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> I find it very arrogant to believe that our current model is _the_ model. I think it would be arrogant, but I've never met anyone who studies physics and bel
by Cogito 7y ago
> I find it very arrogant to believe that our current model is _the_ model.
I think it would be arrogant, but I've never met anyone who studies physics and believes this (though I wouldn't be surprised if some exist). It's not arrogant, however, to be dogmatic when faced with ideas that are incompatible with established models. It's unreasonable to claim someone must be using a broken model, because dark matter and dark energy looks wrong.
Scientific models are good when they are predictive, and powerful when they are simple.
It's incredibly rare for a model-in-use to be wrong - we would never use something that has no predictive power - but every day scientific models are tested, refined, expanded, and simplified in order to make them either more predictive (better accuracy) or more powerful (describe more things).
Sometimes this does manifest as being 'broken at the edges' but not always. Sometimes a model is just fuzzy, and improvements add resolution to every prediction.
- ggambetta 7y agoI generally agree with all of your points. > Scientific models are good when they are predictive, and powerful when they are simple. [...] every day scientific models are tested, refined, expanded, and simplified [...] It seems to me that dark matter goes directly against this. The current model of gravity can't explain certain observations, so we come up with a form of matter and energy that we can't observe in any way, and doesn't interact with anything, except with precisely the one thing we need for our observations to match the theory. A theory that hasn't even been reconciled with quantum mechanics yet! Smells super fishy to me. But as I say, my knowledge of physics and astrophysics is super basic, and I wouldn't call myself "someone who studies physics" in any meaningful way. I understand your feeling that it's unreasonable for me to criticise the status quo because dark energy looks wrong, as I have no idea about the underlying math.
- Cogito 7y ago> so we come up with a form of matter and energy The current top comment by superqd[0] probably deals with this best. Maybe there is a literal dark energy and dark matter, but the thing that is manifested is a 'correction' term in the way we use these equations, and it so happens that using those correction terms makes these equations more accurate. I'd almost go so far as to say the uncorrected equations are a model that is broken at the edges, and dark energy and dark matter are simply a quantification of how broken they are (with the added benefit that adding them to the equations makes the model better). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21279200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21279200
- ggambetta 7y agoThat makes a lot of sense, thanks!