I hope you're joking about infinite vs. finite calculation of pi making any difference.
Oh it would surely make a difference. Depending on how much precision, maybe even quite a noticeable difference.
A difference such that if you freed your mind from the limitations of "reality", you could jump from skyscraper to skyscraper, punch through walls, and dodge bullets?
Of course any current theory will be a better fit to what currently can be observed; if it wasn't, it would already have been discarded. The true test of a theory is how well it predicts phenomena we have not yet observed.
Exactly correct on both counts! Which is why the Aether was thrown out when experiment failed to verify its predictions. And which is why GR and the Standard Model's predictions are considered to be very likely to be true, because so many of their predictions have already been borne out exactly.
I was referring to zero point energy, which isn't exactly the same as luminiferous aether.
I'm not particularly bothered by the idea that the lowest energy state of a vacuum is not zero energy, since being the lowest energy state means by definition you cannot extract energy from it.
Finally, I've heard assertions that energy, space, and even time itself is inherently quantized (this is why calculus works, because there really is no such thing as "infinitesimally small").
Calculus works perfectly well in a continuous environment, so if someone is asserting the universe must be discreet because of math (and there is a physics crackpot troll on/. who makes exactly that argument*), that just means they suck at math.:P
I have heard non-crackpot theories that space-time is quantized, though. It's not considered essential to explaining things, but it has its niceties as well. Sadly we're a damn long way from having measurement precise enough to tell.
This to me is pretty compelling evidence that the universe itself is in fact just a simulation... the implication being that it would trivially easy to change the laws of physics just to keep us guessing.
What, so the "real" universe is actually continuous and, uh, I guess calculus breaks?
Personally if the universe is discreet then to me that only indicates that the universe could be simulated. Both in the sense that we might be living in The Matrix, and in the sense that you could create The Matrix and have it be indistinguishable from reality. You would not need infinite precision on your calculations, you would not need to calculate Pi to infinity. You couldn't predict reality perfectly because they'd diverge due to quantum wave collapse (just like reality itself diverges in the Many Worlds theory), but it would be a perfect simulation of a possible reality.
Oh yeah and once while under the influence I was watching The Matrix, and speculated that the reason some people could tell something was wrong was because the Real World is continuous, and they were subconsciously noticing problems caused by having a finite approximation of Pi. And once they got over their expectation of how things should be, they could exploit glitches created by the approximation to do super-kung fu.
Look for my paper an arxiv any day now.;)
* With the humorous addendum of how he doesn't want to hear any math majors telling him why he's wrong. Ha.
What does this mean for someone like me, who lives life by my own idea of morality, which is "Do whatever you want as long as you bring no harm to another"?
I hope you mean "as long as to the best of my knowledge it will bring no harm". As in, you decide if something is moral *before* doing it and seeing what the outcome was.
I mean I'm assuming you don't think it's moral to line the sidewalk outside your house with claymore mines, as long as nobody actually triggers them.
It does explain a lot. Like that previously baffling scene in Steven Seagal's Out for Justice when the bad guy smokes a bunch of crack cocaine to get himself psyched up for his night of murder and mayhem, and then rubs his head against a giant magnet.
Seagal must have learned something in The East about this a long time ago.
They did a complete reversal on the theory of the aether...
Really? So after concluding there was no aether, they realized that electric currents were really flowing the opposite way, the right-hand-rule should be the left-hand-rule? The predictions made by aether theory weren't just slightly inaccurate, they were astoundingly inaccurate and required going in the complete opposite direction of previous refinements?
No. The Aether was simply a theory that was shown to be false and then subsequently replaced with a better one. To even find the correction between Aether theory and reality took a great deal of ingenuity and the most precise instruments of the day, and that was half a century after it was first proposed and tested. The Aether was only "wrong" at an unprecedented level of precision, so that's anything but a complete reversal!
This is exactly what Asimov was talking about. Seriously, read his essay. His point is -- yes, theories are proven wrong and discarded for better ones, but the degree of 'wrongness' keeps decreasing as the theories are refined for greater and greater precision, not results that wildly skew back and forth. If the theories were that egregiously wrong they never would have lasted in the first place. In terms of electromagnetic theory, the Luminiferous Aether fits into this pattern perfectly.
Similarly, General Relativity is probably "wrong" about gravity, but the correction is likely to be extremely minuscule (just like the correction from Newton to GR is practically undetectable most of the time, only even smaller). It's not going to be that GR/Newton are completely wrong and gravity doesn't actually attract masses toward each other in an approximately linear proportion to mass and inverse-square proportion to distance. Which is part of why theories that tried to modify gravity to eliminate the need for WIMPy dark matter have fallen by the wayside.
now they seem to be leaning back towards something that sounds suspiciously like the aether to me (energy in a vacuum).
Are you talking about dark energy (accelerating expansion of the universe) or zero point energy? One is an observation that needs to be explained, the other is a prediction of quantum mechanics and strongly suggested by the Casimir force. "Dark energy" is really just a placeholder for a phenomenon we don't understand. So what? I'm sure science will develop a theory that explains it well, which will be followed by one that explains it better, which will be followed by a better one still.
