4 ms·
I've had a number of discussions with lay-folk who think we have in fact discovered a new/exotic form of matter. That is what gets lost. What we have discover
by superqd 7y ago
I've had a number of discussions with lay-folk who think we have in fact discovered a new/exotic form of matter. That is what gets lost. What we have discovered is that something went wrong in our predictions, which could be explained as a new form of matter (or more than one new form of matter), but, could also be explained by changing our models in any number of ways, etc. This is not at all obvious to the public.
I say "we" in the broadest sense of physicists, as I did study that for my grad/undergrad, but do not practice in the field (I now do the computering).
- davrosthedalek 7y agoThat may well be the case, but that is not caused by the term "dark matter", but by people not making enough of an effort to distinguish between leading hypothesis and discovery. That could happen with pretty much any name.
- superqd 7y agoI'm pretty sure it wouldn't happen with the term Dark Hypothesis, or Dark Inconsistency. Or something cooler than those :^) . I think the words 'matter' and 'energy' are the confusion because they are already overloaded with meaning, even if not properly understood by the public, they still have some sort of idea of what those are. It might be interesting if we had a standard, and publicly known, word or phrase used when talking about scientific results that find an inconsistency between reality and theory (not just slang). Like, "today physicists discovered a Theory Bug when applying Einstein's general relativity to galaxies" or some such. Something cooler than that though.