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Galactic Survey: The Universe Dying as Old Stars Fade Faster Than New Ones Are Born
astroengine writes: A study of more than 200,000 galaxies, encompassing wavelengths of light from the far ultraviolet to infrared, shows that the universe is producing half as much energy as it did 2 billion years ago and continues to fade. "Newer galaxies are simply putting out less energy than galaxies did in the past," astronomer Mehmet Alpaslan, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., told Discovery News. In other words, astronomers, for the first time, have gathered observational evidence that our universe is slowly marching toward its eventual heat death (in a few trillion years time).
is getting really old
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
I thought it would be a freeze death, no?
Don't put it off til the last minute.
Looks like as time approaches infinity, the sum = 0
Still there are some ignorant deniers who don't accept the unanimous scientific proof that the heat death of the universe is human made.
I guess I'll have to cut short that trip to Disneyland..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Entropy
This Universe Climate Change claim is a bunch of commie bunk by commie professors trying to get gov't study handouts. The universe is perfectly fine! Just keep your guns loaded in case it wants to attack you and turn your children into cosplay space weirdos.
Table-ized A.I.
The Universe is just becoming more energy efficient! Think Earth Hour but on a universal scale
The final answer. Asimov, 1920 - 1992
Article: "The timeline for all this to come to pass is very long, hundreds of trillions of years." Or a "few". Sure. Whatever, I'll be gone either way.
it is supposed to be either expand and freeze, or collapse and crunch.
Actually there is a third possibility: the big rip. The expansion of the universe is accelerating and, if this continues and the Dark Energy driving it is of the right type, then space-time might literally rip itself apart.
Computers got better, so I'm sure that in 2 billion years we'll just 3D print new galaxies.
Neil Young, the physicist
All human ambition will eventually fall to dust.
Throw your inhibitions to the wind. It doesn't matter if chasing your dreams gets you killed...you will die anyway, and so will everyone and everything else and none of it will matter in the end.
Doom is the truth that sets us free.
Since the metaphorical book is longer than can be read in a human lifetime, the ending is meaningless. We'll never know for sure.
That's nice one less thing for us or future generations to worry about as even 1 trillion years qualifies as effectively forever.
Lets get back to things with reasonable deadlines like that pole flip every 250,000 years or so or the large solar flares that hit every 150 years or so or global warming which promises to be a serious pita within the next 100 years or so or more practical deadlines like paying your water/sewer/electric/cellphone bill. They are typically due monthly so best to keep an eye on those.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Well it depends on how fast you are moving. Get up enough speed relative to the rest of the universe and for you the heat death of the universe could happen tomorrow...although that would require that every particle of your body to be accelerated to an energy about a trillion times higher than the LHC.
Please log off.
Have gnu, will travel.
And what do you know: (from TFA)
The decline in galaxies’ energy output coincides with the universe’s ever-increasing rate of expansion, which is due to a mysterious, anti-gravity force referred to as dark energy.
So yeah, but no... it's just that you can't see as much of the newer stuff... ever, cos > speed of light. Not an entirely accurate headline but makes no difference i guess, the point is that cosmological expansion guarantees that everything we see will become less and less, that's before even bothering to consider start birth rate / death rate.
Everything has a beginning and end. No real surprise.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
http://www.multivax.com/last_q... There has never been a better time to read that story.
Well, not quite so. By the time they know how to do it, they would know everything there is to know, hence they would have no reason to live. Most likely at that point they will be incorporeal, and would have also melded in some way so there won't be distinct personalities, and also, they would have most likely melded with the fabric of the universe, becoming the universe itself.
It will be privatized and everything will be perfect!
mfwright@batnet.com
Global warming, no doubt.
I don't believe life works that way.
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How could we maintain the universe indefinitely?
We can't. We don't maintain the universe at all so we certainly can't do so indefinitely.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
In a few billion years, we're fucked!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If Doctor Who taught me anything, is that humans will still be there at the end of the universe.
what about another big bang sized cosmic quantum fluctuation?
ehhhh, forget it... it's probably really unlikely
Latest predictions are that the heat death of the universe will occur at 2^64-1 seconds after the Unix epoch.
Don't try to soften the blow... just tell us... how many months does the universe have left?
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
"Newer galaxies are simply putting out less energy than galaxies did in the past..."