If you're hoping that somehow the observation itself will go away, well, I wouldn't count on it.
Aahh you named, almost - "line of sight". When I was walking around I was too low and when I went far enough to enter the field the distance was already different. And all of us have different physiology, I might have a thinner skull or lack minerals if that may play a role.
Or it's any one of the alternative mentioned that, you know, actually feasibly causes problems, or any number of other explanations.
Confirmation bias: it's getting between you and the truth, and thus between you and your health.
For years people complained that the EM radiation from high tension power lines were making them ill. The emissions of these lines are many, many times stronger than the sources that are supposedly making you ill, yet no test has even demonstrated any ill effect from them nor is there any feasible mechanism to do so.
Psychosomatic illness? Or bizarre new phenomenon science can't explain?
Neither! Turns out the symptoms were real, but the cause was the herbicides used to clear the ground around the towers!
Yet because the sufferers insisted on always blaming the wires themselves, it hindered investigation into the real cause because the discussion could never move past the false cause.
So yeah. If your experience is real, the worst thing you can do is declare it to be the fault of the tower and try to falsify that claim, and believe it when it if and when it is falsified, and then look for something else
Anybody who claims to be sensitive to this sort of thing and who has not won the million bucks is basically a flat-out liar.
Funny story. Once on/. someone was trying to claim that James Randi was rejecting legitimate claims of Super Powers. They of course failed miserably, but in the course of trying they linked to a randi.org forum post that simply made my day. It was the most awesome post I'd ever seen, at least on this topic.
It was a post by a man who had previously submitted an application to be tested (I think it was for EM sensitivity, but it might have been dousing or something), but -- and here's the awesome part -- he was retracting his application because he'd decided to actually conduct experiments with at least a single-blind format, and concluded based on his experiment that he didn't really have super powers.
Holy fuck. Every so often something happens that gives me a little hope for the human species.
21 minutes - God realizes he forgot to carry a one. "Ah crap, this is going to create humans. Well, too late now. Might as well have some fun with this iteration."
Lucifer: There are going to be humans in this universe?! No way am I putting up with their shit again. I'm outta here, who's with me?
(yes im being pretty polemic about but everytime someone complains about "bad demographics" as a problem it just sends chills through my spine)
Actually you're just being less subtle about your disgust at racism than the OP was being about their racism (not that it was very subtle).
Anyway, my question is, how exactly does he imagine we're going to save "The West" without doing any research? When science and technology are among your big advantages, you don't turn around a decline by abandoning them.
So gene patents are both ethically wrong since they're patenting a discovery instead of an invention, and useless for the patent holder as well. Good to know.
Dark matter being simply regular matter that is hard to see was in fact one of the first hypothesis put forward and of course hugely favored for its simplicity, and to this day it is believed to account for some dark matter.
However further observation has largely ruled out this possibility for the majority of dark matter. The large halos of dark matter surrounding galaxies should be absolutely flooded by the light from said galaxy. It's not like the lights in your room are off, it's like you've got a 10-billion watt bulb blazing away and still can't see anything. The fact that this matter neither reflects nor obscures EM radiation in any part of the spectrum makes it completely unlike any "normal" matter we've ever (not) seen or even theorized.
On the other hand, particles that have mass but don't interact electromagnetically don't violate any laws of physics at all. We have already experimentally confirmed the existence of several such particles. In fact in the time it took you to write your post, thousands of these particles originating from the sun have passed through your body, probably without interacting with a single atom.
The thing is, even if you could suggest a type of baryonic matter that was completely transparent with a refractive index of exactly 1 for all frequencies, it still wouldn't match the observed behavior of dark matter. Even such a type of matter would still be subject to the electrostatic forces that keep atoms of ordinary matter spaced well apart. When two galaxies collide, this ordinary matter should be slowed by interaction with the interstellar dust clouds that make up much of a galaxy's mass. We observe this with all the visible matter in galaxies, but the dark matter just keeps right on chugging through slowed by neither the dark matter of the other galaxy nor by the clouds of dust and gas.
So, it's not an assumption. It's a hypothesis based on quite a large amount of evidence. There were competing hypothesis that tried to explain the behavior of galaxies without resorting to non-baryonic dark matter, but even they have had to admit that they can't match these observations without it.
Which do you really think is more likely? That it's all "normal" matter that just happens to act exactly like non-baryonic weakly interacting (meaning... interacts via the weak force) particles contrary to all theory? Or that it's a weakly interacting particle?
Either way, if it's going to be proven wrong, it's going to be proven wrong by experiment conducted by the same scientists making this "assumption".
Seriously, you DO know that the same was true at every point in history, right?
30 years ago, the then current theories were quite simply, the most accurate and comprehensive theories mankind had ever developed. Ditto 60 years ago. And 100. And 1000. And....
And of course we all realize that for the past couple hundred years at least, these theories have been converging on greater and greater accuracy and precision, not 180 degree reversals, right?
I don't need to link Asimov again do I? Oh snap too late.
