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Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy Cast Doubt On the Big Bang?

StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Back in the 1960s, after the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang reigned supreme as the only game in town. But back then, we also assumed that what we consider as "normal matter" — i.e., protons, neutrons and electrons — was, along with photons and neutrinos, the only stuff that made up the Universe. But the last 50 years have shown us that dark matter and dark energy actually make up 95% of the energy composition of our cosmos. Given that, is there any wiggle room to possibly invalidate the Big Bang?"

225 comments

  1. Oh good lord. by AdamColley · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's always the possibility of a theory being falsified but in this case the answer is almost certainly no.

    The big bang is not going to be invalidated, so say COBE, WMAP and PLANCK.

    Also, it's actually less than 5% baryonic matter it seems, 4.4%

    http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/unive...

    Be aware that dark matter is just matter we can't directly detect with our current technology (or just haven't /yet/), it's not something magical.

    1. Re:Oh good lord. by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And maybe dark matter isn't at all, but just a matter (bad pun, I know) of our misunderstanding of something.

      Take the planet Vulcan. No, not THAT Vulcan. But also a fictional one. Astronomers noticed Mercury isn't circling the Sun as it should, so something had to account for this. In their understanding back then, there had to be another planet that causes that. But then uncle Albert came along and explained it with relativity and now we know that gravity is the culprit, not some planet we can't see.

      What if this is a similar case? Like, say, (normal) matter having gravity properties that only become noticeable on a cosmic scale? Like, say, relativistic effects that take a DAMN LOT of gravity to become noticeable?

      I'm not saying it is so, I just wonder if we're dead set on Dark Matter or whether we're actually still looking in other directions? Or rather, whether serious scientists actually look into different options aside of Dark Matter to explain the discrepancies, not just crackpots and snakeoil peddlers.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Oh good lord. by StripedCow · · Score: 2, Funny

      Dark matter is probably just civilizations that have built (advanced forms of) Dyson spheres around their stars.
      This also explains the Fermi paradox.

      --
      If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
    3. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      A cool theory, but no.
      The last image at this link pretty much shows that whatever dark matter is - it doesn't interact with normal matter.
      http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/04/20/how-gravitational-lensing-show/

      This rules out dust clouds, black holes, Dyson spheres, Neutrinos, and pretty much anything else we know about in our existence so far.

      We have a lot to learn.

    4. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This has certainly been considered (and still is to some extent, I've read at least a few papers published this year and this isn't something I'm especially interested in), it's just that building such a theory that would account for all the observed effects seems to be difficult, and it's provable that a fairly general class of theories of modified general relativity is equivalent to general relativity with different matter content. Since this is the case, it doesn't really make too much sense to differentiate between the two, and the existence of dark matter is generally considered the more natural of the two options (in comparison to your example of Vulcan, there have been a large number cases where particles speculated due to similar reasons HAVE been found), so that's what people are sticking with.

    5. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, neutrinos do account for dark matter, it's just that there aren't enough of them. They are also hot, or at least warm (as in energetic), and the cold dark matter component, which has been observed to be very significant, remains unexplained by them. Which is why we'd like to have non-baryonic fairly massive (so relatively cold) particles. Dark matter is anything that doesn't interact with regular matter via the strong or gravitational interactions. Neutrinos don't.

    6. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ugh, what I meant to say was obviously 'Dark matter is anything that doesn't interact with regular matter via *other* interactions than the strong or gravitational ones.' So the exact opposite, sorry.

    7. Re:Oh good lord. by gargleblast · · Score: 1

      Correctamundo. Given that the best theory of cosmology yet devised, the Lambda-CDM model, is a Big Bang theory that includes dark matter and dark energy, I would ... defer to Ian Betteridge's opinion on the matter.

    8. Re:Oh good lord. by dbIII · · Score: 1

      The alternative to dark matter is the hubris of thinking we can see absolutely everything. Journalists may be in that space but it doesn't seem that astronomers are.
      Analogy: you are in a dark room full of people with sparklers, but you know there are some without them because somebody without one just stood on your foot.

    9. Re:Oh good lord. by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      We have no idea what gravity.is, only how it behaves, same deal with dark matter. Perhaps there's no matter in dark matter, perhaps we are seeing a naked gravitational field. Technically all we are observing is a gravitational field, the "matter" itself has never been observed we just assume that all gravitational fields require some sort of matter to bend space, nature is under no obligation to comply to our rules, perhaps space is capable of bending by itself via local fluctuations in the expansion rate.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    10. Re:Oh good lord. by Rockoon · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Please check out "QED" by Richard Feynman. Well we actually don't know how that works ether, but we've figured out the math to make very precise predictions that usually match reality so we must be on the right track.

      Indeed, QED is the most successful theory that man has ever formulated, and Feynman was IMHO far greater than Einstein or Hawking.

      When the first shuttle blew up, NASA picked up the phone and called Feynman, someone that never did anything for NASA before and was not involved in any way with the shuttles, rockets, or even anything astronomy. Feynman figured out what happened quite quickly, went before congress and both explained and demonstrated the problem.

      Einstein has a brilliant idea. Hawking had a brilliant idea. Feynman was simply raw brilliance.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    11. Re:Oh good lord. by FireFury03 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Dark matter is probably just civilizations that have built (advanced forms of) Dyson spheres around their stars.
      This also explains the Fermi paradox.

      Dyson spheres would glow in the infrared and therefore be pretty obvious. This is because they still have to radiate the heat produced by the star they enclose - otherwise their internal temperature would perpetually increase.

    12. Re:Oh good lord. by flyingfsck · · Score: 1

      Dark matter is the foam noodles and other packaging material that the universe was transported in. It now lies in a skip at the back.

      --
      Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
    13. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not magical? Matter that I can't see and can't interact with? Can you imagine if someone made a drone out of that? A perfect spy device. Nobody can see it, hear it, or knock it down. In fact, I may have one hovering over you right now...

    14. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And that is what is so sad about science...nothing is magical.

    15. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This guy has a very good video showing why we don't need the big bang or dark matter/energy to explain the state of "known" universe.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy47OQxUBvw

    16. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why would they specifically glow in the infrared?
      I know that the infrared spectrum glow for dyson spheres is popular in science fiction literature, but I never understood the fixation on that particular part of the em spectrum. Why not something colder, like microwave radiation? The cosmic background radiation is within the microwave spectrum. And there's plenty of other low energy frequencies in the entire em spectrum, radio comes to mind.

      At least in theory, if the barrier holds back all particle radiation, which includes neutrinos, it may only appear as an odd hot spot in the background radiation, that also has some gravitational energy.

    17. Re:Oh good lord. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      And that is what is so sad about science...nothing is magical.

      http://xkcd.com/877/

    18. Re:Oh good lord. by StripedCow · · Score: 0

      Hence I said "advanced forms of Dyson spheres".

      --
      If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
    19. Re: Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nope

    20. Re:Oh good lord. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Interesting

      We just have no clue as to what it is or how it works.

      I'd like to point out that gravity is in the same category. Also time.

      This.

      When Newton was first discussing his theories of universal gravitation, the scientific community was rather skeptical, because it invoked spooky "unseen forces" acting at a distance (i.e., gravity). The previous Aristotelean model of physics asserted that "normal" terrestrial matter came to a nature place of rest (earth sinks down to equilibrium, air rises to equilibrium, etc.), since Newton's first law hadn't been realized yet. Instead, real-world friction, etc. tends to bring things to a state of rest, which accords with everyday experience. All motion had to be explained by a "cause," something that propelled it into motion, and ultimately the matter would stop moving once it came to its natural state of rest.

      The motion of the planets could not be explained using this physics, so the celestial bodies were assumed to be of a different type of aetherial matter (or something) which was set in motion at the beginning of time or something.

      That was the proper scientific theory of the day, and it accorded with empirical observation and common sense -- terrestrial bodies stopped, celestial ones seemed to go in continuous motion forever.

      But Newton came along and equated the two -- and he developed a mathematics that described the motion. Unfortunately it depended on a "spooky" occult idea of forces acting at a distance. (Newton, of course, was really into the occult, alchemy, etc.)

      So, scientists of the day were skeptical. Newton eventually even published an appendix with future editions of the Principia explaining that his model didn't depend on "real" unseen forces acting -- instead, he basically came up with the modern scientific ideal that says: if the math works and predicts the phenomena, that's enough for science. A scientific model need not be concerned with philosophical questions or ultimate causes of phenomena as long as it can actually make good predictions.

      THAT, probably more than anything else, was the foundation of modern "science" laid down by Newton during the Scientific Revolution. People had been doing experiments and empirical investigations for millennia, but they always had to worry about ultimate "causes," which inevitably depended on somebody's pet theory of reality. After Newton, though, what matters is that the math works. Maybe the dark matter/dark energy model is hinting at some deeper aspect of reality and a more elegant theory that we will come up with many years from now... or not. But regardless, these ideas are exactly like Newton's "gravity" -- something which we observe, something we can have an accurate mathematical model of, but also something "spooky" that we don't understand completely yet.

      That's what the modern scientific process is all about.

    21. Re:Oh good lord. by bricko · · Score: 0

      Absolutely NOT....remember all "settled science" is not a topic for continued investigation. Are you going to become a "Bang Denier", you will be ostracized and Slashdot will not publish any questioning ideas. Just like "Climate Change" , it is "settled" and no further investigation is to be done.

    22. Re:Oh good lord. by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2

      Indeed, QED is the most successful theory that man has ever formulated

      No, actually that would be special relativity which has been tested to around 20+ orders of magnitude by cosmic rays as well as (arguably) tests of CPT symmetry which last time I checked (quite a while ago) was at about 18 orders of magnitude.

      QED is 'only' at about 12-14 order of magnitude of accuracy (which is extremely impressive!). Indeed since QED incorporates Special Relativity it would be hard for it to be tested more accurately that SR since any test of QED is, by definition, a test of SR as well.

    23. Re:Oh good lord. by Rockoon · · Score: 0

      QED is 'only' at about 12-14 order of magnitude of accuracy

      Irrelevant to weather it is a success or not. You seem to think that success means 'measured to within a certain accuracy' --- no sir, success means that explained many things, predicted many more things, and knowing it is required to be on the cutting edge of just about everything technological today.

      Relativity doesnt hold a handle to that. Not even close. Aside from GPS satellites, how has our understanding of relatively improved your life? It hasn't. QED has in so many ways that those ways arent even practically enumerable any longer.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    24. Re:Oh good lord. by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 2

      Why would they specifically glow in the infrared?
      I know that the infrared spectrum glow for dyson spheres is popular in science fiction literature, but I never understood the fixation on that particular part of the em spectrum. Why not something colder, like microwave radiation?

      That's an interesting theory. At the moment, we don't really have means to extract additional energy from waste heat, so it ultimately radiates off as infrared. But if we're seriously considering building a Dyson sphere, one supposes we've already exhausted every possible efficiency we can come up with, including reducing infrared wavelength all the way down to microwave wavelength, squeezing every last possible watt out of it.

      It doesn't seem likely. Black body radiation at room temperature and cooler is almost entirely in the infrared. It's the part of the spectrum to which heat converts most readily at lower temperatures. Efforts to convert that infrared back into something useful have been covered on Slashdot. It's apparently possible. But the result is still infrared, coming off the back of the converter. Just less of it. One supposes it has something to do with the fundamental nature of macroscopic matter.

      Is there a physicist in the house?

    25. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > And that is what is so sad about science...nothing is magical.

      What's sad is people who believe in magic after age 5.

    26. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dark matter may not be anything we'd consider "real"; perhaps it's all just virtual particles...

      For example, EM fields are filtered by virtual particles, a negative charge would appear slightly weaker than inverse square law predicts because there are virtual electrons that orient themselves in such a way that reduces the charge.

      Gravity will also have virtual particles (gravitons?), but being always attractive actually makes the gravity force bigger than inverse square law---virtual particles will cause *more* gravity and *more* virtual particles---perhaps that's what multiplies gravitation 20x or so for it to appear like matter is wrapped / orbited by "dark matter that nobody can see except for gravitational affects".

      Perhaps Dark Energy (which I think has more to do with entropy confined within a volume) is the only thing stopping the above described gravity multiplication :-)

    27. Re:Oh good lord. by The+Raven · · Score: 2

      I thought that we had too much Lithium to match the prediction, that observed amounts exceeded predicted ratios.

      --
      "I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
    28. Re:Oh good lord. by Opyros · · Score: 1

      Then what about Tomonaga and Schwinger; were they also greater than Einstein?

    29. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Re: "when you make theories to fit your observations, of course they match."

      Slashdotters appear to generally not realize that scientists simply decide what anomalies to focus the public's attention on. Notice that this article never mentions any uncertainties associated with these ideas, nor areas where potential mistakes might exist within these conventional theories. Why even broach this subject if you're not at all willing to give the critics some airtime to make their case?

      The people who run this site do not have a pulse on how to push science forward beyond these obstacles. The science articles which are promoted on Slashdot exclude any discussion of mistakes within our theories, and for this reason, this aggregator will not generate thought leaders who can help us to resolve the most perplexing issues in astrophysics & cosmology today. Sometimes, in science, cosmetic ad hoc tweaks will not get us from A to B. This is the case with dark matter & energy; they are of that rare class of problems in science where we must revisit the initial hypothesis. And this is ultimately the reason why, after decades of investigation, they remain with us. The ideas which will take us to the next step are generally quite divergent from established wisdom -- which means that they fall into the category of "mistakes in science". And that absolutely guarantees that they will not survive moderation on Slashdot, which exhibits the behavior of a rabid fanboy when it comes to science. We need critics in science. But the Slashdot moderators seem more concerned with convincing us that science is awesome (click harvesting), than actually moving science forward.

    30. Re:Oh good lord. by Belial6 · · Score: 0

      It most certainly does not rule out dyson spheres. Any civilization advanced enough to build a dyson sphere would likely be able to build them in a way that we would have a hard time detecting them. I'm not saying aliens are responsible for dark matter, but it definitely isn't evidence against.

      Besides, interaction with normal matter is the ONLY way that we identify dark matter. So says CERN.

    31. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1. We're always looking in other directions. Bless the theoretical astrophysicists!

