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He expressed it badly. The point I think he is trying to say is that dark matter can be neither proven nor disproven at this time with the information available
by kobeya 9y ago
He expressed it badly. The point I think he is trying to say is that dark matter can be neither proven nor disproven at this time with the information available. An intellectually honest person should remain open to both possibilities.
You can say "I am not convinced of the dark matter hypothesis."
But unless you have information the rest of us do not, you can't really say "I deny the dark matter hypothesis could be real."
- kradem 9y agoI [too] don't think it's about bad wording, yet pure bad logic. The article is positioned on the principle that was imagined based on wrong assumtions of other theory and which acceptance will dissmiss the other theory. I'm not even being close to think of being positioned on a side there, but afaic one could easily take one in this subthread. TL; DR yep, dark matter could be denied no matter of the state of its understanding - just bring the better explanation of those irregularities its existence explains!
- boomboomsubban 9y agoAcceptance doesn't dismiss theories, evidence does. A physicist shouldn't truly deny anything, just look at the evidence and say it is not the best theory. Even with a better explanation, we can't be sure more information won't see the return of dark matter. Milgrom should understand this well, he's suggesting the return of the cosmological constant.
- kradem 9y agoForget dark matter, use the analogy from the article: afaik nobody has ever proven ether is not existing. I know nothing about dark matter, but I could play a zero-sum game based on this article content - just the way anybody else could play - and outcome of that game is according to this article proven theory of this guy denies dark matter and dark energy theory. And that's all, we could prove bad logic here without waiting for the third season of Dark Matter to be broadcasted.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago"Proven theory" isn't a thing, Milgrom is a scientist, he should be well aware of that. Using truth conditional logic here just doesn't make sense.
- kradem 9y agoThis subthread deals with the completely different issue, it's about bad logic. No matter how well Milgrom and/or his theory could be discredited, that doesn't change the fact we can dismiss something prior to fully understand it. It doesn't matter if that - what we dismissed - shapeshifts into something completely different (or similar...) afterward, on the contrary, regarding resources spent it would be sad if not.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago>This subthread deals with the completely different issue, it's about bad logic. No matter how well Milgrom and/or his theory could be discredited, that doesn't change the fact we can dismiss something prior to fully understand it It's not bad logic, it only seems like it is because you're approaching it from an Aristotlean view of logic. These things can't be proven, so dismissing them is never an option in science.
- kradem 9y agoWe're actually dealing with one complex sentence here, the second of these two: > But, dark matter isn't something to be denied. Because it isn't understood yet, to the point where we can doubt its existence I'm lousy in English and my knowledge of dark matter is irrelevant. With those two lemmas in mind, please answer the only question in this subthread: could something be dismissed if we don't fully understand it?
- boomboomsubban 9y agoNo, as the entire concept of "fully understand" is ridiculous. We can't fully understand anything, so if you assume the answer is yes then we could dismiss everything. The actual quote agrees with me here. If we understood it better the best you could do is doubt its existence.