My mistake. It was my understanding that non-baryonic matter was still strictly theoretical and basically precluded its interaction with other matter except in gravitational terms. It may have been explained incorrectly to me, or I may have misunderstood. Thanks for clearing that up.
For future reference, when someone says that Hypothesis A is clearly contradicted by Theory B, when Theory B is something that anyone working on Hypothesis A would obviously be familiar with, and indeed requires to formulate their hypothesis, it's a pretty safe bet that the person telling you this is wrong, mistaken, or simply full of shit.
It's as bad as saying climatologists ignore the sun and its impact on climate cycles when in reality solar radiance is a key component of climate theories.
As tired as OP may be of defending the theory from ignorant people, one does not cure ignorance with anger and condescension.
Ignorance that does not want to be cured cannot be cured at all.
Since they'd already posted the explanation in at least one other thread, and this was the Nth "dark matter obviously doesn't exist cus I'm so smart" post -- EXACTLY the kind of person I was talking about being a giant hypocrite -- I think it's understandable. If that person wanted to acquire a clue, they had ample opportunity to do so.
Or are you saying that we should put up with infinite amounts of deliberately ignorant people arrogantly declaring themselves right and everyone who has actually studied the field wrong? With hypocrites calling scientists religious zealots when it is they who are arguing from belief and an unwillingness to admit they might be wrong?
Sorry that's just not in human nature, nor do I think it is helpful to lay down and be a doormat for these fools.
Thanks especially for the information on Neutralinos. I've read a fair bit about dark matter (for someone who is not even remotely a physicist, anyway) and I'd never heard of them.
Isn't doubt what got us science in the first place?
Only when done sincerely, and with an understanding of the existing theories and the evidence for them, and thus their actual flaws.
We call those people "scientists". There are plenty of them who are exercising legitimate doubt yet following the evidence.
A "doubter" shares none of these aspects with scientists except for the doubt, and even then calling "doubt" is inaccurate because they are so often already convinced that the science is obviously wrong, and the scientists arrogant dogmatists for not admitting it.
At no point in my post did I suggest that dark matter is wrong.
Uh, you said that the leading dark matter hypothesis contradicted gravitational theory, which would mean one or the other was wrong, and you correctly noted that gravitational theory has been verified extensively, strongly suggesting you thought non-baryonic dark matter was ruled out.
You said claiming otherwise was "dogmatic in the extreme".
What I suggested was that people who insist it is right have a very poor grasp of the scientific method. At present it appears to be a very strong hypothesis. That's great.
Nobody is insisting that it is irrefutable. "Very strong hypothesis" is a much better description -- much stronger than most people, including you, are suggesting. The observation of the phenomenon we call dark matter is, at this point, essentially a fact, and that may be what the people are talking about.
I like to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about any observational science that, for reasons of scale or scope, cannot (or has yet to) be proven in a laboratory setting.
That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But it would be helpful if you treated skeptics with skepticism, and looked into their arguments a little closer, or looked more into what evidence does exist for astronomical theory. You might be surprised to find out it's a lot more than you think, or were told by a "skeptic"!
Doubt is a good way to attack religion. Characterizing doubt as an attack on science is to turn science into a religion, and defeat its very purpose.
I'm not characterizing doubt itself as an attack on science.
I'm characterizing "doubt" that is founded in ignorance and the a-priori decision that the science must be wrong, as an attack on science. Which it is. Calling scientists arrogant and dogmatic because you don't understand the theory and because you can't believe they are right is not legitimate doubt. It's not useful scientific skepticism. It's hypocrisy.
While you certainly aren't as bad as many, since information you were unaware of appears to affect your opinion, this is still basically what you were doing -- calling every scientist working on non-baryonic dark matter a dogmatist for not admitting your (incorrect) argument proved them wrong. It's funny how you say doubt is a good way to attack religion, while simultaneously doing everything you can (including the topic of this post) to imply science is a religion and thus attack it via doubt.
Step one to being a useful scientific critic: Stop using arrogance and dogmatism to claim all scientists working in a particular field are arrogant and dogmatic.
Your link was busted, had an @ at the end which I got too when trying to copy the link.:(
But who cares about that! We've been searching for likely dark matter candidates in deep dark holes with ultra-sensitive detectors, when this whole time it's been posting to slashdot!
The question I have is why so many people are so antagonistic to the very notion of dark matter, routinely calling the people who suggest it... "arrogant" and the like.
Personally I think the AC (perhaps unintentionally) nailed it -- it's part of a larger anti-science movement that considers the conclusions of science confusing, uncomfortable, or politically unattractive, and therefore seeks to discredit not just the particular theories but science in general. They do this by dressing up their ignorance with a thin veneer of scientific criticism in order to paint the professional scientists as the ones who are arrogant, ignorant, and arguing out of belief not evidence or reason.
Dark matter gets singled out because it sounds weird (especially if you know nothing about it) and like scientists are just making things up (especially if...). And if they're just making that up, then maybe they're just making up global warming, or evolution, or the age of the earth.