      2. Even if Dark Matter and Dark Energy turn out to be something else, the Big Bang will not invalidated, ever. We know the universe started in an explosion. We have all the evidence. What we can't explain is the distribution of Matter observed vs. the amount of Matter that has to be there to keep things like galaxies from flying apart. A vast majority of the evidence for the Big Bang is there, not going anywhere and not going to change. What changes with Dark Matter and Dark Energy is our understanding of how we got from the Bang to where we are now. The Bang part is no longer in question, just like human evolution from lesser species over billions of years is not (in scientific circles) being questioned. We have enough evidence to say, "Yes, this *IS* how this happened." Reasonable doubts have been removed.

    32. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      A. What part of Gamow's ABC paper was "make theories to fit your observations"??

      He published a paper on April 1st, 1948 with Ralph Alpher and Hans Bethe (Alphar - Bethe - Gamow... get it?) on Big Bang nucleosynthesis that explicitly stated that if there had been a Big Bang, that you still would be able to detect a black body radiation light curve from the first moments that the cosmos expanded (cooled) enough to allow photons to survive. Alpher soon calculated that the peek would be below 5 degrees by now.

      Radioastronomers couldn't be bothered to check this out - it wasn't until 1964 that W&P (not radio astronomers) were trying to fix a "noisy" antenna that this was discovered. They got a Noble prize for this, which should have also gone to Alpher and Gamow.

      B. That you say "And no, if you run that backwards it doesn't work out that its all in the same place." shows that you're thinking of the Big Bang as an explosion - as if you were observing it from outside. This isn't correct at all - everything you are, and the stars and galaxies are part of the cosmos. Two weeks ago - most galaxies were millions of miles closer - i.e. the cosmos was more dense. A few months ago - a few billion miles closer - more dense still. 13.7 billion years ago all the matter/energy OF the cosmos was so close - so dense and hot that there was a hot particle soup - that locally some galaxies are coming together due to gravity rather than spreading apart is irrelevant.

      It's like saying - all the cars on the road couldn't be from a factory - they're all going different directions!

    33. Re:Oh good lord. by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      First of all, aspects of big bang cosmology were predicted before observation, and second of all, WTF? Theories have to fit observation or they are, by definition, wrong.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    34. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yes, there are aspiring legitimate scientists (PhD students, passed quals, yay) trying to posit DM as something other than excitations of ad hoc SM (Standard model)-like fields.

      I am one of them, and I get dumped in the crackpot bin pretty fast. I have to be exceedingly careful with my words. I cannot express excitement or optimism for my research and the directions I'd like to take it. I cannot be colorful.

      Unless you can vomit out the next General Relativity in isolation (Einstein worked 10 years, and certainly NOT in isolation: Gunnar Nordstrom, Minkowski, etc) you had better not call your work theory, or it becomes ill motivated. That's referee talk for "not doing what all the cool kids are doing."

      The community is quite fucked sir.

    35. Re:Oh good lord. by ubrgeek · · Score: 1

      > Run that backwards in time and we're all in the same place about 13.7 billion years ago.

      New Jersey?

      --
      Bark less. Wag more.
    36. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Professional physicists like to ignore & ridicule people. But, I think we are going to eventually see some overreach here. When you are are dismissing entire disciplines like philosophy of science, & even physics education researchers (which incidentally can point to great successes), it stands to reason that you've basically given up on any serious attempt to reform the way we teach physics today. What will predictably happen is that they will start to ignore so many people that they will eventually lose the pulse of society's reaction to their own work. The world will move on without them. It seems strange to think it today, but public opinion can transition so much faster than the entire body of scientists.

      An area to watch out for will be this physics education research, which is quite mature by now. The astrophysicists & cosmologists are not tuned into this at all. Their decision to defend their knowledge leads them to ignore the application of PER to their own discipline. And what this suggests is that innovations in physics education will not originate within conventional science circles; it will probably come from these very groups which they are trying their hardest to ignore, for these people are most in touch at this point with how science can derail.

    37. Re:Oh good lord. by morcego · · Score: 2

      Sigh, when you make theories to fit your observations, of course they match.

      And how, pray tell me, should we be making our theories, if not to fit our observations (facts and evidence)?
      The problem is when people try to distort (or ignore) facts to fit their theories. Or when people aren't willing to revise or discard their theories when presented with new facts.

      Doesn't make them any more correct

      Of course it does. More than that, that is the exact definition of a theory being correct: matching the facts.
      It is the the theory doesn't match the observations (facts and evidence) that it is incorrect, and needs to be revised or even discarded altogether. There is even the process where a theory gets revised so many times and it loses all credibility, even if not disproven in its entirety ("God of the gaps theory"), where you simply reverse the burden of proof and discard any validity based on preexistence and, since there is nothing to corroborate the theory, it goes the way of Russell's Teapot.

      And no, if you run that backwards it doesn't work out that its all in the same place

      :citation needed:

      --
      morcego
    38. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And no, if you run that backwards it doesn't work out that its all in the same place

      :citation needed:

      I think morecego is confused due to the observation that the andromeda galaxy (and other local galaxies) are coming toward us - not racing away from us. This doesn't change the overall observed trend that the further away galaxies are, the more red shifted they tend to be. Someone else has already pointed out that this confusion stems from the name "Big Bang Theory" which incorrectly implies an explosion rather than a density change.

    39. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We do know a lot more about ... electricity. ... Well we actually don't know how that works e[i]ther...

      I knew it! You liars don't know how fucking magnets work either!

    40. Re:Oh good lord. by INT_QRK · · Score: 1

      ...and hey, I thought that with "settled science" one is never allowed to question, or even more egregious, test, a theory, right?

    41. Re:Oh good lord. by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Well, dyson spheres seems a bit implausible unless there are a TON of them, and they're not actually invisible as they would radiate waste heat - they'd appear as IR black bodies.

      However, if they were invisible I'd think they'd be consistent with the bullet cluster image. That image showed that intergalactic gas interacted during the collision, but dark matter did not. I wouldn't expect large objects like stars to interact the way that gas would. If you point a fan into a room full of air, you'll feel a breeze up close and nothing at any distance. if you throw two rocks past each other in a room, they'll just sail past each other unimpeded. In both cases you get miniscule gravitational interaction, but the electromagnetic interactions are dramatic with air currents, and non-existent with large objects.

    42. Re:Oh good lord. by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Hate to self-reply, but by TON of them, I mean that 95% of the stars in the universe are actually inhabited by intelligent life who have built dyson spheres, and everything we see are just the remnants that they haven't bothered to settle, which seems rather unlikely to me.

    43. Re:Oh good lord. by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Not magical? Matter that I can't see and can't interact with? Can you imagine if someone made a drone out of that? A perfect spy device. Nobody can see it, hear it, or knock it down. In fact, I may have one hovering over you right now...

      Not so, if you can't see or interact with it, then it can't see or interact with you.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    44. Re:Oh good lord. by Alef · · Score: 1

      Heat is a waste product, efficient energy use doesn't necessitate heat.

      Not sure if I'm feeding a troll now, but, yes it does. "Using" energy specifically means transforming it such that the entropy increases. The energy doesn't disappear, you can only change its form. And the form where it has the highest entropy (i.e. where you have extracted all useful work), is heat.

      All a Dyson sphere does is exploiting the energy difference between its interior and its exterior. All the energy passes through it; the sphere just maximises the entropy as it passes through, in order to perform as much useful work as possible. If it emits anything other than pure black-body radiation, that means it has inefficiencies.

    45. Re:Oh good lord. by Raenex · · Score: 1

      Indeed, QED is the most successful theory that man has ever formulated, and Feynman was IMHO far greater than Einstein or Hawking.

      Please. Annus Mirabilis papers

      That's four groundbreaking papers in one year (1905), any one of which would have made Einstein of historical significance. To follow that up with the only major advance on gravity since Newton 10 years later puts him well past Feynman.

      When the first shuttle blew up, NASA picked up the phone and called Feynman, someone that never did anything for NASA before and was not involved in any way with the shuttles, rockets, or even anything astronomy. Feynman figured out what happened quite quickly, went before congress and both explained and demonstrated the problem.

      He did good work on the panel, but it was hardly a big mystery as to why the launch failed. There was actually a conference call the night before the launch between NASA and the manufacturers of the O-ring. The latter wanted to scrub the launch because of the cold, but pressure from NASA and worries about an upcoming contract with NASA resulted in a go-ahead.

      Feynman was as much a showman as he was a scientist, which explains a lot of his fame. Who were the scientists who shared his Noble Prize for QED? Right.

      Don't get me wrong, I like Feynman a lot. But saying he was "far greater than Einstein" is a joke.

    46. Re:Oh good lord. by lgw · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Dark matter was there in todays proportions in the hot early universe, so no. All the MACHO theories went by the wayside with the CMBR data, it's WIMPs now for sure.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    47. Re:Oh good lord. by lgw · · Score: 1

      Just like "Climate Change" , it is "settled" and no further investigation is to be done.

      You couldn't be more wrong: it is "settled" and billions of dollars of public research funding are required, or the Earth will die in a fire! Of course, none of that research will be allowed to contradict existing claims, or even question them, but if you think that matters you miss the whole point.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    48. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So the entire universe is a dyson sphere

    49. Re:Oh good lord. by Intanjir · · Score: 1

      If you want them to be dark, you are better off conjecturing something less power dense than a Dyson sphere.
      A tendency for advanced civilizations to disassemble their host star and instead make and use energy at a slower rate over a larger volume is a more defensible dark matter conjecture.

    50. Re:Oh good lord. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Wow, the self-important, self-certain ignorance is really rank.

      You seem to be conflating a bunch of different things, then waving your hands and shouting "impossible." Impossible is the idiot's way of saying, "I don't know the answer."

      If you have heat, you have useful energy. Period.

      Entropy goes up in an isolated system that contains irreversible processes. But no process is irreversible, given the precondition of an intelligent race with advanced technology. The only reason entropy "has to" go up in the standard thought experiment is that the thought experiment is set up so that there is not intelligent beings inside the isolated system making changes; and the system contains irreversible processes. But on process is irreversible at a basic level. It is just that many processes aren't naturally reversed; there is no mechanism for reversal. With intelligent being and technology, you can not longer make that assumption. Easy peasy.

    51. Re:Oh good lord. by Aighearach · · Score: 3, Funny

      That wasn't a person without a sparkler, that was a grue.

    52. Re:Oh good lord. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Allow me to paraphrase your comment.

      "My subjective assessment is different than yours, but I'm so insecure about not being able to prove subjectives that I'm going to call your viewpoint names."

      Was Feynman a better showman than the other people who also came up with working math for QED? Yes.

      Einstein was also a great showman, who is widely believed to have stolen some of his theories from his first wife. Einstein is legendary as a showman, if you actually are interested in these sorts of non-science details. As a lover of history, I find there is a lot to be learned both from the "great minds" of the past, and from the process of deciding what to remember and hold up as "great," and what to ignore. All of the names remembered are the great Showmen, and they are only maybe 5% (throwing numbers at the wall) of the equally-great minds of their time that were actively engaged in the same fields.

      However, none of that matters. Arguing that a subjective opinion is somehow wrong, that is provably wrong. You're totally wrong. Totally. It is provable, too, simply by examining the nature of "opinion." Since this story is about science, not philosophy, I'll leave that as exercise for you to do on your own.

      Your subjective view might be great, it might meet your needs, it might be "true" based on your standards. But claiming it is better, or more correct, than somebody else's subjective view, that is guaranteed to be wrong . It is also anti-social and narcissistic.

    53. Re:Oh good lord. by Raenex · · Score: 1

      Allow me to paraphrase your comment.

      Allow me to paraphrase your comment: I'm a jackass who thinks nothing substantial can be said when opinion counts, even when the accomplishments are well-documented and acknowledged by the larger scientific community. I also entertain spurious allegations about Eisenstein having plagiarized his wife, which has no credible evidence.

    54. Re:Oh good lord. by robbiedo · · Score: 1

      Almost like some kind of scientific Nirvana?

    55. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Insightful, concur that GP misapprehends the BB as an "explosion" within some other cognizable framework. The cars/factories analogy is a little off, though I can't think of a more accurate one (maybe because describing the nature of space itself is inherently hard and unintuitive). I'd just tell GP that everything in our universe had to have come from "the same place" because the (expanding) fabric of the universe is the only "place" there is. The BB kicked off an explosive expansion of the fabric of spacetime itself, within which everything exists.

    56. Re:Oh good lord. by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 1

      How much mass would a Dyson sphere require? My guess is a few orders of magnitude beyond that of a star. Consider the volume occupied by a sphere at 1 AU from its star. That would be a rather large amount of mass on its own. And that would reduce the number of Dyson spheres required to exist to account for the dark matter.

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    57. Re:Oh good lord. by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      That accounts for the second (well, not really, but let's not go there yet), but what about the first law of thermodynamics? You have a star in the middle of the system, constantly converting H to He and releasing the binding energy thereof, hence increasing the energy level of the system. How do you keep an equilibrium if you don't radiate?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    58. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where does it all end up, then, if not in the same place?

      Publish, or fuck off.

    59. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Settled science" is always open to be questioned and tested by scientific questions and tests. You're just not allowed to "question" it by sticking your fingers in your ear and saying "is not!" (well, technically, you ARE allowed to put up such criticism, but you make a complete ass of yourself by showing what an ignorant dolt you are).

    60. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd put as much weight into his witty retorts as I would in his understanding of basic thermodynamics (which is "I know a few clever facts, but I don't understand how it all fits together").

    61. Re:Oh good lord. by ShakaUVM · · Score: 1

      You should probably read up a little more on how hypothesis formation works. You can either base it on experiment, or you can base it on, say, what math says should be there.

      But it's just hypothetical until it is shown to conform to reality with a certain degree of certainty.

    62. Re:Oh good lord. by Kariles70 · · Score: 1

      Being that nearly all of that antimatter supposedly made by the Big Bang is missing, I would say that is a big yes, Sheldon! Oh wait, I know!!! Its hiding . . . in the oceans, you know, where all the global warming is hiding!!! Yeah!