Just like them young kids today, by dammit! Always settin' around and playin' with them tabulets and why-fie-fo-fummery and smart phones smaller'n yer pecker after a dip in the stream.
A dumb phone that just set there polite-like and rang 'til you answered or hit it with yer shoe was always good enough for me.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You'd need an energy source larger than the universe. Probably many fold larger. Plus more for continued maintenance, unless you could stop expansion. But who knows what would happen if you did that... perhaps a big crunch and a new big bang.
At this point, everybody you ever knew would appear to you, clapping politely, and saying 'congratulations!'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
They'll need to factor this into their calculations now...
First, there is still plenty of hydrogen and helium to build stars. However, this makes sense. It is commonly believed that the first generation of stars had a relatively high number of hypergiants, which burn at a rate millions of times the speed of the more common red dwarf. Frankly, this just means that as the universe is getting older the number of high mass stars is diminishing. The number of lower-mass dwarf stars may or may not be increasing, which actually extends the length of time before heat death as opposed to if it did not happen. I choose to not panic over our impending doom.
A big point here is that Special Relativity is increasingly looking shaky. I know that is heresy/crack-pottery.
But consider dark matter and dark energy.
The stars around galaxies spin with IDENTICAL angular velocity indifferent to distance. The stars near the core spin around with the SAME angular velocity as stars at the rim. That is... imagine if pluto was going around the Sun at the same rate as Mercury... EXACTLY as many rotations over a given unit of time. Precisely.
Now that's fucking weird. But that's how every star in the universe that we've seen is going around any spiral galaxy you'd like to mention.
Now to explain that... they introduce "dark matter"... aka they say there is EXACTLY enough missing mass that we're not seeing in every galaxy in the universe to give us precisely this effect. How likely does that sound? Its fucking impossible. It also means that something like 98 percent of all mass in the universe is dark matter... because that's basically how much the gravitational calculations are off by. If your theory is 98 percent off the mark... its fucking wrong.
That means there's something wrong with our understanding of gravitation.... space time... etc.
And dark energy is basically just an admission that we don't know why the universe is expanding or where the energy for that to happen is coming from. I'm not even going to deal with that. I'll stick with the dark matter.
Add to that, Quantum Mechanics doesn't line up with Special Relativity. We've been trying to unify the theories for decades and they don't match up.
The argument is always that Quantum mechanics is wrong or there is some missing theory between the two that we have to discover.
But consider if the problem is Special Relativity itself.
I know I sound insane to you now. Because this would mean Einstein was wrong. I would argue that is because I'm saying something audacious more than being actually crazy. But the proof is in the pudding, no?
So when we talk about the fate of the universe and how according to Special Relativity it must become one thing or another... I don't really credit that. I don't think Special Relativity has a clue what is going to happen at that scale.
We have so many patches and work arounds for errors in SR. All complex electronics have work arounds built into them that effectively correct for errors in SR as relates to their context.
All the communication's sats have corrections that according to SR they shouldn't need... but they do.
I think we need to take a good hard look at SR because I think we might have made some fundamental error. What that error was?... Not sure. But dark matter itself is such a huge fucking problem that the universe is basically just laughing at us. Think about that again... all the stars moving with the SAME angular velocity around the center of the spiral.
And just to underscore my point, most of the prominent scientists that predated Einstein had a very different notion of how the universe worked. There were quite a few opponents that said he was wrong. And internet famous fellows like Nikola Tesla didn't buy SR at all. Tesla didn't buy it because SR contradicts certain things about electrical fields that Tesla was very aware of... Again, to this day, we use special corrections with complex electrical devices that according to SR we shouldn't need. But we do.
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Let's see. There's plenty of evidence for dark matter that isn't galactic rotation curves, like gravitational lensing and problems with the composition of the Universe. Dark matter is matter that interacts weakly if at all electromagnetically, and we're already aware of matter (neutrinos) that does that. The amount of dark matter is determined by figuring out what the mass has to be. You're very close to saying that, if I put an object into a 1-pound box, and weigh the box with object at 11 pounds, then it would be an incredible coincidence if the object turned out to weigh 10 pounds - and, also, that a theory that has the object ten times the weight of the box must be wrong.
You're also completely confusing Special and General Relativity. Quantum mechanics works just fine with Special Relativity. As far as how General Relativity describes the Universe, you're saying you don't credit it, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about it. (BTW, nobody sweats the idea of Einstein being wrong. He was almost certainly way wrong when he claimed that there are no truly random elements in quantum theory. He was a great physicist, but no physicist thinks anything is true just because Einstein said so.)
