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Except the very first experiment that was supposed to confirm the ether showed that there is no ether, while every astrophysical observation we made on any sca

Except the very first experiment that was supposed to confirm the ether showed that there is no ether, while every astrophysical observation we made on any scale [1] confirmed that there is dark matter. [1] https://www.twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1371141258236764160?lang=de https://www.twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1371141258236764...

dnautics 5y ago
We don't have any confirmation that it exists, we have more observations that Newton's law is wrong. Moreover, these observations collectively are unimodal; to date we only have observations of more gravitational discrepancies, not corroborating phenomena which correlate to the existing discrepancies.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > we have more observations that Newton's law is wrong No, we don't. We have observations that show that the motion of stars in galaxies is not what we would predict if we used our current laws of gravity with a distribution of matter that matches just what is visible to us. There are two possible hypotheses to explain these observations: (1) There is matter present that is not visible to us; (2) Our current laws of gravity are wrong and need to be modified. "Dark matter" is basically a name for #1; "MOND" and similar models are in category #2.
bopbeepboop 5y ago
What do you mean? Aether theories are the dominant model (“quantum fields” are renamed aethers), and we’ve directly detected aether waves with a scaled up version of the original experiment — which turned out not to be sensitive enough, because the aether is squishy rather than firm. LIGO is literally Michelson-Morley, but larger. Most of modern science is based on the techniques of Michelson-Morley. It’s a nearly prescient experiment — and it says more about us psychologically than the world at large we remember it as “wrong” rather than “not accurate enough”. LIGO proved them right. https://physics.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/physicsatmit_09_whatisspace_wilczek.pdf https://physics.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/physicsat...

dnautics 5y ago

We don't have any confirmation that it exists, we have more observations that Newton's law is wrong. Moreover, these observations collectively are unimodal; to date we only have observations of more gravitational discrepancies, not corroborating phenomena which correlate to the existing discrepancies.

pdonis 5y ago
> we have more observations that Newton's law is wrong No, we don't. We have observations that show that the motion of stars in galaxies is not what we would predict if we used our current laws of gravity with a distribution of matter that matches just what is visible to us. There are two possible hypotheses to explain these observations: (1) There is matter present that is not visible to us; (2) Our current laws of gravity are wrong and need to be modified. "Dark matter" is basically a name for #1; "MOND" and similar models are in category #2.

bopbeepboop 5y ago

What do you mean? Aether theories are the dominant model (“quantum fields” are renamed aethers), and we’ve directly detected aether waves with a scaled up version of the original experiment — which turned out not to be sensitive enough, because the aether is squishy rather than firm. LIGO is literally Michelson-Morley, but larger. Most of modern science is based on the techniques of Michelson-Morley. It’s a nearly prescient experiment — and it says more about us psychologically than the world at large we remember it as “wrong” rather than “not accurate enough”. LIGO proved them right. https://physics.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/physicsatmit_09_whatisspace_wilczek.pdf https://physics.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/physicsat...