    63. Re:Oh good lord. by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      To be honest I'm not sure about the mass of a Dyson sphere. However, I'd assume that estimates of the amount of baryonic matter already take into account the non-steller mass associated with a typical solar system, so if the estimate is that we need N stars to account for it, we'd need N Dyson spheres since those spheres could only be constructed from the matter around the star. That is, unless they disassemble a few stars to provide matter to produce a sphere around a different star.

      In any case, they would still radiate IR. Also, is it any less astonishing to claim that for any 2-3 stars we see anywhere in the universe (including in other galaxies) there is a dyson sphere in the same galaxy, with all of them being distributed fairly uniformly? If they can deconstruct entire stars and move the matter around, why would they scatter the stars they do occupy all over the place?

    64. Re:Oh good lord. by coinreturn · · Score: 1

      Dark matter is probably just civilizations that have built (advanced forms of) Dyson spheres around their stars.

      Are the Dyson spheres so they can suck up all the cosmic dust?

    65. Re: Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gay != slut, as you so seem to think.

    66. Re:Oh good lord. by IwantToKeepAnon · · Score: 1

      Also, the evolution and make-up of stars

      Do stars evolve? Are there small genetic changes that make them more fit to reproduce? Is there "survival of the fittest" stars? Sure they get bigger, brighter, burn out, collapse, etc.... but that's its life cycle.

      --
      "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
    67. Re:Oh good lord. by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Dyson spheres would glow in the infrared and therefore be pretty obvious. This is because they still have to radiate the heat produced by the star they enclose - otherwise their internal temperature would perpetually increase.

      Isn't that purely supposition?

      Because, by the time a civilization has the technology to build a Dyson sphere ... we really have no of what else they would be able to do.

      Building a Dyson sphere sounds like it involves engineering challenges well beyond anything we can even imagine.

      So, I'm not sure us naked monkeys can really say what would or would not be true if someone built one.

      My guess, any civilization which could do this would be laughing at we we say about how it would work, and what the constraints would be.

      Of course, that's just what I said it is ... a wild assed guess by a stupid little naked monkey who can't even begin to grasp the scope of someone actually building one of these things.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    68. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's because Slashdotters, for the vast majority, are not qualified to make comments regarding most conventional theories in science. Yes we need critics, but only when they make valid points. BitZtream only claimed there were problems and failed to cite any of the problems. Why? Chances are, BitZtream may not know enough about the subject to provide new insight that the conventional theories do not take into account. On the chance that BitZtream DID know enough, then all that happened was a disservice where BitZtream didn't feel compelled to offer the insight when the opportunity was presented.

      The point is, you need some understanding before you can make useful points to a field on the cutting edge. Otherwise, it's like asking in Chess "why can't I checkmate your king by moving my queen off the board behind your king at the start of the match?" My example in Chess is especially good, given that new and innovative plays pretty much require years, if not decades, to reach a skill and knowledge level where a person can actually contribute to the field. Until you have proven that you have enough of an understanding of the problem, it's hard to say if your criticisms of a theory stem from not knowing about the complete body of knowledge that exists for a particular subject. That's why the scientific community tends to peer-review works of either known researchers or people working towards or already have a PhD in the subject.

      Lastly, keep in mind that science and science reporting have had a large disconnect for the longest time. Scientists will say one thing and the journalists, feeling that they are important enough to contribute, tend to reword, interpret, extrapolate and do all other types of editing to make it appropriate for consumption by the general public. Slashdot then grabs these articles while only linking to the original abstract. If you want to see the uncertainties, you'll have to read the original paper. Otherwise, it's already be sanitized so much by scientific journalism that you're not going to see the actual scientists discuss the uncertainties. Most of the blame you put on scientists are attributed to people who butcher the original source.

    69. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, I love their vacuums!

    70. Re:Oh good lord. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      Where is this magical free energy coming from? Energy is conserved. If you're not radiating, it means you reused everything already, so of course nothing increases.

      You're probably confusing the thought experiment, and forgetting that that conversion can be reversed, as can they all.

    71. Re:Oh good lord. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      I'd say that, if you made theories that didn't fit your observations, they wouldn't be much use. Of course, to be a real scientific theory, it has to make predictions of things we haven't yet observed.

      Scientists aren't generally in the business of focusing the public's attention. They focus on anomalies because that's where the interesting stuff is. Science mainlines criticism. The best way to make a big name for yourself is to come up with a theory that attracts a whole lot of criticism and survives it nicely.

      I also don't see where you're coming from. Slashdot is not a place to genuinely advance physics and astrophysics. While many on Slashdot have a good understanding of the basic principles, very few have the detailed knowledge necessary to contribute meaningfully. This is, at best, a good science journalism site with some actual experts providing occasional fascinating commentary, and science journalism isn't the same as science.

      Could you give examples of controversial new theories that were widely called "mistakes in science"? I've read of new theories being called all sorts of times, but not generally mistakes.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    72. Re:Oh good lord. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      "Settled science" is stuff that we're pretty darn sure of. Consider it as proven for now beyond reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean that somebody isn't going to show up next week claiming that this theory satisfies the observations better and predicts such and such, but it does mean that it's going to take some pretty convincing evidence.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    73. Re:Oh good lord. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      People have analyzed Maxwell's demon*. Feynman did in one of his lectures. The conclusion is that it simply can't work, that it would require more usable energy to sort molecules by energy than it would produce. There really isn't any way known even in principle to reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

      *Maxwell's demon: Maxwell hypothesized a small hole between two parts of a sealed bottle, arbitrarily labeled hot and cold, and a little demon that would examine every molecule headed towards the gate. If the molecule moved fast and was headed towards the hot side, let it through. If it moves slow and is headed towards the hot side, reflect it. Magic based on this principle could create a temperature differential where there was none, violating the Second Law.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    74. Re:Oh good lord. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      All of the names remembered are the great Showmen

      While you don't remember Gregor Mendel, plenty of other people do. He published his greatest results in a rather obscure journal, and was generally forgotten for some time after his death. He only became famous when his work was rediscovered. Definitely not a showman.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    75. Re:Oh good lord. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      It's a little like turning invisible to go spy on attractive unclothed members of the appropriate sex. Since the photons now go right through you, they go through your retinas, and you can't see them. (If you could, then there'd be a couple of floating retinas moving around, and that would attract attention.)

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    76. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1) Only if you have a heat differential do you have useful energy. If both sides of a heat engine are the same temperature, you can't extract work, even if they're both "hot." No amount of technology can change that -- it's as fundamental as 1+1=2 or the speed of light -- which is to say we can exploit the knowledge, but we can't change the facts.

      2) What you're proposing are things like Maxwell's Demon. You can't reverse the changes without expending energy. If you could, you'd have perpetual motion, and you wouldn't need to harness energy in the first place.

    77. Re:Oh good lord. by Alef · · Score: 1

      I think you should ask yourself what it actually means to "use" energy. What purpose can energy have that does not involve irreversibly transforming it to heat?

      Or to put it another way: If you have a system that takes in a lot of useful energy, and it does not transform this energy to heat (which inevitably would be radiated as black-body radiation as the system's temperature increases), then you are either: 1) wasting energy, by not exploiting all the work it could have performed before releasing it, or 2) just storing it without actually using it (although the process of storing it would involve performing some work as well).

      If, on the other hand, you have managed to build a magical system that can perform useful work without extracting it from the energy you are continually collecting, but can "reuse" energy like a perpetual motion machine, then why the fsck are you collecting more? You don't need it!

      Honestly, though, I really think you should pick up a physics text book that covers thermodynamics if you want to understand these things. From your responses (assuming you're not just trolling) it's evident that if you ever read one, you either didn't understand it, or you've forgotten some pretty basic principles and need to refresh. Now the argument sounds more like "I don't really know, therefore aliens can do it. Easy peasy."

    78. Re:Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Evolution is changes in a population over time, reproduction is not a required component. Stellar evolution is an accepted term, and your semantic one-upmanship adds nothing to the discussion.

    79. Re:Oh good lord. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      "Use" means to convert it to a different form. That is all it means, that is all it ever means. In an isolated system, there is no loss. You seem to think heat is somehow different than everything else, but the laws of thermodynamics apply to heat as well. Everything is conserved, there is no requirement for something to escape. Calling an isolated system a "perpetual motion machine" is to misunderstand the whole concept; to misunderstand why even a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Of course the Universe itself might be a "perpetual motion machine." The whole problem with perpetual motion is that it is not an isolated system. It will interact with the world around it, indeed it has to in order for you to know it is "working," and generally it is presumed to be doing some work external to the device. So by being a machine of some sort, it has to lose energy.
      In the version of the Dyson Sphere thought experiment that was being discussed, you have an isolated system. All the work is being done inside the device. No work is being done outside the device. So the exact same principle of conservation of energy that says that a "perpetual motion machine" is impossible, also says there is no energy gains or losses inside an isolated system.
      And no, you're not collecting anything; whatever is collected was collected during the construction of the Dyson Sphere. Presumably they torched up a few gas giants for construction power.

    80. Re:Oh good lord. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      The purpose of the thought experiment is not the engineering analysis that Feynman did, as interesting as that also is. Nor was the discussion here about if it is feasible to build with human understanding. And nobody is talking about reversing the laws. The physical "laws" already allow for energy changes to be reversible. And people are waving their hands a lot about thermodynamics without, I think, even considering the thought experiment. People remember, "a perpetual motion machine is impossible," then they try to apply that instead of the law. Of course if the advanced aliens build an isolated system, a perfect Dyson Sphere, then the conservation of energy already means you won't have losses. The initial premise determines all of these interesting side effects.

      The problem with Maxwell's Demon is that the demon is an engine, doing work and adding energy to the system. That is true even if the demon is "magic." Heck, gravity is just magic, as far as we know; luckily the laws of physics don't get involved in "why."

    81. Re:Oh good lord. by Alef · · Score: 1

      "Use" means to convert it to a different form

      ...and to extract work while doing so. No? Which means converting it to some form where it has higher entropy.

      Look, it seems like you are more or less just making stuff up based on your rather incomplete understanding of thermodynamics, which is why recommended you to actually read up on the subject. Setting aside the rather dubious claim that a perfectly isolated system can even exist, what you are describing is exactly how you could define a perpetual motion machine of the second kind: an isolated system that performs work using energy from a single heat reservoir, without transferring heat to an external cooler reservoir. Such a machine cannot exist, because it violates the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated(!) system never decreases. The system tends towards thermal equilibrium, where all the energy is converted to a uniform distribution of heat.

      If you had bothered to look any of this up, you would have already known this, instead of speaking out of your ass based on what you think a perpetual motion machine is and why it must be impossible.

      The key flaw in your reasoning is that you seem to think of energy as something that's equivalent regardless of its form. It is not so. In fact, whenever we use energy to perform some work, it actually isn't the energy in itself that we are using, but its state of being far from equilibrium. Its "order", for the lack of a better word. The energy is just a carrier. And when we are using heat energy, we are actually not using the heat in itself, but exploiting the temperature differential between the heat reservoir and a cooler reservoir. That's why all heat producing power plants need cooling water, and the reason jet engines get higher efficiency when flown through cooler air at high altitude (even if it's thinner). Conversely, it explains why a refrigerator requires external energy even though it is removing energy from its interior, and why a heat pump can have more than 100% heating efficiency whereas distributed heating can never reach 100%.

      One physicist who have written a lot about these things is Ilya Prigogine, if you are interested to read more, although I'm sure you could find many others.

    82. Re:Oh good lord. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      AFAICT, the disagreement we have is that I believe a Dyson sphere must radiate, and you appear to think that there could be a sufficiently clever way to capture and use all that heat so that none gets out. Before I believe that, I need at least some sort of thought experiment as to how the Second Law can be violated on a large scale.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    83. Re:Oh good lord. by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      The part where you claim that using energy requires entropy to increase is the part where you go off the rails. Unfortunately for your point, that is at the start.

      Entropy is not guaranteed to increase when all the energy use is controlled by an intelligent actor. The thermodynamics stuff is what happens as a result of known natural processes. Entropy will increase. But that does not mean that with an intelligent actor inside the system that it has to. Basically nobody has done that work, and the people who have tried have all had philosophical, non-scientific bones to pick or points to make. But the reality is that it is not a matter of "science" at all, it is a question of engineering, and it is simply not known if an advanced intelligence would be able to construct such a system. It is not disprovable, so there is little science to do there; if you don't know how to build such a system, you also don't know what technology you don't know about! We can't know what we don't know. We can know what happens naturally when we set up conditions and then let the experiment run within certain bounds without fiddling. How intelligent life itself impacts entropy in the long run is just an unknown. We'll only know if in fact we can control entropy with the right technology; if we can't we'll never know that. We do know that simple life, such as we would grow in a lab, does not have any technology (or intent...) to affect entropy, and does not change anything. If you have a spare few billion years and a bunch of habitable star systems maybe we could get some experiments started, but don't hold your breath.

      You also go off the rails talking worrying about if an isolated system "can even exist." That shows deep bias, because that is an engineering concern that is not at issue in the thought experiment. In the thought experiment we're considering what it is like inside the system, not where it came from.

      You do a bunch of hand-waving asserting I don't understand and are making stuff up, but that just shows you didn't even try to understand what I said. First, understand what I said; then you can try to disprove it. You can't disprove it by waving your hands, shouting "thermodynamics."

      You miss the mark heavily where you talk about a "perpetual motion machine" that is "an isolated system that performs work using energy from a single heat reservoir, without transferring heat to an external cooler reservoir." Do you see the huge gaping problem here? There are 2 problems. The first is that from outside the isolated system there is no work being done. There is the same amount of energy inside the isolated system all the time. It is just a black box to you, and it is dark. You probably can't even know it is there, because it is isolated. You certainly can't see any work being done. And then your "external cooler reservoir" is complete nonsense, sorry to say. An isolated system has no external interactions, by definition, certainly not a "cooler reservoir" that would be sucking heat energy out of the system, causing a decrease in the system's energy. What you describe is an impossible perpetual motion machine.