Special Relativity is an incredibly well-tested theory, and nobody's found discrepancies or holes in it. Everything works just as predicted. General Relativity is much harder to test, but it checks everything we can test. Some people find this annoying, since it's real hard to make scientific progress if you can't find problems with the current theories. The GPS satellites do have corrections for Special Relativity and General Relativity, and work just like predicted. (I think you're just making up the crap about complex electronics violating relativity - do you have something specific to claim?)
Of COURSE Einstein's predecessors had problems with Einstein's ideas as to how the Universe works. Einstein said that space and time are not distinct things, and that there is no absolute space or time, which contradicted basic assumptions of everything from Newton on. That's why we call it Einstein's theory. Poincare had worked out all the math of Special Relativity before Einstein, but didn't make the big conceptual leap. Lots of people said he was wrong, because they couldn't get their heads around it (at least at first). And, again, we see the crap about relativity contradicting observations without any supporting evidence (because there is none, of course).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
hmmm... not sure if we're talking about the same thing.
If we take any one galaxy as a given example and compare it to itself... we fine that the curve is very nearly flat once you leave the closest stars. That is, the disc is generally uniform. You're saying that isn't true for all spiral galaxies... can you give me an example of where it isn't true? I've never seen that.
The big problem with the dark matter hypothesis is that it is too convenient. Its a deus ex machina solution. And the observations are too weird for it to just be some extra mass especially when it is that much extra mass distributed just "so"... I mean, even if we buy into the missing mass, explain why the mass would be distributed that way? There's nothing in the known laws of physics that would explain a distribution pattern like that. The distribution of dark matter should be equivalent to the distribution of non-dark matter. And that would lead to the galaxies behaving basically as we initially believed they would... aka like the solar system writ large. The fact that they don't is not explained by the presence of dark matter because even if there is dark matter that doesn't explain why the distribution of mass is different.
I've seen nothing that explains that.
Possibly I'm crazy or ignorant or something... but the whole thing strikes me epicycles all over again.
This comes from a layman so by all means, high hat me. But know that that is just ad hominem and will be taken as such.
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Let me first make the obvious admission that I'm a layman. I've never claimed to be otherwise.
Now lets get to the issue here, so you're saying dark matter is backed up by things besides galactic rotation? Can you cite why those require dark matter? Are you saying there are transparent gravitational lenses out in the middle of the universe that bend light without giving any indication of mass big enough to do it?
Regardless, my main issue with dark matter is not the concept but what it conveniently skips over. The distribution of dark matter should match the distribution of non-dark matter. If they both respond to gravitation then dark matter should be concentrated in the core of galaxies just like the non-dark matter with the distribution of dark matter largely following the same pattern as regular matter in the disc. If it does that then the galaxies will spin faster BUT the acceleration curve would fall off the same way it does in our solar system.
The fact that it doesn't... if we assume dark matter... you're saying that the distribution of dark matter is DIFFERENT from regular matter. And that that distribution basically just HAPPENS to flatten the acceleration curve for every spiral galaxy's disc.
Think of the odds of that. that's like rolling a zillion dice and having them all land on six. I don't buy it.
My issue is not the dark matter itself. Its the distribution of dark matter that I find unsupportable. Why is dark matter distributed that way if it exists? I know of no physical law that would cause regular matter to distribute with most of the mass in the core of the galaxy and yet have dark matter distribute with a disproportionate amount of mass in the disc. Explain it.
Am I laymen? Sure. But that doesn't invalidate the question or the position unless ad hominem has suddenly become a valid rebuttal.
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As to lensing near galaxies, that doesn't prove dark matter.
What that proves is a distortion in space time or something of that nature near galaxies. Now the only thing we know of that can do that IS matter. So when we see that we say "clearly matter". The problem with that is that the way the galaxies are behaving suggests there might be something else going on.
The dark matter concept is a deus ex machina solution. You don't actually know what is going on there. And if it is dark matter, you then need to explain why the dark matter is distributed differently from the regular matter. Actions have equal and opposite reactions, no? So if the dark matter is acting on the stars and bending light... then the matter there should be acting on the dark matter in turn. And that would incline the dark matter to concentrate in the core of the galaxy and then distribute itself throughout the disc in roughly the same way that the conventional matter is distributed. And if it does that... and it must under existing theory... then the acceleration curves would be the same thing we see in the solar system.