Even if they aren't against any of those particular theories, it's still just part of a general anti-science trend where people start with their conclusion -- the scientists are wrong because I don't understand them and I'm so smart that's not possible unless they're wrong -- and then work backwards to the kind of posts you see here. Accusing scientists of arrogance and dogmatism.
I mean look at the GP. They says it's "dogmatic in the extreme" not to admit that non-baryonic matter violates the law of gravity, clearly demonstrating that they are arguing out of ignorance and a belief that dark matter theory can't be true. The hypocrisy is astounding.
The world makes me sad. But data like this makes me happy. It's an exciting time in physics no matter what the doubters say and I can't wait to see where it leads.
And yet the very notion of "non-baryonic matter" challenges laws as fundamental and thoroughly-established as laws of gravitation.
Uh no it doesn't. Why do you think that? Who told you that? Gravitational theory itself has nothing to say on the subject of baryonic vs non-baryonic matter, and another thoroughly-established theory, the Standard Model, has predicted non-baryonic matter which has also been subsequently verified to exist (google up neutrinos, W and Z gauge bosons).
As the more detailed link on spacetelescope.com (EU hubble site) explains, this data actually confirms General Relativity in the relationship between lensing and red shift, plus confirms dark matter, plus confirms dark energy (accelerating universal expansion).
Multiple hypothesis and theories all come together and make a bunch of detailed predictions, that prediction is borne out to a T by actual experimental observation, that's called a phenomenal success.
Pretending otherwise is dogmatic in the extreme.
No your assumption that this causes all kinds of problems that it does not is dogmatic. Despite what you or whoever informed you thinks, the dark matter hypothesis is not inherently flawed. It's quite a good hypothesis, actually.
But further study is necessary, and the very true statement "we have no idea what it is" suggests to me that we don't even know if it really qualifies as matter. In that sense, calling it "dark matter" is misleading and potentially a case of multiplying entities. And having that pointed out should not embarrass or anger us.
It being matter is simply the leading hypothesis. And while it is understood that it might be something that isn't actually "matter" at all, that would be the case of needlessly multiplying entities. We know that weakly interacting matter exists. Adding in a completely new thing that acts like matter but isn't would require a very good theory and some very solid experimental evidence to back it up. Hypothetically possible at this point, but way more out there than it being matter.
In the meantime, the GP was not quite right, as we do have some good ideas what it could be, though of course we haven't confirmed it. The Neutralino is a leading candidate, and we may be closing in on confirmation of its existence.
get your ass down to the IEEE who actually have an idea of whats really going on
LOL.
Yeah right. The IEEE know that Electric Universe is a bunch of horesshit, because they understand how electromagnetism actually works, which cannot be said of any of the EU idiots. EU proposes that the solar wind - which is a quasi-neutral plasma consisting of equal amounts of positively and negatively changed particles -- is created by an electric field emanating from the sun.
I guess this is the first time scientists were able to actually go from saying "There's dark matter 'somewhere'" to "Look at this data, we were able to indirectly locate some of it".
They have been able to locate some of it before, just the scale here is unprecedented. It was previous discoveries of dark matter outside colliding galaxies that put dark matter well ahead of alternative explanations.
Cool thing, it might just get us a step closer to understanding the whole subject better.
...how they know it's lensing, and that the stars aren't just positioned like that?
Much like with regular lenses, there's more to it than just a change in apparent position.
To me still a imaginary excuse, based on the arrogance of not being able to admit that the math is wrong, but instead calling the universe wrong! ^^ [But a good {and compact!} explanation will of course change my mind.]
Once we discovered extra-galactic dark matter, it became really hard to find a different explanation. Coming up with a way to modify gravity to not need dark matter (but still explain everything "the math" explains perfectly) was hard enough. Once you had to modify gravity to not even point at the known center of mass, it kinda becomes unworkable.
And people were trying to eliminate the need for dark matter! In contrast to this somewhat weird sounding definition of "arrogance", there are physicists around the globe who are arrogant enough to think that they're smarter than whoever came up with "the math", and they could be the ones to prove the theory wrong and present a new one. One that would be named after them.
Or Newton again, in the case of MOND. It's still name-in-history(well, physics) books type stuff.
Anyway, although gravitational lensing has plenty of evidence already, this data actually confirms another aspect of the predicted lensing effect and its relation to redshift, provides yet more evidence for dark matter, and even corroborates universal expansions. Multiple theories and predictions working in concert and completely consistent with observation. That's what you call a slam dunk. The game isn't over, but there's a reason this is the favored math at this point in time: it works.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you're joking about infinite vs. finite calculation of pi making any difference.
Oh it would surely make a difference. Depending on how much precision, maybe even quite a noticeable difference.
A difference such that if you freed your mind from the limitations of "reality", you could jump from skyscraper to skyscraper, punch through walls, and dodge bullets?
I'd like to think so. ;)
Of course any current theory will be a better fit to what currently can be observed; if it wasn't, it would already have been discarded. The true test of a theory is how well it predicts phenomena we have not yet observed.