      Presumably somebody told you to come here and "make fun" of my comments, because your comment on this old thread comes right after I posted on a new thread. If so, that bias coming in explains why you so easily mistook what I described for whatever they told you to come and find. ;)

      And yes, all energy is equivalent. Going into the weeds over the exact semantic meaning of the word "use." I certainly would agree that the English word "use" does not clearly describe actual physical processes of "using energy." But you don't have to go there to understand conservation. Unfortunately your attempt to explain falls victim to the same problems.

      Just assume I'm not an idiot and then re-read what I actually said. And instead of assuming that I said what I didn't mean that is wrong, assume I said what I meant. The task of the reader is to find the most-true meaning, not the least-true meaning. And honestly, it should be pretty embarrassing to have such a negative attitude towards my comments while also claiming an isolated system would have an external energy drain. D'oh!

  2. Electric Universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I believe that there is some wiggle room, looking at the electric universe theory.

    1. Re:Electric Universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Re: "but the cosmic scale currents and magnetic fields it describes would create easily detectable phenomena which are not actually observed."

      You seem to be unaware of the work of radio astronomer, Gerrit Verschuur, who has published numerous papers by now on the subject of critical ionization velocities associated with these interstellar HI hydrogen filaments. A CIV is what happens when charged particles are slammed into neutral gas at very high velocity. The end result is ionization -- which suggests that ionization is an ongoing process in the universe (not simply an epoch of the Big Bang). Verschuur shows that it is these CIV's which make the high-velocity clouds exhibit anomalous redshifts, given their inferred location. I recommend that people here take a closer look at this issue, because this is a quantitative demonstration of the Electric Universe idea.

      Try Google search "Gerrit Verschuur critical ionization velocity". Verschuur is not, btw, an EU theorist. He's an independent astronomer who stumbled upon confirmation for this EU idea.

      The WMAP group has attempted to dismiss his research (which also correlates to WMAP hotspots, suggesting they are actually a localized electromagnetic fog), but Verschuur argues that he had to manually isolate the filaments in order to observe these CIV's -- whereas the WMAP group generally uses algorithms which do not pick apart the overlapping filaments.

    2. Re:Electric Universe by Black+Parrot · · Score: 2

      I believe that there is some wiggle room, looking at the electric universe theory.

      Actually, Electro-Temporal Unification Theory shows that "electric universe" and "timecube cosmology" make the same predictions at the critical energy density point in 8-space, and is in good accord with all available evidence.

      Unfortunately the paper was publised by a certain Jack N. Withya, so most cosmologists haven't bothered to read it.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    3. Re:Electric Universe by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

      Dark energy is needed to explain the rapid inflation of the universe. Dark matter is matter we know is out there but can't yet identify because it so weakly interacts with normal matter. One is extremely important to explaining big bang cosmology as we currently understand it. The other in certainly is part of the big bang story, but is as much an interest to particle physicist as cosmologists because it represents the possibility of physics beyond the Standard Model.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    4. Re:Electric Universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For an actual electrical cosmology publication written by an actual adviser to the Department of Energy, it appears that Anthony Peratt is publishing a revision to his Physics of the Plasma Universe -- although I'm hearing that checkout at this point remains difficult ...

      http://www.springer.com/physics/atomic,+molecular,+optical+%26+plasma+physics/book/978-1-4614-7818-8

  3. We LOVE it when you question things.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...that you clearly don't possibly understand!

    Slashdot on weekends allows a lot of crap.

    T

    1. Re:We LOVE it when you question things.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure but is it intangible dark crap?

    2. Re:We LOVE it when you question things.... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      On weekends?

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  4. Don't ask me by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy Cast Doubt On the Big Bang?

    I have no idea! You should probably ask a physicist.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:Don't ask me by physicsphairy · · Score: 5, Funny

      The physicists are the ones asking. We better take this one to the Big Guy Himself.

      "So, uh, we were wondering if you could explain why our orbital and rotational predictions for galaxies are not matching our astronomical measurements?"

      "They aren't? Are you sure? Let me check the source code. Oh, that's not good. Should have caught that a few billion years ago. This is going to be a real pain to patch. Unless. . . ."

      "Unless, what?"

      *lightning bolt strikes questioner*

    2. Re:Don't ask me by jd · · Score: 1

      Given that physicists are seriously studying whether the universe is a computer simulation, that joke might not be too far from the truth. You have been warned.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    3. Re:Don't ask me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm already counting the days until Big Religion adopts the idea of the Simulation Theory and claims that God is the system builder, programmer and admin that knows all the cheat-codes.

      While the idea of this theory is sound, this is more something like meta-physics instead of real physics.

    4. Re:Don't ask me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      all explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy47OQxUBvw

    5. Re:Don't ask me by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2

      I have no idea! You should probably ask a physicist.

      You called? The answer is no and we were not really asking this question ourselves since the one of the major pieces of evidence for Dark Matter (PLANCK CMB measurement) relies on Big Bang models!

    6. Re:Don't ask me by sound+vision · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Perhaps that is the end goal of the "human experiment" - someone's trying to see how long it takes for a universe to evolve living beings, and for those beings to figure out the mechanics of their own universe. (Worshiping the creator is optional, but it probably gives him a giggle.)

      This morning, I was reading about quantum phenomena and how some string theories posit that the length of a string is approximately the Planck length. Strings being the basic quantum unit, nothing can be measured to be smaller than 1 Planck length or measured with more precision than 1 Planck length. What you end up with then, is a universe where the spatial dimensions are a grid, that cannot be traversed continuously, but only in Planck-length increments. In other words - it is essentially digital. Like pixels on a display, where the pixels are much smaller than an atom. My understanding of string and quantum theory (admittedly far from complete) is that all aspects of the universe could be quantized, and thus simulated digitally in a computer.

      If anyone can clarify/elaborate/refute, please do.

    7. Re:Don't ask me by Improv · · Score: 1

      If by physicists you mean to include some fringe folk like Tegmark, then sure.

      --
      For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
    8. Re:Don't ask me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      the ultimate is when we finally create our own universe experiment/simulation....or go back and create the universe we exist in....either way becoming God ourselves.

    9. Re:Don't ask me by jd · · Score: 1

      http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847">No.

      Please stop assuming you're intelligent, you're just embarrassing everyone else.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    10. Re:Don't ask me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What you are describing is, in essence, one of the avenues presented by the Moving Blocks / Stadium Paradox of Zeno. You might want to check that out if you are interested. The online Stanford Encyclopedia has a section on it.

      My take from this puzzle is that, while, yes, quantum behaviour is discrete (grid-like and digital as you say), nothing in quantum mechanics implies a discrete structure of space-time. In fact some things appear to suggest otherwise, but I'm not nearly as proficient enough in physics to rely on it. So entities micro and macro might still behave discretely within a continuous context - which nicely matches our experiences and expectations of analog potentials and discrete effects.

    11. Re:Don't ask me by StikyPad · · Score: 1

      Intuitively, I think there is a difference between the smallest measurable distance vs continuous positioning. If we pick an arbitrary value of, say, 1 Lego to be the minimum size of all things, that doesn't mean that a Lego can't move in units smaller than its length; just that we couldn't measure it (although we could interpolate its position with multiple measurements). I haven't seen anything that precludes the same with regard to Planck lengths.

  5. Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, the fact that we can still hear the universe ringing at the exact range and frequency curve predicted by George Gamow nearly twenty years before Wilson and Penzias "discovered" it (see the cosmic background radiation - look it up), I'd say no.
    Also, the farther out we look, the faster galaxies are moving away from us. Run that backwards in time and we're all in the same place about 13.7 billion years ago. Again, I'd say no.
    Also, the balance of H, He and Li that was predicted...
    Also, the evolution and make-up of stars and proportions of heavy elements in near and far galaxies...
    Etc. etc.

  6. Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If a headline ends in a question mark the answer is always no. If the answer was yes they wouldn't ask, they'd tell.. The question mark is how shitty opinion pieces trying to push a view point try to masquerade as news.

    1. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Charliemopps · · Score: 2

      If a headline ends in a question mark the answer is always no. If the answer was yes they wouldn't ask, they'd tell.. The question mark is how shitty opinion pieces trying to push a view point try to masquerade as news.

      Everything from medium.com is of low quality. They take some nice pictures, put them inline with some artsy text and then say absolutely nothing for several paragraphs. Every article I've read on there has been some made up controversy. "Does dark mater invalidate the big bang?" then 10 paragraphs later "No, not at all" So why exactly did you write this article?

    2. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      IS 2+2 REALLY 4?

    3. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So why exactly did you write this article?

      Because the article is written in response to a reader's question?

    4. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Will.Woodhull · · Score: 1

      IS 2+2 REALLY 4?

      Well, the concept of "two", or "twoness" is imaginary. It has no physical, chemical, astronomical, or any other scientific qualities. So it is outside the set of things that are "real". "Twoness" only exists in your head; it is at best an artifact of your perception of reality. But such artifacts are not real in themselves.

      There is no reason to believe that doubling something that is not real will make it real. That would not be logical. (Invoking the Spock argument.)

      Thus "2+2" does not "REALLY" equal "4" in any place other than in your head.

      That you can use the totally imaginative structures of "language" to construct a pattern of sounds or pixels that evokes in someone else an imaginary statement of "2+2=4" is something to wonder about, but again no part of that process has any real component. It is all imagination. Highly discipiined imagination in some cases, such as QED, but still just imagination. Not real in any meaningful sense of reality.

      --
      Will
    5. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Jiro · · Score: 1

      Should we still put stock in the Big Bang?

      Betteridge's Law applies to actual headlines, not to sentences which people write up trying to sound like headlines that no article is really using.

    6. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If a headline ends in a question mark the answer is always no. If the answer was yes they wouldn't ask, they'd tell.. The question mark is how shitty opinion pieces trying to push a view point try to masquerade as news.

      And, getting a /. username is how paid shills masquerade as /. community members that submit articles.

    7. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If a headline ends in a question mark the answer is always no.

      Betteridge's law of headlines

    8. Re:Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Does He+He=Be?

  7. Dark matter by ledow · · Score: 1, Interesting

    As stated below by others, just because it's "dark" doesn't mean it's not just ordinary matter.

    It's just that we can't actually see it.

    Given the twists and turns of galaxy-sized gravitational pulls, it's hardly surprising that there's stuff out there that we can't directly or indirectly observe (but that we believe has to be out there for other things to look like they do).

    The only reason that something is "dark" is because we think it should be there but can't actually find it. Having 95% dark matter/energy just means that we know LESS about the universe than we did before - which is not at all unusual when you've just passed a cusp of understanding.

    When we "knew" everything was atoms, we thought we had 100% knowledge. When we split the atom, we then realised that we knew only 1% of what was happening. Then we caught up again to something approaching 100% "understanding". And hit a wall. When we scale that wall, our "understanding" will drop dramatically.

    That's what's happened with dark energy/dark matter. Think of it as our ignorance quotient increasing because of the discovery of new evidence. Not as some vast debunking of existing science - that's like saying "atoms don't exist" and abandoning all the working atomic science we already have just because we find out that the atom isn't the complete story, or abandoning all Newtonian physics because of the discovery of quantum physics.

    It just doesn't work like that. The best bit of dark matter science is ahead of us. We're in ignorance, looking for the light. Or, in this case, the dark.

    1. Re:Dark matter by Kjella · · Score: 5, Informative

      As stated below by others, just because it's "dark" doesn't mean it's not just ordinary matter. It's just that we can't actually see it.

      Repeating the ignorant doesn't make it true, that "dark matter" is simply ordinary matter we couldn't detect was a good first guess. Very strong evidence indicate it's not because that would create other interactions as well that aren't there. There's some small fraction that is regular matter and some is neutrinos, but without some other form of particles it just doesn't add up.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:Dark matter by rahvin112 · · Score: 1

      We measure and effect and we call that dark matter because it exhibits gravitational effects but we really have no idea what it is or what's causing it. It could be super strings or worm holes or even singularities far from other matter.

      This is the problem I have with the entire speculation about Dark Matter, we have no idea what it is. People spend a lot of time talking about it like we know what it is and what it means and all that and it could be nothing more than isolated gravitational anomalies like super strings in interstellar space that we've located. We need a better understanding of how prevalent these effects are and a lot more data about the entire phenomenon before we start theorizing about what's the cause.

  8. Isn't it the other way around? by dottrap · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I thought Dark Matter was conceived to account for missing matter that the Big Bang theory predicts needs to exist.

    1. Re:Isn't it the other way around? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah that's exactly what it is and why this whole article is retarded. If it wasn't for the Big Bang Theory we wouldn't be looking for this missing Dark Matter / Dark Energy in the first place, because it's a prediction based ON that theory.

      It's purely theoretical since we *have not observed it*. Not finding it would put a bigger dent in the Big Bang Theory, since that's the only reason we're looking for it in the first place. It's almost eye-rollingly inane, the idea that finding something predicted by a certain theory invalidates the theory.

    2. Re:Isn't it the other way around? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A force that seems to only act on the large spaces between galaxies and pushes them apart faster and faster. As the cosmos continues to expand at an ever increasing rate, will dark energy become strong enough to pull all matter apart

      Like anti-gravity.

    3. Re:Isn't it the other way around? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are at least two forms of evidence for dark matter. There is the expansion rate of the universe, as you mentioned. There is also the rotation rate of galaxies and gravitational lensing, which is a different matter.

    4. Re:Isn't it the other way around? by Livius · · Score: 1

      The big bang theory is the part we're confident about. There are observations that imply there are other phenomena happening, and dark matter and dark energy are, so far, the best theories to account for them, but they don't "cast doubt" on big bang cosmology - at best they're likely to lead to minor adjustments.

      Now, if something totally new comes along, then we could have a revolution in our thinking and need to come up with a new theory, such as when Aristotle's thinking was replaced with the Galileo/Newton model, and then replaced with Einstein's general relativity, and it could be something new about dark matter and/or dark energy that motivates that revolution, but that something new isn't here yet.

    5. Re:Isn't it the other way around? by Livius · · Score: 4, Informative

      I thought Dark Matter was conceived to account for missing matter that the Big Bang theory predicts needs to exist.

      No, it (mostly) came about when it was noticed that galaxies required a lot more mass than was visiible

      It's both, and other observations as well. That's why dark matter is a good theory for the observations we have at this time - several phenomena all point to the same explanation.