The ONLY way dark matter can do what you want it to do is if its distribution doesn't follow the same rules as regular matter. And given that both of them apparently respond to gravity... dark matter MUST respond like regular matter in regards to gravity.
Opposing theories? I have them of course but I'm not arrogant enough to think any of them have merit without evidence. My only observation here is that "dark matter" doesn't make sense because it couldn't be distributed that way if it responds to gravity.
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hmmm... The lensing thing I'm going to put a pin in and skip over to what I feel is the critical issue...
The distribution. Now you're saying that because dark matter doesn't react electromagetically... it doesn't fall into gravity wells? That makes no sense. To the contrary it is electromagnetic reactions that tends to keep gas etc from falling into gravity wells. What inflates stars and keeps the mass from collapsing into a singularity?
EM radiation.
Okay... so your dark matter doesn't react with the repulsive force of EM but does react with the attractive force of gravity... and you think this will cause dark matter to NOT collapse into existing matter pockets or form its own singularities?
How does that make sense?
If DM is applying an attractive force by gravity then it is likewise being PULLED just as it pulls. And that means its going to fall into gravity wells... and since it doesn't react with EM... there is nothing to stop it from just collapsing into a dark matter blackhole.
Frankly this "it doesn't react with EM" concept poses more problems than it solves. I think you'd do better with the "dark matter is just regular matter we haven't detected". Saying it is a totally different type of matter that doesn't react with EM makes it even more improbable that it would have this distribution pattern you want.
And even if it were just regular undetected matter... the distribution pattern is still implausible.
And let me just add another problem with dark matter.
Drag. If Dark matter is basically everywhere then that means stars are PLOWING into it as they orbit the galactic center. That would have an effect on stars not unlike as satellite scrapping the top of earth's atmosphere... it would slow down the stars can cause them to fall into the galactic core.
But that's just icing on the cake. The distribution is the cake.
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Now you're asking good questions.
Yes, there are transparent gravitational lenses out there that bend light without giving any indication of mass big enough to do it, or at least not in the right place. The primary example is probably the Bullet Cluster. We can tell where the visible mass is in that cluster, and we can tell where the main mass is. They aren't the same.
The distributions don't match because they behave differently. If two pieces of matter run into each other, they change velocities. They may clump together. If they're in a gravity well, they're likely to lose their orbital or escape velocity and wind up deeper in the well. If two pieces of dark matter run into each other, they apparently don't interact significantly. This means that it's a lot harder for them to lose orbital or escape velocity, and they do not tend to concentrate in the core.
If a chunk of matter is coming towards the center of the Earth at high velocity, it crashes into the Earth. If a chunk of dark matter (if it can come in a big enough size to be a chunk) is doing that, it goes through the Earth, picking up speed as it falls, and then shoots out the other side.
You also seem to be getting the line of reasoning backwards. We can tell, by rotation curves, about how much mass is in a galaxy. We can tell, by more complicated reasoning, that there isn't that much normal matter in a galaxy. We figure that either there's matter we can't detect, or that there's some mistake in our understanding of gravity. We figure that rotation curves show the distribution of this dark matter isn't the same as the visible matter.
At that point, we have two primary hypotheses: that there is such a thing as dark matter with different properties, or that the laws of gravity need to be modified. (I suppose there's also the hypothesis that there's more normal matter than we think, but it turns out that, while we may well be missing some, it isn't nearly enough.) This being science, people try testing these hypotheses.
If there's enough dark matter in galaxies to make them behave as they do, there's enough to form gravitational lenses, so it makes sense to look for such lensing in places where we know there's not enough normal matter, and we find it. This is consistent with dark matter, and not with rewriting the laws of gravity. (From what I've read, we can rewrite gravity to account for galactic rotation curves, but it doesn't work for the lensing.) Somebody notices that the best models of the Big Bang predict that there's less normal matter than there needs to be, and that the dark matter hypothesis predicts that neatly. People look at the distribution curves of dark matter in the galaxy, and note that it seems to be consistent with the idea that it doesn't interact with itself.
