that can create universes and is really really vindictive, a tad unstable and extremely needy..... or a physical process that sets in motion a series of events according to a few dozen simple rules...

I can tell you which I find more plausible.

But I guess that's where the thought process diverges.