    6. Re:Isn't it the other way around? by sir-gold · · Score: 2

      It's not necessarily a new form of energy.

      It's possible that there is a 5th force that we don't know about, different from the 4 forces that we already know about (gravity, magnetism, strong force and weak force.)

      It could be a very weak force with an extremely long range that only manifests when the other 4 forces are beyond their effective ranges.

    7. Re:Isn't it the other way around? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How can we be confident about a theory that extrapolates time backwards 14billion years, when we can't even explain galaxies in the present?

  9. Electric Universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I would say quite the opposite - that the existence of dark mater and dark energy suggests a possible mechanism for the initial rapid expansion (inflation) without resorting to "magic" forces we have not yet observed.
    The electric universe or ionized plasma theory looks great on paper, but the cosmic scale currents and magnetic fields it describes would create easily detectable phenomena which are not actually observed.

    I've personally observed a number of Christian astronomers cite "The Big Bang Never Happened", as possible testimony that the universe isn't 13.8 billion years old after all. Having actually read the book I enjoy pointing out that Eric Lerner's conclusion about the age of the universe being 150 billions of years old is completely out of wack with actual observations, and cherry picking parts of scientific ideas doesn't work the same way as cherry picking passages of other books. If your theory predicts things that don't match reality - throw it away and try again. Read up on dating quasars using spin decay rates if you really want to know.

  10. Oh good lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We're finding it quite easy to directly detect its affects with our current technology - it's called a telescope. We just have no clue as to what it is or how it works.
    I'd like to point out that gravity is in the same category. Also time.
    We do know a lot more about light and electricity. Please check out "QED" by Richard Feynman. Well we actually don't know how that works ether, but we've figured out the math to make very precise predictions that usually match reality so we must be on the right track.

  11. On the contrary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    It's quite the opposite. You need dark matter and dark energy in order to explain the CMB and the distribution of matter in the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy fit perfectly in the theory, that's the main reason why the alternatives to dark energy/matter that have been proposed were rejected: they fail to explain the CMB and the distribution of matter, while the dark matter and energy explain it perfectly.

  12. Isn't it the other way around? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I thought Dark Matter was conceived to account for missing matter that the Big Bang theory predicts needs to exist.

    No, it (mostly) came about when it was noticed that galaxies required a lot more mass than was visiible to keep from flying apart. The speeds of stars 'orbiting' was too high, and the things should have flown off. There were other oddities observed as well. All the behaviors observed could be explained if there was a lot more gravitational mass than what could be seen. Some of things seen were quite bizarre, too, and required the stuff to account for things acting the way they did.

    Enter Dark Matter as a formal theory..

  13. Isn't it the other way around? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    No, dark matter was called up to explain why galaxies are spinning up to twenty times faster than they should, and that they spin more like a rotating platter then the water in a drain.
    If it was just that - galaxies are spinning too fast - it's conceivable that there might be another force at play. However - there's now extremely strong evidence thanks to observations of colliding galaxies and gravitational lensing that it is indeed gravity, and whatever this dark mater is - it doesn't interact with normal mater.

    Dark energy is the creepy one. A force that seems to only act on the large spaces between galaxies and pushes them apart faster and faster. As the cosmos continues to expand at an ever increasing rate, will dark energy become strong enough to pull all matter apart - nobody knows!

    Sleep well!

  14. Not much is going to change by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The thing which is going to change quite soon is how we define dark energy. But until it's confirmed we can't say that for sure and it may take longer than expected.
    Basically dark energy doesn't seem to exist in the dimensions we can observe, and it may be even smaller than what is currently known as "Planck Length".
    Still, it's the biggest thing in the universe and the main underlying fabric of it were light and matter can exist.
    Apparently as it seems the description of dark energy will be even more complicated than complete quantum mechanics and quantum theory, and even more difficult to understand as it doesn't exist in our 4 dimensions we can observe.
    At the moment it's more likely that advancements in AI and understanding of theory of mind will be able to deliver such solution, thru the code and not just pen and paper.
    It could be that it actually already happened it will just take many years to understand it.

    1. Re:Not much is going to change by khallow · · Score: 1

      Basically dark energy doesn't seem to exist in the dimensions we can observe

      Unless it's curvature or a cosmological constant and not energy at all. Then it can manifest quite easily at our scales and observed dimensions. "Dark energy" is one of the more terrible scientific labels out there IMHO because it encourages us to think about this phenomenon in a way that may be totally misleading.

      At the moment it's more likely that advancements in AI and understanding of theory of mind will be able to deliver such solution, thru the code and not just pen and paper. It could be that it actually already happened it will just take many years to understand it.

      The problem with this is that stuff which is intractable to pen and paper (which is a vast amount of stuff) tends to be intractable to everything else as well. Increase in complexity tends not to be gradual, but more like a cliff.

      For example, a naive approach to computing Standard Model physics of subatomic particle interactions would be via certain "perturbative" methods. Namely, take the simplest Feynman diagram (an abstract diagram detailing a scenario of particle interactions) of the input and outcome state possible, and then add possible internal interactions, summing over all possible interactions of N things before moving on to the N+1 things.

      This approach explodes rapidly in computational complexity as you add more interactions (the number of computations grows faster as a function of the number of internal interactions than the factorial function). By hand, you probably can do a single additional interaction (or at least a sloppy approximation). A desktop computer can do another two or three interactions. A Solar System scale computer using all of the power of the Sun solely for this computation, could go a few more levels deep - at least during a human lifetime.

      But a substantially more efficient algorithm is probably amenable to pen and paper. Such is the nature of complexity.

    2. Re:Not much is going to change by brysiek · · Score: 1

      Think about this way: could we solve current computational problems 200 years ago? We could say, OK, we could use pen and paper and discover these algorithms out of blue. In theory - yes, in practice - no. The advancements in computer software are the main drivers of science, and believing that being isolated in the jungle with pen and paper, and no internet, one could formulate dark energy... In your imagination...

    3. Re:Not much is going to change by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What I was trying to tell you, that with the increasing help of compute power and advancements of software, it's very likely that we will formulate whatever we can't formulate today and it will be far ahead of what we can confirm with observation.
      You have pointed out what we understand based on observation, this is great clue to get the understanding, but don't expect that we will find out what is dark energy based on observations, because at the moment it seems that what we understand about the dark energy is close to zero, and the second thing we understand is that we don't understand it.
      Hence there comes simple conclusion that the inner workings of dark energy are at least as complex as what we understand now so far regarding observable matter.
      Knowing how complex is observable matter and how log it took to understand it, and what effort was taken to do it, and with dark energy not being observable (as being dark), it is straightforward conclusion that it can be done only using virtualization, some sort of simulation instead, and that would be still guessing before it's confirmed.
      Knowing that progress of compute power is subject to Moore law (plus minus), it would be quite easy to predict when computers will be able to surpass humans in concluding these equations, which was pointed out that it's going to happen in 2045.

    4. Re:Not much is going to change by khallow · · Score: 1

      could we solve current computational problems 200 years ago?

      Yes, for small problem sets.

      We could say, OK, we could use pen and paper and discover these algorithms out of blue.

      And yes, in practice we did use pen and paper (or blackboards, etc) to do just that. Most of the algorithms are easily within the grasp of mathematicians of the past 3000 years (once you get them to accept basic math concepts like real numbers and set theory.

      Note that computers didn't make these algorithms possible, they merely created the need for them.

      believing that being isolated in the jungle with pen and paper, and no internet, one could formulate dark energy...

      Where am I going to find pens and paper in a jungle? The existence of both, particularly of pens with extruded plastics, chemically sophisticated inks, or machined parts, implies already a considerable amount of civilization.

      And it's worth remembering here that dark energy was formulated with whatever Einstein was using at the time, which was near equivalent to pen and paper. He didn't have the internet either.

  15. Not much is going to change by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I just love it when someone takes something we don't yet understand, and wraps it up in a bunch of big complicated scientific mumbo jumbo that makes even less sense.

    It's simple really - we know three things for sure about dark energy. Based on our recent observations the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, this rate started increasing only five billion years ago, and the expansion seems to be greatest in the parts of the cosmos with the least mass (the large spaces between galaxies).

    Studying distant supernovas is how two independent groups with independent data came to the same conclusion at the same time (see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6085/1090.2.summary).

    Anything said about its complexity, dimensions, scale, or mental acuity needed to solve our understanding of it is pure speculation - or BS.

  16. Big Bang or Bing Bang Theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Big Bang theory is not what a lot of people think it is, for example, inflation theory explains events before the big bang theory. The Big Bang theory is simply how the universe started from something very small and expanded, thats pretty solid, inflation theory explains how the universe got to a state for the big bang theory to take effect. The Big Bang, start of the universe, doesn't have a theory, we don't have a physics for that, so anything is possible.

  17. No by JustOK · · Score: 0

    Poor writing, a constant derision of mental health issues, and excessive salaries threatens the Big Bang Theory.

    --
    rewriting history since 2109
  18. dark by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The reason dark matter and dark energy have not been directly detected is a simple one: science has not yet gone over to the dark side.

  19. Of course it's "perfect" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The equation goes something like this:

    (Stuff we think we understand) + x / y = (the Universe as we think we understand it)

    Hmmm..... What if.....

    X = Dark Matter
    Y = Dark Energy

    "Wow! That fits perfectly!"

  20. Big Bang or Bing Bang Theory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Inflation - ÃoeYou Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It MeansÃ.

    You're right about the Big Bang not being what people think it is - that term rather implies that you could observe it from the outside and see some gigantanormus explosion. It would be better to call it a "the entire cosmos was insanely dense super hot energy particle soup" theory. Space itself eventually grew enough for the cosmos to cool and condense to become the kind of matter we know - gas atoms and light, then eventually stars and galaxies. The cosmic background radiation is light from this condensing into atoms period - which took only about three minutes. We know this from the ratio of elements that we observe around us today. Steven Weinberg has a good book about this - or Simon Singh's book for something a bit more recent.

    If you assume an infinitely dense starting point (the Big Bang), this condensing period (the three minutes) took place some 300000 years after the Big Bang. The smoothness of the cosmic background radiation suggests however that the start of the expansion of the cosmos was much faster right after the Big Bang than the expansion during the condensing period. This also suggests that the total size of the cosmos is perhaps hundreds of times larger than our observable cosmos. This faster early expansion of the cosmos is thought to have multiplied both space and matter - and is referred to as Inflation. Inflation wasn't before the Big Bang - it's an integral part of it.

    You are right about not knowing about the start of the Big Bang - or anything before the Big Bang happened - we can't observe anything that happened before the condensing period, and sort of by definition outside our observable space.

  21. Dark matter and dark energy by jd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These theories have their own problems. As noted on Slashdot previously, neither exist around dwarf globular clusters or in the local region of the Milky Way. It is not altogether impossible that our models of gravity are flawed at supermassive scales at relativistic velocities, that there's corrections needed that would produce the same effect as currently theorized for this new kind of matter and energy.

    Remembering that one should never multiply entities unnecessarily, one correction factor seems preferable to two exotic phenomena that cannot be directly observed by definition.

    But only if such a correction factor is theoretically justified AND explains all related observations AND is actually simpler.

    There is just as much evidence these criteria are true as there is for dark stuff - currently none.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:Dark matter and dark energy by shawnhcorey · · Score: 2

      There may less dark matter in our region of the galaxy because of the Local Bubble. When the supernova push all the dust out of our region, it could have dragged, via gravity, some of the dark matter with it.

      --
      Don't stop where the ink does.
    2. Re:Dark matter and dark energy by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      It is not altogether impossible that our models of gravity are flawed at supermassive scales at relativistic velocities, that there's corrections needed that would produce the same effect as currently theorized for this new kind of matter and energy.

      Sure it is. And very smart physicists have considered this option, among many others.

      Remembering that one should never multiply entities unnecessarily, one correction factor seems preferable to two exotic phenomena that cannot be directly observed by definition.

      Of course it does. Something to remember is that "dark matter" and "dark energy" are perhaps bad names. They don't necessarily imply that there is something like "normal matter" or "normal energy" out there but is just "dark" (whatever that means). They're just convenient terms to refer to the mathematical "fudge factors" that need to be invoked to explain how things in the universe are actually moving. Whether they are actually caused by a dark form of "matter" or "energy" or whatever is up for debate.

      But lots of smart people are working on this exact problem, and no one yet has come up with some sort of simple "correction factor" that would work for all of this.

      But only if such a correction factor is theoretically justified AND explains all related observations AND is actually simpler.

      By those criteria, we should have rejected Einstein's Theory of Relativity, since it fails 2 of the 3. Einstein's theory was NOT "theoretically justified" within Newtonian mechanics (and actually suggested a number of truly weird violations of Newton), and I certainly don't think you can claim 4-dimensional tensors of space-time are "simpler" than Newton's static and uniform space.

      Truly great breakthroughs in science often are not "theoretically justified" within the old models of knowledge, particularly when they involve complex new mathematical models of something -- they just fit the data better. And while the good ones often are more "elegant," they are rarely "actually simpler."

    3. Re:Dark matter and dark energy by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2

      There is just as much evidence these criteria are true as there is for dark stuff - currently none.

      Not actually correct. The bullet cluster (see Wikipedia) is extremely hard to explain without Dark Matter. This collision between two galaxies has effectively separated he normal matter from the dark matter so we observe a gravitational field bending light where there is no normal matter. Without Dark Matter you are left with the extremely hard task of trying to explain how a gravitational field can exist where there is no matter.

    4. Re:Dark matter and dark energy by Spinalcold · · Score: 1

      Why is parent modded up? Everything stated is wrong. Modified Newtonian Gravity (MOND) has been attempted to explain away dark matter for decades with no success. The Bullet Cluster pretty much put the nail in the coffin of MOND. Dark Matter is the simplest and currently only idea that actually explains all the observations. That's not saying anyone knows what it is but lots of experiments are getting close to getting first glimpses at possibilities.

    5. Re:Dark matter and dark energy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thank you for your persistence. I predict, dozens of comments south of here, someone will say, "But what about MONDs??" or "Yeah, but maybe it could all just be Dyson spheres!" and I thank you in advance for patiently explaining the science, over and over again.