That's how good scientific theories are born. People notice discrepancies between theory and observation, and toss out ideas. Some of these ideas explain only the particular discrepancy they're made for, and not anything else. Other ideas explain not only that discrepancy, but others, and make predictions that turn out to be true. Dark matter is looking like a fairly simple explanation for a variety of discrepancies.
Compare the photon theory of light. In the 1900s, everybody knew light was waves, and therefore couldn't be particles. They applied the best theory of the time to black-body radiation, and found it completely wrong. We have a discrepancy. Max Planck figures that, if light comes in little packets, with the amount of energy in each packet depending on frequency, that the black-body radiation comes out right. That's something of a curiosity. Einstein notes that Planck's little packet theory explains the photoelectric effect nicely (that's the work that got him his Nobel Prize, relativity being far too controversial). Photons go on to explain more things, and people make predictions based on this photon idea.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Alright, so I didn't consider the EM thing meaning stuff would just fly out the other side. But even then, do the distribution patterns of mass make any sense?
And considering that we're admitting the existence of space time AND theorizing an ever present STUFF that is flowing through us at all times... is this model the best model?
Sometimes when you get all these corrections I think it pays to step back and consider if we didn't make a false assumption earlier on.
Possibly there is a better model that explains all of this rather than improbable dark matter.
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The bullet cluster is an odd citation... I know it is used to prove dark matter but the actual evidence doesn't look compelling to me.
Could we go through that?
As to premises... my understanding is that if the speed of light is variable that could also explain a lot of this stuff.
As to the orbital characteristics of dark matter. We're talking about something that is akin to a perfect pendulum? It falls into wells... fires out the other side... rinse repeat... forever? I understand the concept, I just think it is a convenient fig leaf.
We've never actually detected it. We find things that can be explained by its existence but that's not the same thing.
Look, I am a layman... I know it. But I can think about this stuff as much as anyone... assign whatever credibility you like to the opinions but I frankly think I'm more intellectual to have opinions and think about it than those that simply memorize the theory and repeat.
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Who said I have strong opinions about it?
I didn't. And what am I going to do about it? It doesn't hurt you or anything else whatever I believe about dark matter.
And the notion that if you just nod and bow you're ahead of the curve... I reject it. I might not know what I'm talking about but at least I'm thinking about it. Which is more than most people can say for themselves.
I'm not a believer in the old Catholic Church system where the priest tells people what is good and evil and the peasants kneel and bow.
That's not who I am. I'm going to read the book myself and have my own thoughts about it. And if that bothers you... Tough shit.
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You've read the words but not understood the meaning. We have a communication failure.
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Neutrinos are dark matter or not?
As to models being fit to observations... well that's a hypocritical thing to say given that the default theory of the day has lots of "constants" built into it to fit things into place and then the mass is a variable you always fit to the situation.
Why is it okay in one model to do that and not okay in another? I mean you're only inferring the dark matter in the first place because your observations weren't lining up.
And any rival theory has the problem that its never going to be as deep... even if the existing theory is wrong. How much work has been done on GR and SR? You can't compete with the sheer volumes of text written about it. So saying "your theory isn't as well flushed out" isn't really fair nor does it mean anything is right or wrong.
As to me sticking the word improbable into things... well... maybe we have different definitions of what that means. Would you mind saying what you find to be improbable and then we can look at the basis of that opinion and see where our definitions differ?
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Neutrinos are dark matter or not?
They've been ruled out as a candidate for dark matter, unless one of the sterile neutrino theories was true allowing for a fourth kind of neutrino that is harder to detect (but those models have been essentially ruled out by one recent experiment, and it is a matter of just seeing if other experiments confirm those models are wrong). The point is you took issue with theorizing stuff flows through us all the time, except that is already an existing, well tested concept in physics already.
Why is it okay in one model to do that and not okay in another?
I never said it is not okay, just that it factors into relative comparisons. In part the point is to counter the lot of people around loudly exclaim that declaring alternative gravity theories will save us from fudge factors, when they are built on arbitrary factors themselves. However, the gravity theories are currently all based on factors fit to single or small number of observations, as in you can make it work to explain rotation curves, or lensing, or cluster structure, or CMB structure, etc., but only one at a time by refitting them. Dark matter fits all of these concurrently. There is a big difference between what some of the gravity theories do, by fixing observation A and getting value x, and fitting observation B and getting whereas dark matter can independently fit observation A, B, C... and get the same value x every time. That is the very nature of how science works, formulating an idea, and then testing it in different ways.