Exactly correct on both counts! Which is why the Aether was thrown out when experiment failed to verify its predictions. And which is why GR and the Standard Model's predictions are considered to be very likely to be true, because so many of their predictions have already been borne out exactly.
I was referring to zero point energy, which isn't exactly the same as luminiferous aether.
I'm not particularly bothered by the idea that the lowest energy state of a vacuum is not zero energy, since being the lowest energy state means by definition you cannot extract energy from it.
Finally, I've heard assertions that energy, space, and even time itself is inherently quantized (this is why calculus works, because there really is no such thing as "infinitesimally small").
Calculus works perfectly well in a continuous environment, so if someone is asserting the universe must be discreet because of math (and there is a physics crackpot troll on /. who makes exactly that argument*), that just means they suck at math. :P
I have heard non-crackpot theories that space-time is quantized, though. It's not considered essential to explaining things, but it has its niceties as well. Sadly we're a damn long way from having measurement precise enough to tell.
This to me is pretty compelling evidence that the universe itself is in fact just a simulation... the implication being that it would trivially easy to change the laws of physics just to keep us guessing.
What, so the "real" universe is actually continuous and, uh, I guess calculus breaks?
Personally if the universe is discreet then to me that only indicates that the universe could be simulated. Both in the sense that we might be living in The Matrix, and in the sense that you could create The Matrix and have it be indistinguishable from reality. You would not need infinite precision on your calculations, you would not need to calculate Pi to infinity. You couldn't predict reality perfectly because they'd diverge due to quantum wave collapse (just like reality itself diverges in the Many Worlds theory), but it would be a perfect simulation of a possible reality.
Oh yeah and once while under the influence I was watching The Matrix, and speculated that the reason some people could tell something was wrong was because the Real World is continuous, and they were subconsciously noticing problems caused by having a finite approximation of Pi. And once they got over their expectation of how things should be, they could exploit glitches created by the approximation to do super-kung fu.
Look for my paper an arxiv any day now. ;)
* With the humorous addendum of how he doesn't want to hear any math majors telling him why he's wrong. Ha.
What does this mean for someone like me, who lives life by my own idea of morality, which is "Do whatever you want as long as you bring no harm to another"?
I hope you mean "as long as to the best of my knowledge it will bring no harm". As in, you decide if something is moral *before* doing it and seeing what the outcome was.
I mean I'm assuming you don't think it's moral to line the sidewalk outside your house with claymore mines, as long as nobody actually triggers them.
It does explain a lot. Like that previously baffling scene in Steven Seagal's Out for Justice when the bad guy smokes a bunch of crack cocaine to get himself psyched up for his night of murder and mayhem, and then rubs his head against a giant magnet.
Seagal must have learned something in The East about this a long time ago.
They did a complete reversal on the theory of the aether...
Really? So after concluding there was no aether, they realized that electric currents were really flowing the opposite way, the right-hand-rule should be the left-hand-rule? The predictions made by aether theory weren't just slightly inaccurate, they were astoundingly inaccurate and required going in the complete opposite direction of previous refinements?
No. The Aether was simply a theory that was shown to be false and then subsequently replaced with a better one. To even find the correction between Aether theory and reality took a great deal of ingenuity and the most precise instruments of the day, and that was half a century after it was first proposed and tested. The Aether was only "wrong" at an unprecedented level of precision, so that's anything but a complete reversal!
This is exactly what Asimov was talking about. Seriously, read his essay. His point is -- yes, theories are proven wrong and discarded for better ones, but the degree of 'wrongness' keeps decreasing as the theories are refined for greater and greater precision, not results that wildly skew back and forth. If the theories were that egregiously wrong they never would have lasted in the first place. In terms of electromagnetic theory, the Luminiferous Aether fits into this pattern perfectly.
Similarly, General Relativity is probably "wrong" about gravity, but the correction is likely to be extremely minuscule (just like the correction from Newton to GR is practically undetectable most of the time, only even smaller). It's not going to be that GR/Newton are completely wrong and gravity doesn't actually attract masses toward each other in an approximately linear proportion to mass and inverse-square proportion to distance. Which is part of why theories that tried to modify gravity to eliminate the need for WIMPy dark matter have fallen by the wayside.
now they seem to be leaning back towards something that sounds suspiciously like the aether to me (energy in a vacuum).
Are you talking about dark energy (accelerating expansion of the universe) or zero point energy? One is an observation that needs to be explained, the other is a prediction of quantum mechanics and strongly suggested by the Casimir force. "Dark energy" is really just a placeholder for a phenomenon we don't understand. So what? I'm sure science will develop a theory that explains it well, which will be followed by one that explains it better, which will be followed by a better one still.
If you're hoping that somehow the observation itself will go away, well, I wouldn't count on it.
Aahh you named, almost - "line of sight". When I was walking around I was too low and when I went far enough to enter the field the distance was already different. And all of us have different physiology, I might have a thinner skull or lack minerals if that may play a role.
Or it's any one of the alternative mentioned that, you know, actually feasibly causes problems, or any number of other explanations.