  22. Also dark by rossdee · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Dark Side of the Moon

    1. Re:Also dark by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      a mass delusion, trick, and 'snare' easily avoided by a strong and constant faith in God.

      we're not all so easily fooled by the dark side. this comes from the power of God and His love for His people.

    2. Re:Also dark by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When you close your eyes to reality - everything is darkness.

      My GOD is responsible for sickness and war, death and pain, chaos and old age, hatred and madness, unhappiness and boredom, and she doesn't like you ether. She's been very busy lately. Just hope she leaves you alone for a while, but she WILL get you eventually - she always does. Your happy loving GOD seems to be on vacation right now. Keep your eyes closed friend.

  23. Low Quality Article, Uses Question Mark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If a headline ends in a question mark the answer is always no.

    Should we still put stock in the Big Bang?

  24. Re:Oh good lady, and lord. by Will.Woodhull · · Score: 5, Insightful

    we'd like to have non-baryonic fairly massive (so relatively cold) particles. Dark matter is anything that doesn't interact with regular matter via the strong or gravitational interactions. Neutrinos don't.

    More and more I'm getting a feeling that science has been down this road before. That our understanding of subatomic particles and the distant edges of the Universe is similar to the pre-Copernican use of epicycles to understand astronomy. That the search for dark matter (and probably string theory too) is a search for that final missing epicycle that will make the model work just right.

    I think we need to look for a Galileo or Copernicus who has some whacky, undeveloped alternate concept that if only we could change our point of view, we would see that it makes everything so much more clear.

    --
    Will
  25. Alternatives are good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Seeing that our entire universe is little more than a spec in space, I always found the Big Bang to be as silly as creation.

    Sure, it's possible... But it's too odd. I've always preferred something simpler which is that our universe is more similar to an exploding star which contained all the energy and mass and simply went boom.

    It just seems that all the matter and energy in our universe more likely came from a single body of mass of where they are as plentiful as the stars in the sky.

    1. Re:Alternatives are good by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      The phrase "in space" is trickier than you seem to think. There is no good evidence for infinite space, despite it working well mathematically.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  26. The Bullet Cluster Makes it Unlikely by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Informative

    What if this is a similar case? Like, say, (normal) matter having gravity properties that only become noticeable on a cosmic scale?

    Models like this have been considered such as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics). These models were largely shot down by the aptly named Bullet Cluster. This is a system of two galaxies colliding at a high relative speed. The gas from the smaller "bullet" cluster collides with the gas in the larger cluster causing it to slow down, heat up and emit X-rays so we can see it.

    So far so go. However you can also look at the mass distribution by seeing how it distorts the light from galaxies behind the cluster (this is called gravitational lensing). This shows that most of the mass of the smaller cluster has not slowed down and is now separated from where all the gas in the cluster is located. Effectively the collision has separated the matter from the dark matter because, unlike normal matter, dark matter has a tiny cross-section for interacting with itself or other matter. This is exceedingly hard to explain by modifying the behaviour of normal matter since you are observing a gravitational field where there is no normal matter.

    1. Re:The Bullet Cluster Makes it Unlikely by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Re: "Models like this have been considered such as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics). These models were largely shot down by the aptly named Bullet Cluster"

      Have you considered that there is more than one possible interpretation for the Bullet Cluster?

    2. Re:The Bullet Cluster Makes it Unlikely by Cyberax · · Score: 1

      Yes, there were attempts to explain it using a yet-another-MOND. But we've seen several such examples by now, and no conceivable MOND can explain them.

    3. Re:The Bullet Cluster Makes it Unlikely by lgw · · Score: 1

      MOND can't explain the CMBR data at all, while dark matter, WIMPs specifically, predicted the observed proportions accurately.

      So we know now: dark matter is there, it's ~80% of matter, and it's WIMPs not MACHOs. String theory predicts a family of 1-plank-mass-ish particles - just one more untestable string theory claim, but it would fit dark matter pretty well. If we ever actually build a dark matter detector that works, the worst might happen: we might have to start taking string theory seriously too! Eeeesh.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    4. Re:The Bullet Cluster Makes it Unlikely by painandgreed · · Score: 1

      Re: "Models like this have been considered such as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics). These models were largely shot down by the aptly named Bullet Cluster"

      Have you considered that there is more than one possible interpretation for the Bullet Cluster?

      At this point, while there might be some sort of MOND out there to describe what is going on, currently it would be such a bizarre and complicated theory that nobody can come up with a theoretical set of equations that fits current observational data, let alone could be otherwise tested. And trust me, there are plenty of grad students and other people working on the issue, that would love to find such and get their Nobel if not just playing with it as a mental exercise.

    5. Re:The Bullet Cluster Makes it Unlikely by strikethree · · Score: 1

      What if the effects of gravity travel faster or slower than the speed of light? (In theory, the effects of gravity can not travel faster than light, I know... but what if?)

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
  27. um no by slashmydots · · Score: 1

    They cast doubt on scientists' ability to do math. There has never been any verifiable evidence that it exists and it has never been measured.

    1. Re:um no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If by "verifiable" and "measured" you mean something completely different from what every other person who speaks English does, you're certainly on to something. Otherwise, not so much.

  28. No by Goldsmith · · Score: 1

    The answer is no.

    TFA says this in about 10 pages, with all the gory details.

    Can we try no to have clickbait headlines? TFA is a blog called "Ask Ethan" so it makes sense for the title to be a question. A more appropriate headline here would have been "Dark Matter and Dark Energy don't Impact the Big Bang."

  29. Religion is at it again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    seriously, this scream religious belief trying to win over science.

  30. Dark Bang by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    I bet in a few years, a new theory called "Dark Bang" will replace it.

  31. What diff by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It doesn't make any difference. Like the global warming and lie detector frauds, it will continue to be promoted as valid.

  32. complete and utter rubbish by thegreatemu · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm probably a bit biased here, but also an expert, since I am a physicist who studies dark matter for a living.

    The title's question doesn't even make sense! Big bang theory, and in particular studying the exact power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, is by far the strongest evidence we have for the existence of dark matter and dark energy. All those pie charts you've seen showing the divisions of baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy? If they're properly cited, I guarantee every single one of them comes from data from WMAP or PLANCK: CMB experiments! You can't say that dark matter gives you room to invalidate the big bang, because without that we don't have really any strong evidence for non-baryonic dark matter in the first place...

    1. Re:complete and utter rubbish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course you don't have evidence. That is exactly what he said.

    2. Re:complete and utter rubbish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wish I had mod points. The author and submitter of the story are just spreading FUD for click bait. It's pathetic.

    3. Re:complete and utter rubbish by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      IANAP, but I'd say that gravitational rotation curves and unexplained gravitational lensing (particularly the Bullet Cluster) would count as strong evidence.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  33. microwave bright [Re:Oh good lord.] by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    well, if Dyson spheres are anywhere near the size of the solar system, they would radiate in the infrared. Longer infrared the larger they are.

    You could imagine a Dyson sphere that is vastly larger than a solar system -- like, a hundred AU across, or so--that would radiate waste heat in millimeter wave, or even something vastly larger than that that would radiate in microwave.

    But, of course, that doesn't solve the problem-- they would be shine like beacons to radio telescopes.

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
    1. Re:microwave bright [Re:Oh good lord.] by ultranova · · Score: 2

      You could imagine a Dyson sphere that is vastly larger than a solar system -- like, a hundred AU across, or so--that would radiate waste heat in millimeter wave, or even something vastly larger than that that would radiate in microwave.

      Except that according to Wikipedia the cosmic microwave background peaks at around a millimeter, so the super-sized Dyson sphere would absorb more than it radiates. Also, we need to remember that a diameter 50 AU Dyson sphere won't get any more energy than a 2 AU one, it'll simply get it in a more dispersed - and thus less useful - form.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    2. Re:microwave bright [Re:Oh good lord.] by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 1

      Well, I didn't say it was a good idea.

      --
      http://www.geoffreylandis.com
    3. Re:microwave bright [Re:Oh good lord.] by wbr1 · · Score: 1

      If a civilisation could create a Dyson sphere, don't you think they'd have some use for all the wasted energy "radiating in infrared"? Perhaps a large portion of the star's output is used for their energy needs, and efficiency rules the day? Perhaps the drive to attain the best efficiency possible is required of a civilisation before they can reach a stage advanced enough to buld something on this scale.

      --
      Silence is a state of mime.
    4. Re:microwave bright [Re:Oh good lord.] by toddestan · · Score: 1

      Well, the other way of doing it other than increasing the size of the Dyson sphere would be to build it around a smaller star that emits less radiation. It may not be a bad idea if you're in it for the long haul, as the smallest stars will burn for a thousand times longer than a star like ours, meaning you get the best return on your investment of building the Dyson sphere in the first place. Of course, you then have the problem that less radiation is hitting the surface of the inside of the sphere. That can be solved by, of course, building it smaller which means it will take less material (another plus), but then you're back to emitting infrared again.

  34. Re:Oh good lady, and lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Re: "I think we need to look for a Galileo or Copernicus who has some whacky, undeveloped alternate concept that if only we could change our point of view, we would see that it makes everything so much more clear."

    Yes, you are right, and it's called the Electric Universe -- which is simply the application of laboratory plasma physics models to cosmic plasmas. What people seem to not be aware is that there is extreme divergence between the Big Bang / MHD version of plasmas, and those plasmas we use every day to light up fluorescent lights. Is it simply a coincidence that fixing these models so that they can conduct electrical currents, hold electric fields, exhibit some minute electrical resistance & have electrodynamic magnetic fields also resolves the dark matter problem?

  35. Expanding confusion by bjs555 · · Score: 1

    Cosmology is a very interesting subject. I enjoy reading about it but many of the ideas confuse me (that's easy to do). The explanations of cosmic expansion in most non-mathematical books usually point out that the expansion isn't like an explosion in space but that it's an expansion of space itself. If that's true then wouldn't anything used to measure the expansion be affected by the expansion as well? If I use a magically accurate ruler to measure the width of a sheet of paper and both the paper and the ruler are expanding, how would I know that the width has changed? Wouldn't the expansion of both the paper and the ruler cancel each other out?

    I've tried to find an answer online and some explanations that I've seen say that expansion only applies to non-gravitationally interacting bodies I guess that means galaxies and galaxy clusters that are very far apart. But isn't gravity universal? Does it make senses to talk of bodies that are gravitationally isolated? Perhaps the explanations are talking about bodies that are only very weakly influenced by the mass of other bodies. Does the strength of local gravitational attraction tend to overcome the strength of cosmic expansion thereby reducing the expansion to a small and negligible number?

    I'd sure appreciate some help about how to understand this.

    Thanks.

    1. Re:Expanding confusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Expanding universe means two phenomenon: Expansion of space itself and galaxies flying away from each other (from the initial momentum from big bang).

      Expansion of space is happening everywhere, even on earth, and has nothing to do with gravity and other forces. It's the expansion of the space itself.
      But for ordinary matter, molecules which make up our world, they are held together by EM force, which's a very very strong force.

      Consider a simple hydrogen atom, with an electron flying around a nucleus. The initial radius of the atom was x. At a certain time, space expaneded and now the electron is more far away from the nucleus, let's say x + y. If the expansion (i.e. y) is small enough, electrostatic force will pull the electron back to x, and then got pulled away by space expansion again, and so on. Eventually e will settle at somewhere between x and x + y.

      And in our universe, the space expansion rate is very low in our universe. In general, for bounded objects (by weak/strong/EM/gravity), space expansion increases the equilibrium size of the bounded system (nucleus, atom, etc).

      In your example, the ruler doesn't expand with the space.

      If the expansion is too fast (a large y), the electron might escape from the atom, and matters fall apart, which doesn't happen in our universe.

      This's just a classical explanation how space expansion affects atoms but it's good enough.

  36. Re:Oh good lady, and lord. by dryeo · · Score: 1

    On the other hand, perhaps it's like the neutrino. fusion (or fission, I forget) equations didn't work out so as a fudge the neutrino was invented, a super small particle that didn't interact with normal matter.
    I'm sure it was met with derision by a certain group, an imaginary particle that could travel through the Earth, how ridiculous and obviously the idea of fusion was wrong in some fundamental way.
    Well eventually the neutrino was observed, mostly matching up with theory (it was actually more complex, coming in a few flavours) and now we have neutrino observatories buried deep under the Earth.

    --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  37. Re:Oh good lady, and lord. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Re: "I'm sure it was met with derision by a certain group, an imaginary particle that could travel through the Earth, how ridiculous and obviously the idea of fusion was wrong in some fundamental way."

    Don Scott & Wal Thornhill do not deny the existence of neutrinos, btw. If this is what you're getting at, this is misinformation being spread by the popular G+ RIT educator & astrophysicist, Brian Koberlein. What they do suggest is that within the electrical cosmology view, evidence for fusion can be observed within either the photosphere or the corona (in other words, at or near the Sun's surface). This has been briefly mentioned in Ratcliffe's The Virtue of Heresy (which points to actual observations), and if true, would explain why there appears to be an anti-correlation which comes and goes between sunspots & solar neutrinos. It's been suggested by many astrophysics that these anti-correlations are not actually based upon valid statistics -- the problem being is that they tend not to publish the graph, and it's pretty obvious from just looking at this graph that there is indeed an anti-correlation going on here. Eve if the statistics used to make the case are somehow problematic, it's clear that there is an anti-correlation worth investigating here that appears to come and go.

  38. The dark lord by DanielOom · · Score: 1

    The ingredients for creating your own univerel:
    - 26 % dark matter
    - 69 % dark energy
    - 5 % dark magic

  39. Certainly yes by s.petry · · Score: 2

    Part of the issue here is that the question is ambiguous. "Big Bang" has morphed and changed into may forms in the last century+ when it was first envisioned. So, which big bang are you and TFA referring to? The original that said all the mass was a few hundred thousand miles across and blew up? The one taught in the 1970s that all mass was compressed into a ball about 270,000 light years across and blew up? The one that still requires all of the mass to exist already and compressed down to a compact size that you can find on U of M website? Or finally, are you referring to the Big Bang which steals the Quantum/Expanding Vacuum theory, but somehow claims to still be a "big bang"?