So saying "your theory isn't as well flushed out" isn't really fair nor does it mean anything is right or wrong.
That isn't what I said. I did say that alternative gravity theories fail to explain everything dark matter does.... as in they tried to apply it to those problems and get the wrong answer, not that people haven't taken the time to flesh it out.
. Would you mind saying what you find to be improbable
The probability of theories is not an easy subject to approach, especially say in the case where you have two competing theories that can match observations, as opposed to the easier case where you need to assume some sort of mistake was made in an observation (seriously a lot of stuff written about this philosophy of science, there is no easy way to assign probabilities to open-ended inductive reasoning, even Bayesian methods require a lot of assumptions). But that is moot, because regardless of an exact definition, evaluating the probability of a theory should at least require some actual knowledge of the subject, knowing what it says, what observations exist, etc.
I don't think I can continue this, as I'm not seeing any hope that this conversation will fundamentally change. I am spending more than half of my words explaining stuff that has already been explained many times before. If you actually cared about the subject, you could have already read up on it in less time than it would have taken you to write these comments. This isn't like asking for help on an obscure error message or giving an opinion on an uncommon algorithm, but instead like trying to have some one piecemeal ask to explain something well spelled out like how html or tcp/ip works. It also doesn't help that other asshole-ish AC(s) are now posting with a similar style too.
As to neutrinos not being dark matter... okay, I'm just confirming that we haven't actually found any of it yet... like touched it or seen it at anything short of galactic distances... and only by inference.
As to alternative gravity and fudge factors, I'm merely pointing out that there is no superiority there. On that basis you'd be on equal terms with other theories.
As to the difference between flushed out and wrong answers... I think we could agree that there is disproportionate energy put into the standard model and as such it will be able to answer more questions off the cuff than other theories. I would argue that if you had put as much energy into other theories as you have into the standard model they would have 'answers' for all these things. Would they be better answers than dark matter? Possibly not. But would they be worse? Also possibly not.
Consider that you've added a lot of extra particles into the standard model that have never actually been detected. And even so there are serious problems.
I believe the standard model has been able to describe about 5 percent of the observable universe. That is... 5 percent is conventional matter and energy... about 25 percent is dark matter... and 70 percent is dark energy. Now, if your system describes 5 percent of the observable universe while the remaining 95 percent is "stuff we don't understand" then I don't understand why there is such a high degree of confidence in the system.
There is also a big difference between coming up with a model that describes the way a system acts and actually what the system is. Things like string theory etc appear to be mostly mathematical models that describe certain things without actually representing them in fact. I believe on occasion this distinction is not observed or forgotten and that can be dangerous.
As to the improbability of theories, I think you have a point in any situation where things are murky and you don't really know what is going on... and the thing you're proposing has some precedent. Arguably Dark Matter qualifies for all of that. I think we'd have to acknowledge that we could invent improbable theories for things. God for example. You could answer any scientific question with "god". And that's unsatisfying and improbable in a lot of cases for a lot of reasons.... if not in all cases for even more reasons.
So the defense of the probability of dark matter is first that we're dealing with something that we really don't get. We're seeing huge deviations in orbits and the only thing we know of that can distort gravity is matter... and the nature of the distortion requires very weird matter that we have not yet found. That said, you pointed out... there are neutrinos and if they exist maybe something that are to neutrinos what neutrinos are to more conventional matter exists.
I get it. I'd just like to see more questioning of fundamental assumptions. It shouldn't escape your notice that we are now arguing both that there is a space-time and that it is filled with an ever present flow of matter that is flowing through us at all times transparently. This is sounding to some extent like a return to the whole aether thing. Now I know the aether was disproven... but the nature of all these "corrections" all seem to basically add it back in... in various ways. Not in all obviously. But that seems suspicious to me.
I'm sure I sound like a crack pot or an idiot or something... Unfortunate if that's all I am to people that know more on the issue. I come from a place of genuine interest and genuine curiosity and genuine intellectual integrity. Ignorant? I freely admit it. But I would argue that is my only real flaw here. And it is possible that crippling though my deficiency is... there may be other people that are not ignorant but who possibly lack the courage to wipe the chalkboard clean... and build a new theory from the ground up with all observed data.
A unified theory has eluded physicists because the macro theories do not play nice with the nano theories.
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