Confirmation bias: it's getting between you and the truth, and thus between you and your health.
For years people complained that the EM radiation from high tension power lines were making them ill. The emissions of these lines are many, many times stronger than the sources that are supposedly making you ill, yet no test has even demonstrated any ill effect from them nor is there any feasible mechanism to do so.
Psychosomatic illness? Or bizarre new phenomenon science can't explain?
Neither! Turns out the symptoms were real, but the cause was the herbicides used to clear the ground around the towers!
Yet because the sufferers insisted on always blaming the wires themselves, it hindered investigation into the real cause because the discussion could never move past the false cause.
So yeah. If your experience is real, the worst thing you can do is declare it to be the fault of the tower and try to falsify that claim, and believe it when it if and when it is falsified, and then look for something else
And a little bit left over for hookers and blow.
It's well documented* that both of these things help mitigate the effects of EM sensitivity. It's all for his medical needs!
* citation needed? The MAN won't let me post a citation!
Anybody who claims to be sensitive to this sort of thing and who has not won the million bucks is basically a flat-out liar.
Funny story. Once on /. someone was trying to claim that James Randi was rejecting legitimate claims of Super Powers. They of course failed miserably, but in the course of trying they linked to a randi.org forum post that simply made my day. It was the most awesome post I'd ever seen, at least on this topic.
It was a post by a man who had previously submitted an application to be tested (I think it was for EM sensitivity, but it might have been dousing or something), but -- and here's the awesome part -- he was retracting his application because he'd decided to actually conduct experiments with at least a single-blind format, and concluded based on his experiment that he didn't really have super powers.
Holy fuck. Every so often something happens that gives me a little hope for the human species.
21 minutes - God realizes he forgot to carry a one. "Ah crap, this is going to create humans. Well, too late now. Might as well have some fun with this iteration."
Lucifer: There are going to be humans in this universe?! No way am I putting up with their shit again. I'm outta here, who's with me?
(yes im being pretty polemic about but everytime someone complains about "bad demographics" as a problem it just sends chills through my spine)
Actually you're just being less subtle about your disgust at racism than the OP was being about their racism (not that it was very subtle).
Anyway, my question is, how exactly does he imagine we're going to save "The West" without doing any research? When science and technology are among your big advantages, you don't turn around a decline by abandoning them.
I guess that means that CERN's precautionary destruction of the earth in 2008 was for naught!
You forgot this pic of Gordon Freeman practicing for a headcrab invasion.
So gene patents are both ethically wrong since they're patenting a discovery instead of an invention, and useless for the patent holder as well. Good to know.
Dark matter being simply regular matter that is hard to see was in fact one of the first hypothesis put forward and of course hugely favored for its simplicity, and to this day it is believed to account for some dark matter.
However further observation has largely ruled out this possibility for the majority of dark matter. The large halos of dark matter surrounding galaxies should be absolutely flooded by the light from said galaxy. It's not like the lights in your room are off, it's like you've got a 10-billion watt bulb blazing away and still can't see anything. The fact that this matter neither reflects nor obscures EM radiation in any part of the spectrum makes it completely unlike any "normal" matter we've ever (not) seen or even theorized.
On the other hand, particles that have mass but don't interact electromagnetically don't violate any laws of physics at all. We have already experimentally confirmed the existence of several such particles. In fact in the time it took you to write your post, thousands of these particles originating from the sun have passed through your body, probably without interacting with a single atom.
The thing is, even if you could suggest a type of baryonic matter that was completely transparent with a refractive index of exactly 1 for all frequencies, it still wouldn't match the observed behavior of dark matter. Even such a type of matter would still be subject to the electrostatic forces that keep atoms of ordinary matter spaced well apart. When two galaxies collide, this ordinary matter should be slowed by interaction with the interstellar dust clouds that make up much of a galaxy's mass. We observe this with all the visible matter in galaxies, but the dark matter just keeps right on chugging through slowed by neither the dark matter of the other galaxy nor by the clouds of dust and gas.
So, it's not an assumption. It's a hypothesis based on quite a large amount of evidence. There were competing hypothesis that tried to explain the behavior of galaxies without resorting to non-baryonic dark matter, but even they have had to admit that they can't match these observations without it.
Which do you really think is more likely? That it's all "normal" matter that just happens to act exactly like non-baryonic weakly interacting (meaning... interacts via the weak force) particles contrary to all theory? Or that it's a weakly interacting particle?
Either way, if it's going to be proven wrong, it's going to be proven wrong by experiment conducted by the same scientists making this "assumption".
Seriously, you DO know that the same was true at every point in history, right?
30 years ago, the then current theories were quite simply, the most accurate and comprehensive theories mankind had ever developed. Ditto 60 years ago. And 100. And 1000. And....
And of course we all realize that for the past couple hundred years at least, these theories have been converging on greater and greater accuracy and precision, not 180 degree reversals, right?
I don't need to link Asimov again do I? Oh snap too late.
You forgot the step where you apply for a grant! You can't forget that; it's the most important part of any version of the scientific method!