    QV or EV invalidates the need for a Big Bang. Though we don't know where quantum particles come from, the theory has worked out that collisions would result in mass over time and a constant source of energy. All we need to start the Universe is a small vacuum and time (hence the Universe is much older than people in the Big Bang camp claim). There are a couple variations of the QV/EV theory, but they don't differ greatly like the "Big Bang" does. I hate to advertise for the guy, but Lawrence Kraus's book "A Universe from Nothing" is a decent read.

    As to this "But the last 50 years have shown us that dark matter and dark energy actually make up 95% of the energy composition of our cosmos. Given that, is there any wiggle room to possibly invalidate the Big Bang?" pardon me if I don't share your enthusiasm. From a logical perspective we have been able to study quite a bit of our solar system hands on, and we have never been able to detect either dark matter or dark energy (no, gravitational lensing is not a test [see last paragraph]). Even the people using the term in science papers can't seem to agree on any what these things are, properties vary from model to model and person to person.

    Dense matter is a logical probability, because we know that the majority of every atom is empty space. Under extremely high gravitational fields this area could be reduced making denser atoms. Dark matter and dark energy have been used exclusively to make people's mathematical models of the Universe work. It is just as likely that we don't fully understand gravity as much as we thought, as it is to have dark matter and energy. I'd further argue that since we have never detected either in our solar system, odds would favor that they don't exist. I don't rule it out as impossible, but I would not say it's probable.

    Gravitational lensing does not require either dark matter or dark energy. I find it odd that the NASA link discusses Einstein as the person that came up with the theory, yet fails to mention that Einstein did not theorize these two "dark" things. Gravitational lensing is a result of having curved space and obviously gravity. Dark * is not required nor expected..

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    1. Re:Certainly yes by lgw · · Score: 2

      From a logical perspective we have been able to study quite a bit of our solar system hands on, and we have never been able to detect either dark matter or dark energy

      So all things that exist, exist within our solar system and are detectable with existing technology? The Higgs boson didn't exist 2 years ago, but exists now? I'm struggling to follow your reasoning.

      There were many theories to explain galactic rotation rates: MOND, WIMPs, MACHOs, many more I've forgotten. But out of the whole pack, WIMPs predicted the recent CMBR data accurately. When the math works, and accurately predicts unrelated measurements unknown when the hypothesis was made, well, science means we go with that until we have something better. We still don't know enough about dark matter to build a detector, but that's not required - what matters is that this theory survived when the others were falsified.

      I'm sure there are many physicists cooking up more specific hypotheses about what dark matter "really is", and whoever's right will have the correct recipe for a detector. Only then will we know stuff like particle masses, and maybe even get something better than the Standard Model out of the mess.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:Certainly yes by Aighearach · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not only can we not find the dark matter or dark energy...

      Look. We just recently mapped the Earth's radiation belts. Oops, they did not match prediction. At all. Not even the right number of belts.

      Voyager is out exploring the Solar System's heliopause. Ooops, not as predicted.

      That is the recent actual experimental work that has come out of cosmology lately. The rest of it is a lot of hand-waving using edge data points, at scales where nothing can be verified.

      Compare that to the work that actual physicists do at the subatomic level, where experiments usually match predictions to insane numbers of decimal points. That is what real science looks like.

      This stuff about, "oh we got our own neighborhood totally wrong, we don't understand how the solar system formed well enough to predict the heliopause, we don't understand our own planet well enough to predict the radiation belts, but when it comes to the really large measurements using edge data, we're really right-on, and sure of it." It is just total crap, at the flat-Earth level. Background radiation is the ultimate edge data; if Big Bang is true, it would be like God; an un-provabable hypothesis that science should ignore in preference of logical positivism. If it is true, we can't prove it, because we'll never have a sensor where we can test it on both sides of the value we want to measure. We can never calibrate a sensor, so we just can't know.

      Maybe old photons just turn redder and redder and then die, and the cosmic background radiation is a giant field of dead photons that all average the same age because they then fade away after another n years. Maybe there is more than one cause of redshift; the cause we can verify at very tiny scales, and another one at cosmic scales that we haven't even tested for yet, or had the chance to test for yet. Nobody in academia wants to ask about that, because if they start the experiment now, they won't be the ones to write the papers in a few million years when the answer comes in.

      Edge data tells us nothing. That the "early Universe" is presumed to have simpler laws of physics reminds of me something. The way that trees on the horizon at the edge of my vision appear simpler and simpler; and yet retain all their symmetries.

    3. Re:Certainly yes by pantaril · · Score: 1

      Gravitational lensing does not require either dark matter or dark energy. I find it odd that the NASA link discusses Einstein as the person that came up with the theory, yet fails to mention that Einstein did not theorize these two "dark" things. Gravitational lensing is a result of having curved space and obviously gravity. Dark * is not required nor expected..

      Einsteins theory doesn't use gravity at all. It works with mass and energy which cause curved spacetime which then causes gravitational lensing. The dark matter is predicted by this effect because we can't detect enough normal matter to justify the level of light-bending we can observe. Dark matter is also predicted by several other observable phenomena like the speed galaxies rotate around each other or cosmic microwave background.

    4. Re:Certainly yes by s.petry · · Score: 1

      So all things that exist, exist within our solar system and are detectable with existing technology?

      Not at all, and nowhere do I state any such thing. I do state that logically it's improbable, but not impossible.

      If you want to claim that up to 95% of the Universe is made up of dark matter and energy, fine. We can watch geysers on a gas giant's moon, but we can't detect 95% of the space between our Earth and the probe watching? Come now, something is wrong with that claim. Oh I know, someone decided that "dark matter and energy don't exist in our Solar system". Then why is it absent in our solar system?

      Higgs boson is a sub atomic particle, and not the same claim or the same scale. Nobody claimed that the particle made up 70%-95% of the Universe like they do with dark matter and dark energy. You are making an apples to elephants comparison in an attempt to skew the rhetoric in favor of the irrational (whether you realize it or not).

      There were many theories to explain galactic rotation rates: MOND, WIMPs, MACHOs, many more I've forgotten. But out of the whole pack, WIMPs predicted the recent CMBR data accurately. When the math works, and accurately predicts unrelated measurements unknown when the hypothesis was made, well, science means we go with that until we have something better. We still don't know enough about dark matter to build a detector, but that's not required - what matters is that this theory survived when the others were falsified.

      In the case of Big Bang they have had to make models work by inventing most of the mass and energy from thin air. We are not talking about a small anomaly that they can't account for, we are talking about anywhere between 70% and 95% (depending on the model)! Stop and think about that for a second.

      This is about filling in gaps in mathematical models to make them work, there is nothing ever "detected". Everything used to claim "we detected dark matter/energy" exists without those two things, like gravitational lensing.

      So is it possible that dark matter and dark energy exist? Sure. Is it possible that those two things make up 95% of the Universe? No. Extraordinary claims and all that.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    5. Re:Certainly yes by s.petry · · Score: 1

      Einsteins theory doesn't use gravity at all. It works with mass and energy which cause curved spacetime which then causes gravitational lensing.

      The model Einstein had includes gravity, you are skewing how he viewed gravity as a property of mass.

      The dark matter is predicted by this effect because we can't detect enough normal matter to justify the level of light-bending we can observe.

      Einstein never predicted dark matter or dark energy, so that statement is a complete fabrication. Dark matter and dark energy were "predicted" when models of the "Big Bang" did not work. Stop and think about that for a while.

      Dark matter is also predicted by several other observable phenomena like the speed galaxies rotate around each other or cosmic microwave background.

      As with above the "prediction" is because our mathematical models of the "Big Bang" and gravity are not working, which means that they are not "predicted" but needed for someone's theory to work.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    6. Re:Certainly yes by lgw · · Score: 1

      If you want to claim that up to 95% of the Universe is made up of dark matter and energy, fine. We can watch geysers on a gas giant's moon, but we can't detect 95% of the space between our Earth and the probe watching? Come now, something is wrong with that claim. Oh I know, someone decided that "dark matter and energy don't exist in our Solar system". Then why is it absent in our solar system?

      Dark Energy is everywhere, but the name is terrible. I prefer the old "cosmological constant", even if it may not be constant. All we know about it is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating over time. No idea why or how (or at least stuff that's been explained at my limited level of understanding is just guesswork), but the measurements aren't controversial. And the energy that would be required to cause this expansion, overcoming gravity and all, would be the dominant thing in the universe (or maybe space just works that way, no energy required?).

      Dark matter is most likely here in the solar system, no reason for it not to be, but we don't know how to build a specific detector. It's existence is pretty clear now from the combination of galactic rotation rates, gravitational lensing from stuff we can't otherwise see, and the CMBR data. The CMBR data showed the same ~5:1 ratio of dark matter to normal matter as the WIMP dark matter theory of galaxy rotation, to two significant digits. It's nature is unknown, except by its negatives - it doesn't interact with light, and it's not fast-moving like neutrinos.

      This is about filling in gaps in mathematical models to make them work, there is nothing ever "detected". Everything used to claim "we detected dark matter/energy" exists without those two things, like gravitational lensing.

      Not sure what you want by "detected". Dark energy, whatever it may be, is a placeholder name for an effect that inarguably exists. The measurements of large-scale expansion are clear. Dark matter was "filling in gaps in mathematical models" (the place all hypotheses start) 10 years ago. Now it's been detected to the same extent the Higgs Boson has: theory predicted measurements, but measurements that require some math to understand. In neither case do we have a machine that goes "ping" when a HB/DM particle hits it, what we have is data that's explained very accurately by theory, and not at all by the null hypothesis.

      In the case of dark matter, there are teams working on building a specific detector, as we know so little about it, and there's much good physics to be done once we know more. Particle masses? Strong force interaction? Heck, we'll learn a ton just from the nature of the detector that works: by what mechanism can dark matter possibly interact with normal matter (beyond gravity)? Neutrinos were hard enough to detect and physicists were pretty sure how they interacted.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    7. Re:Certainly yes by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      Let's simplify things. We can detect things using electromagnetic interaction only. When we try to detect other things, such as the strong and weak nuclear force, we construct experiments that will have predictable electromagnetic effects. Gravity is the same way: we can't detect it directly, but only through electromagnetic interactions (like, say, the ones governing molecular interactions). Gravitational lensing requires a gravitational field, which is a certain effect in spacetime, that is produced by mass. We can tell where the mass is, and we can tell there isn't enough normal matter is there. Hence, dark.

      It's really hard to detect things that just don't interact electromagnetically. Neutrino detectors are hard to make. Dark matter is currently detectable only by its gravitational effects (that can be monitored by electromagnetic interaction).

      Dark matter almost certainly exists in the Solar System. It's hard to detect because (a) it's inherently hard to detect, and (b) it would be spread out through the system, rather than clumping like normal matter does.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    8. Re:Certainly yes by s.petry · · Score: 1

      Please stick with the Socratic method and argue the points at their simplest level.

      We can detect gravity from our Sun, Moon, other planets, their moons, and other objects well enough to slingshot a space probe to Pluto, but we can't detect 95% of all mass and energy in our Universe? Come now, you are going to have to do better than this.

      Dark Energy is everywhere, but the name is terrible. I prefer the old "cosmological constant", even if it may not be constant.

      If it's everywhere as you claim, there should be exponentially more of this stuff to detect when compared to say, gravity. Do you believe that the alchemists were correct about the aether? The argument you provide is the same substance, go back and read some of those writings. Nobody knew what it was, but they were sure it was everywhere. Interestingly, this same argument exists for Nth dimensional travel but people miss the obvious because they are "told" this is "modern science" (lacking any science of course)

      Not sure what you want by "detected". Dark energy, whatever it may be, is a placeholder name for an effect that inarguably exists.

      Stop picking and choosing parts of paragraphs to argue and comment on the whole context. I stated that any method of "detecting" dark matter and energy exist without dark matter and energy. I even gave the example of gravitational lensing which people claim detects this stuff, yet the theorist who predicted gravitational lensing does not have this aether like stuff in his theory. In fact absolutely zero of his theories make such a prediction.

      You finally go off on a tangent trying to claim that if we could somehow build a better detector we could detect 95% of the Universe, without addressing the first issue of "How the hell you can rationally claim that 95% of the Universe is hidden from view." and introducing topics that actually counter such a claim.

      Such as neutrinos which are present, but surely not 95% of the Universe.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    9. Re:Certainly yes by lgw · · Score: 1

      We can detect gravity from our Sun, Moon, other planets, their moons, and other objects well enough to slingshot a space probe to Pluto, but we can't detect 95% of all mass and energy in our Universe? Come now, you are going to have to do better than this.

      Right, and the physicists devoting their careers to this never thought of that, what occurred to you in the first 5 minutes? Dark matter doesn't "clump" like normal matter (no mechanism for friction, as far as anyone knows), so is expected to be a diffuse sphere the same size as the visible disk of the galaxy. All the normal matter is together in a disk, and further clumped into stellar systems, so even at 5:1 overall, dark matter is pretty sparse in our neighborhood compared to normal matter.

      And why then are you sure there's no dark matter in e.g. the Sun? We know the total mass of the Sun, of course, and a bit about its internal processes, but not enough to exclude some low % of weakly interacting particles (and it would be nearly impossible to know if some of the matter in the core of a planet were dark matter, if the % is low). It's not like someone's proposing that there's a bunch of previously undetected mass at the solar system scale (though some of the mass we know about may be different than expected). Most of the predicted dark matter in our galaxy simply doesn't overlap the galactic disk.

      Dark Energy is everywhere, but the name is terrible. I prefer the old "cosmological constant", even if it may not be constant.

      If it's everywhere as you claim, there should be exponentially more of this stuff to detect when compared to say, gravity

      Which of course is why it was detected as soon as we started looking at large enough scales - it's not a theory looking for evidence, it's evidence looking for an explanation. Dark energy is an extremely tiny effect, even compared to gravity, per cubic meter. It's just that it's everywhere, while matter is quite sparse. Want a full and detailed explanation for the layman, so you know what you're arguing about? Here you go. Ed Copeland has become my favorite physicist of late, for his lack of arrogance or showmanship - just patient explanation.