My mistake. It was my understanding that non-baryonic matter was still strictly theoretical and basically precluded its interaction with other matter except in gravitational terms. It may have been explained incorrectly to me, or I may have misunderstood. Thanks for clearing that up.
For future reference, when someone says that Hypothesis A is clearly contradicted by Theory B, when Theory B is something that anyone working on Hypothesis A would obviously be familiar with, and indeed requires to formulate their hypothesis, it's a pretty safe bet that the person telling you this is wrong, mistaken, or simply full of shit.
It's as bad as saying climatologists ignore the sun and its impact on climate cycles when in reality solar radiance is a key component of climate theories.
As tired as OP may be of defending the theory from ignorant people, one does not cure ignorance with anger and condescension.
Ignorance that does not want to be cured cannot be cured at all.
Since they'd already posted the explanation in at least one other thread, and this was the Nth "dark matter obviously doesn't exist cus I'm so smart" post -- EXACTLY the kind of person I was talking about being a giant hypocrite -- I think it's understandable. If that person wanted to acquire a clue, they had ample opportunity to do so.
Or are you saying that we should put up with infinite amounts of deliberately ignorant people arrogantly declaring themselves right and everyone who has actually studied the field wrong? With hypocrites calling scientists religious zealots when it is they who are arguing from belief and an unwillingness to admit they might be wrong?
Sorry that's just not in human nature, nor do I think it is helpful to lay down and be a doormat for these fools.
Thanks especially for the information on Neutralinos. I've read a fair bit about dark matter (for someone who is not even remotely a physicist, anyway) and I'd never heard of them.
You're welcome. That's a refreshing change of pace so I'll just say here's a decent place to start to learn more.
Isn't doubt what got us science in the first place?
Only when done sincerely, and with an understanding of the existing theories and the evidence for them, and thus their actual flaws.
We call those people "scientists". There are plenty of them who are exercising legitimate doubt yet following the evidence.
A "doubter" shares none of these aspects with scientists except for the doubt, and even then calling "doubt" is inaccurate because they are so often already convinced that the science is obviously wrong, and the scientists arrogant dogmatists for not admitting it.
At no point in my post did I suggest that dark matter is wrong.
Uh, you said that the leading dark matter hypothesis contradicted gravitational theory, which would mean one or the other was wrong, and you correctly noted that gravitational theory has been verified extensively, strongly suggesting you thought non-baryonic dark matter was ruled out.
You said claiming otherwise was "dogmatic in the extreme".
What I suggested was that people who insist it is right have a very poor grasp of the scientific method. At present it appears to be a very strong hypothesis. That's great.
Nobody is insisting that it is irrefutable. "Very strong hypothesis" is a much better description -- much stronger than most people, including you, are suggesting. The observation of the phenomenon we call dark matter is, at this point, essentially a fact, and that may be what the people are talking about.
I like to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about any observational science that, for reasons of scale or scope, cannot (or has yet to) be proven in a laboratory setting.
That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But it would be helpful if you treated skeptics with skepticism, and looked into their arguments a little closer, or looked more into what evidence does exist for astronomical theory. You might be surprised to find out it's a lot more than you think, or were told by a "skeptic"!
Doubt is a good way to attack religion. Characterizing doubt as an attack on science is to turn science into a religion, and defeat its very purpose.
I'm not characterizing doubt itself as an attack on science.
I'm characterizing "doubt" that is founded in ignorance and the a-priori decision that the science must be wrong, as an attack on science. Which it is. Calling scientists arrogant and dogmatic because you don't understand the theory and because you can't believe they are right is not legitimate doubt. It's not useful scientific skepticism. It's hypocrisy.
While you certainly aren't as bad as many, since information you were unaware of appears to affect your opinion, this is still basically what you were doing -- calling every scientist working on non-baryonic dark matter a dogmatist for not admitting your (incorrect) argument proved them wrong. It's funny how you say doubt is a good way to attack religion, while simultaneously doing everything you can (including the topic of this post) to imply science is a religion and thus attack it via doubt.
Step one to being a useful scientific critic: Stop using arrogance and dogmatism to claim all scientists working in a particular field are arrogant and dogmatic.
Personally, I don't think the space lab's religion is any of our business.
I dunno... it could be a problem if it's a strict 6000-yr Creationist.
NASA: Okay MSL, send us the data from the last sample analysis.
MSL: I'll save some bandwidth and just give you the summary. No life, no precursors.
NASA: Okay, but if you could please just send us the raw data, that'd be great. This sample looked really promising and...
MSL: I said NO LIFE!
Your link was busted, had an @ at the end which I got too when trying to copy the link. :(
But who cares about that! We've been searching for likely dark matter candidates in deep dark holes with ultra-sensitive detectors, when this whole time it's been posting to slashdot!
Sorry couldn't resist. ;)
The question I have is why so many people are so antagonistic to the very notion of dark matter, routinely calling the people who suggest it... "arrogant" and the like.