      Stop picking and choosing parts of paragraphs to argue and comment on the whole context. I stated that any method of "detecting" dark matter and energy exist without dark matter and energy. I even gave the example of gravitational lensing which people claim detects this stuff, yet the theorist who predicted gravitational lensing does not have this aether like stuff in his theory. In fact absolutely zero of his theories make such a prediction.

      You finally go off on a tangent trying to claim that if we could somehow build a better detector we could detect 95% of the Universe, without addressing the first issue of "How the hell you can rationally claim that 95% of the Universe is hidden from view." and introducing topics that actually counter such a claim.

      Such as neutrinos which are present, but surely not 95% of the Universe.

      Why do you expect 95% of the universe to be visible to the tools we have? The central importance of humanity to the universe? Our godlike mastery of science and technology? Nothing but intellectual arrogance - how long have we even had electric light as a species. We're just starting to learn.

      You talk about other explanations for gravitation lensing. Sure. There were also other theories, as I said, for galactic rotation rates. There were also many theories about the universe at the time the CMBR was released. But one theory predicted all three accurately, and the others didn't. So we go with that theory until we have something better because that's what the scientific method is.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    10. Re:Certainly yes by s.petry · · Score: 1

      And the same people who theorize this have careers riding on "Big Bang" being correct, while QV/EV threatens their livelihood. But you keep on pretending that science never has any biases or motives other than the purity of science. I have a few thousand years of history that shows you are wrong.. but that does not mean you will pay any attention to facts.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    11. Re:Certainly yes by lgw · · Score: 1

      And the same people who theorize this have careers riding on "Big Bang" being correct, while QV/EV threatens their livelihood.

      Ohhhhh, you're one of those crackpots. Never mind then. I'm sure you're right and all of science is just a conspiracy to hide the truth about relativity/evolution/the big bang/whatever else would take effort to understand.

      Have a brilliant new theory with actual evidence that explains everything? There's a Nobel Prize waiting for you. But all the wacky theories people don't want to accept today started from evidence that previous theories failed on.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    12. Re:Certainly yes by lgw · · Score: 1

      Oh, finally found the link I wanted. apply this to your favorite "all the physicists are wrong" theory - try for a high score!

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    13. Re:Certainly yes by s.petry · · Score: 1

      Crackpots? Haha, so now we go to the ad hominem instead of the absurd. Keep astounding me with your brilliance.

      Big Bang has never ever been proven, but anyone that does not believe must be committing blasphemy against science, because that other science is that of the heathen. Never mind the fact that Big Bang requires the Aether to work and we can't prove anything about the Aether, it must be true because you have been taught to believe it. Just fucking amazing!

      Show me a working Big Bang model without magical components and I'll give you the whole debate. You can't, so can't win. Hmm, ad hominem will generally lead to more ad hominem especially after being caught in better masked fallacies. Maybe you will go with more ad hominem and try an appeal to emotion fallacy next.

      Taking a non-biased look at "Climate Science" should be enough to prove to anyone that "Science" has not changed much from the "Flat Earth" days, with the exception of course that people are not usually physically tortured and killed for belief in a round world. Just chastised, defunded, and humiliated if they are one of "those" scientists.

      Lastly, why would I need to come up with yet another theory when I clearly stated numerous times that the Quantum Vacuum theory is more sound mathematically than the "Big Bang"? There is no need for yet another theory, but you refuse to read anything that interferes with your belief. Grats on being a thoroughly complete imbecile! (Perhaps a bit of a retaliatory ad hominem, but your failure to read and comprehend in addition to your lack of critical thinking skills is deserving of the title.)

      Unless you can magically prove what over a century of worth of theorists have not, your "belief" is no longer interesting and is certainly not better than the actual theoretical physicists (of which I do read periodically). Your selective reading and comprehension ability mixed with your fanatical belief is really not pleasurable company. In fact I'd probably rather discuss theology with a Jehova's Witness, because they at least use a reference book for their bullshit. You just have a line of bullshit you are claiming is "science".

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    14. Re:Certainly yes by s.petry · · Score: 1

      Nowhere do I claim all physicists are wrong, stop fantasizing things that don't exist in order to protect your belief. I stated that Dark Energy and Dark matter are "probably" wrong. Those two things are only needed to protect a questionable theory called "Big Bang" which is something questioned by numerous physicists, especially those that came up with other theories such as the Quantum Vacuum theory.

      Since you are now into the realm of using fantasy to protect beliefs, have a nice life. It is simply impossible to debate someone with that level of delusion.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  40. Invalid hypothesis by s.petry · · Score: 1

    There is no "human" life in New Jersey.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  41. Don't let the creationists hear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    'cuz all the creationists will hear is "big bang debunked: science says god did it"

  42. Re:Oh good lady, and lord. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

    More and more I'm getting a feeling that science has been down this road before. That our understanding of subatomic particles and the distant edges of the Universe is similar to the pre-Copernican use of epicycles to understand astronomy.

    It's certainly possible that we're merely stumbling about to find a better theory, but I think the epicycles analogy is generally a bad one -- it was good science back in the day, based on what was "known" about the universe at the time. Now we know better, because we've figured out that some of the fundamental assumptions of the old model were wrong, but good scientists of the day had no way of knowing some of those things were wrong (and in fact had some good evidence that those things were right -- like a bunch of very logical arguments why the earth is not in motion and how various effects that should happen if it were in motion were not observed... most of those problems were only explained in the 1800s, centuries after Copernicus). (For detailed background on myths about epicycles, see here for example.)

    Also, please note that Copernicus and Galileo both still required epicycles, since they presumed circular orbits. (Galileo rejected Kepler's correct empirical observations of elliptical orbits, since they weren't as "perfect" as the circle... which shows how far even great "scientists" of the day were invested in the old ideas.)

    If anything, I think a better analogy for the kind of situation you're assuming in modern science would be with Galileo's theory of the tides, which he created even though it didn't make much sense (and didn't accord with empirical evidence -- it required only one tide per day at noon), but it allowed him to justify his heliocentric hypothesis. In effect, it was a whole new idea tacked onto the old models without empirical support and only needed to fill in the gap to "prove" that the earth was in motion (since other things needed the prove that hadn't yet been observed, and most wouldn't be until centuries afterward). In a similar way, trying to "prove" our newer Big Bang models and particle physics models has led to the introduction of dark energy, strings, etc.

    Thus, dark matter/energy and string theory are similar new ideas built up out of the old ones to "fill in the gaps" as it were, and we don't yet know whether they will pan out. Epicycles, on the other hand, were a very old and extremely well-accepted idea (which both Galileo and Copernicus used in their theories).

    Finally, I would also note that gravity too was a sort of "fudge factor" introduced by Newton without evidence: where does this "unseen force" come from? how is it transmitted? We still don't thoroughly agree on those answers, centuries later. But it made the math work out for Newton's idea of universal gravitation, just as some of our modern theories do today.

    So the question is -- are these new ideas more like Newton's spooky occult theory of an unseen force acting at a distance, or more like Galileo's attempt to make up a theory of the tides to hold his model of the universe together? Only time will tell.

  43. QED relies on Special Relativity! by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

    Irrelevant to weather it is a success or not. You seem to think that success means 'measured to within a certain accuracy'

    Yes actually that is precisely what it means for a scientific theory. The aim of a scientific theory is to model the behaviour of the universe therefore the most successful theory is the one that most accurately describes the universe's behaviour.

    Relativity doesnt hold a handle to that. Not even close. Aside from GPS satellites, how has our understanding of relatively improved your life?

    Leaving aside that you appear to be confusing Special Relativity with General Relativity, QED requires and relies on special relativity. Hence anything which QED gives us would not be possible without special relativity. You also seem to be confusing QED with quantum mechanics in general. QED has had some useful applications but mainly in medical physics since it only applies to relativistic electrons and high energy photons e.g. PET, electron beam treatment of skin cancers etc. Special relativity also has similar applications e.g. all particle accelerators used to produce medical isotopes rely on it as well as those outside this field e.g. police radar.

    1. Re:QED relies on Special Relativity! by hubie · · Score: 1

      What does special relativity have to do with police radar?

    2. Re:QED relies on Special Relativity! by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

      Police radar relies on the relativistic doppler shift formula which is different to the classical doppler shift formula used for e.g. sound waves.

    3. Re:QED relies on Special Relativity! by hubie · · Score: 1

      Are you sure? About the police radar part that is. I'm pretty sure laser radar guns work by time of flight just like LIDAR, not by frequency shift. I would also be very surprised that, in police guns at least, that there is any relativistic correction put in given that it goes as v/c and the difference between using classical vs relativistic is insignificant for automobiles (or at least for those that don't have Flux Capacitors in them).

  44. Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy Cast Doubt On the B by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No.

    If you RTFA, the answer is also no.

    Typical slashdot click-baiting. Feel like an idiot that I fell for it.

  45. Re:the universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ROLL TIDE!!

  46. antimatter missing by Kariles70 · · Score: 1

    Being that nearly all of that antimatter supposedly made by the Big Bang is missing, I would say that is a big yes, Sheldon! Oh wait, I know!!! Its hiding . . . in the oceans, you know, where all the global warming is hiding too!!! Yeah!

  47. complete and utter rubbish by Kariles70 · · Score: 1

    Yes. And all that antimatter created at the Big Bang, Its just hiding.

  48. 2nd law [Re:microwave bright [Re:Oh good lord.]] by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 1

    If a civilisation could create a Dyson sphere, don't you think they'd have some use for all the wasted energy "radiating in infrared"?

    If they can get usable energy out of waste heat, they have a means of getting around the second law of thermodynamics. It's hard to guess what a technology with that much sophistication can do, but if they can do that, they don't need to surround a star with a shell to harvest energy.

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  49. Expanding confusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please check out Simon Singh's "The Big Bang Theory" book, much is explained
    A few simple things - if space expands, the distance between any two objects in that space grows which can be measured a couple ways - farther objects are dimmer, the time it takes for light to travel between objects is greater.
    As space expands it also leaves a fingerprint on any light that is in transit - the speed of that light doesn't change but the amount of energy it carries does. "Stretched" out light shifts toward red, and "Compressed" light is shifted blue. Because stars emit light with gaps - thanks to the atoms and electron shells in the gasses that they are made of - we know where these gaps should be. We observe these gaps moving around - toward red and we know it's moving away from us - toward blue and it's coming toward us.
    Put these together and make a graph, we find that on average the farther away observed galaxies are (based on supernova "standard candles"), the faster they are moving away from us (more red shift).

    We've found galaxy UDFy-38135539 has a red shift z=8.6, which means that the light it emitted is now eight times longer in wavelengths as it's reaching us.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift

  50. Re:2nd law [Re:microwave bright [Re:Oh good lord.] by painandgreed · · Score: 1

    If a civilisation could create a Dyson sphere, don't you think they'd have some use for all the wasted energy "radiating in infrared"?

    If they can get usable energy out of waste heat, they have a means of getting around the second law of thermodynamics. It's hard to guess what a technology with that much sophistication can do, but if they can do that, they don't need to surround a star with a shell to harvest energy.

    In one of Stross's novels, it's computonium, a material that absorbs energy and uses it as computational power. The sun is surrounded by successive layers of Dyson spheres with each outer layer absorbing the waste heat of the layer inside of it and radiates off increasing wavelengths of radiation. Subsequently, each outer layer runs at a slower rate than those father towards the interior and are the slums of the virtual society that exists inside all those layers of computonium.

  51. Re:Oh good lady, and lord. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    There was no final epicycle that made the predictions right. On the other hand, if there's lots of matter that doesn't interact with anything electromagnetically, that would explain a lot of things nicely. It would explain galactic rotation curves. It would explain places where we have gravitational lensing without visible matter (consider the Bullet Cluster in particular). It would explain certain predictions of the Big Bang theory.

    I have no idea why people have so much trouble with the idea. Basically, we're talking about something like slow, massive, neutrinos. That hardly seems exotic to me.

    --
    "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  52. I do like... by camazotz · · Score: 1

    How if you RTFA that's linked the answer is obviously no, and why.

  53. complete and utter rubbish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Huh. I guess I assumed too much. I read the summary as saying the complication of needing Dark Matter and Dark Energy were the wedges to invalidate the Big Bang theory. Are there that many people here who don't already know Dark Matter/Energy originated as fudge factors to make the Big Bang-based maths actually work with (some of the) problematic observations?

  54. Of course it's invalid by ebvwfbw · · Score: 1

    This is one of the biggest - no Duh moments in science. Junk science at its best. The whole notion that everything, and probably everyone reading this has absolutely no idea what everything even is, even a what a little piece of it is - came out of one point is just wrong. If I could let you look through a good telescope when it's say about 10F out and you can see what's out there, I mean really see what is out there and see that for all of these disks in random orientations out there consist of "countless" stars, planets and so on, the mass is well really really (repeat really about a billion billion times or so) big. Then to think that even say (what became) black holes came out of this - and escaped is clearly a violation of physics and time. I know, I know... - "IT'S THE BEST SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION THAT SCIENCE CAN COME UP WITH." Never the less, it's still wrong and they know it.

  55. In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! by Tenebrousedge · · Score: 1

    Dyson spheres would glow in the infrared and therefore be pretty obvious. This is because they still have to radiate the heat produced by the star they enclose - otherwise their internal temperature would perpetually increase.

    Isn't that purely supposition?

    No, it's pretty well tested. Just because you don't understand something does not mean that no one does. Compare to geometry: you might not know how to construct a given shape, but you can probably say something about its properties given a few conditions that it must satisfy.

    For example, we know that relativity is an extremely accurate description of the geometry of spacetime. We have proved mathematically that energy must be conserved, in addition to observational evidence. That gives us the conditions that a Dyson Sphere must satisfy: it must exist in a universe with the same physics. However, even setting aside that requirement -- if your technology can break the laws of thermodynamics, why would you need a Dyson Sphere?

    The next time you feel compelled to argue that your ignorance is as good as someone else's knowledge, may I suggest in lieu of posting here that you start a television or political career?

    --
    Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.