Personally I think the AC (perhaps unintentionally) nailed it -- it's part of a larger anti-science movement that considers the conclusions of science confusing, uncomfortable, or politically unattractive, and therefore seeks to discredit not just the particular theories but science in general. They do this by dressing up their ignorance with a thin veneer of scientific criticism in order to paint the professional scientists as the ones who are arrogant, ignorant, and arguing out of belief not evidence or reason.
Dark matter gets singled out because it sounds weird (especially if you know nothing about it) and like scientists are just making things up (especially if...). And if they're just making that up, then maybe they're just making up global warming, or evolution, or the age of the earth.
Even if they aren't against any of those particular theories, it's still just part of a general anti-science trend where people start with their conclusion -- the scientists are wrong because I don't understand them and I'm so smart that's not possible unless they're wrong -- and then work backwards to the kind of posts you see here. Accusing scientists of arrogance and dogmatism.
I mean look at the GP. They says it's "dogmatic in the extreme" not to admit that non-baryonic matter violates the law of gravity, clearly demonstrating that they are arguing out of ignorance and a belief that dark matter theory can't be true. The hypocrisy is astounding.
The world makes me sad. But data like this makes me happy. It's an exciting time in physics no matter what the doubters say and I can't wait to see where it leads.
And yet the very notion of "non-baryonic matter" challenges laws as fundamental and thoroughly-established as laws of gravitation.
Uh no it doesn't. Why do you think that? Who told you that? Gravitational theory itself has nothing to say on the subject of baryonic vs non-baryonic matter, and another thoroughly-established theory, the Standard Model, has predicted non-baryonic matter which has also been subsequently verified to exist (google up neutrinos, W and Z gauge bosons).
As the more detailed link on spacetelescope.com (EU hubble site) explains, this data actually confirms General Relativity in the relationship between lensing and red shift, plus confirms dark matter, plus confirms dark energy (accelerating universal expansion).
Multiple hypothesis and theories all come together and make a bunch of detailed predictions, that prediction is borne out to a T by actual experimental observation, that's called a phenomenal success.
Pretending otherwise is dogmatic in the extreme.
No your assumption that this causes all kinds of problems that it does not is dogmatic. Despite what you or whoever informed you thinks, the dark matter hypothesis is not inherently flawed. It's quite a good hypothesis, actually.
But further study is necessary, and the very true statement "we have no idea what it is" suggests to me that we don't even know if it really qualifies as matter. In that sense, calling it "dark matter" is misleading and potentially a case of multiplying entities. And having that pointed out should not embarrass or anger us.
It being matter is simply the leading hypothesis. And while it is understood that it might be something that isn't actually "matter" at all, that would be the case of needlessly multiplying entities. We know that weakly interacting matter exists. Adding in a completely new thing that acts like matter but isn't would require a very good theory and some very solid experimental evidence to back it up. Hypothetically possible at this point, but way more out there than it being matter.
In the meantime, the GP was not quite right, as we do have some good ideas what it could be, though of course we haven't confirmed it. The Neutralino is a leading candidate, and we may be closing in on confirmation of its existence.
get your ass down to the IEEE who actually have an idea of whats really going on
LOL.
Yeah right. The IEEE know that Electric Universe is a bunch of horesshit, because they understand how electromagnetism actually works, which cannot be said of any of the EU idiots. EU proposes that the solar wind - which is a quasi-neutral plasma consisting of equal amounts of positively and negatively changed particles -- is created by an electric field emanating from the sun.
Q.E.D. They're idiots.
I guess this is the first time scientists were able to actually go from saying "There's dark matter 'somewhere'" to "Look at this data, we were able to indirectly locate some of it".
They have been able to locate some of it before, just the scale here is unprecedented. It was previous discoveries of dark matter outside colliding galaxies that put dark matter well ahead of alternative explanations.
Cool thing, it might just get us a step closer to understanding the whole subject better.
Indeed.
...how they know it's lensing, and that the stars aren't just positioned like that?
Much like with regular lenses, there's more to it than just a change in apparent position.
To me still a imaginary excuse, based on the arrogance of not being able to admit that the math is wrong, but instead calling the universe wrong! ^^ [But a good {and compact!} explanation will of course change my mind.]
Once we discovered extra-galactic dark matter, it became really hard to find a different explanation. Coming up with a way to modify gravity to not need dark matter (but still explain everything "the math" explains perfectly) was hard enough. Once you had to modify gravity to not even point at the known center of mass, it kinda becomes unworkable.
And people were trying to eliminate the need for dark matter! In contrast to this somewhat weird sounding definition of "arrogance", there are physicists around the globe who are arrogant enough to think that they're smarter than whoever came up with "the math", and they could be the ones to prove the theory wrong and present a new one. One that would be named after them.
Or Newton again, in the case of MOND. It's still name-in-history(well, physics) books type stuff.
Anyway, although gravitational lensing has plenty of evidence already, this data actually confirms another aspect of the predicted lensing effect and its relation to redshift, provides yet more evidence for dark matter, and even corroborates universal expansions. Multiple theories and predictions working in concert and completely consistent with observation. That's what you call a slam dunk. The game isn't over, but there's a reason this is the favored math at this point in time: it works.