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The available evidence includes many galaxies. "Seems to have too much mass" and "seems not to have too much mass" are both things that a correct theory has to
by vba616 5y ago
The available evidence includes many galaxies. "Seems to have too much mass" and "seems not to have too much mass" are both things that a correct theory has to explain. It's not sufficient to explain one at a time with kettle logic.
Are you sure that any theory which allows for different things happening in different locations is inherently and unavoidably meaningless? Or is there something else that bothers you?
I would like to understand why people such as yourself viscerally dismiss "dark matter" as if it were inconsistent with all science and rational thinking. Can you describe what's obviously special about it compared to all of the other things we can't see and take for granted?
I assume we all accept the idea of matter that is invisible because it is cold and doesn't emit light...there's nothing particularly weird about asteroids and planets adrift far from stars that are "dark" due to lack of light, right?
And electromagnetic radiation that we can't see is everyday stuff right? Like radio waves, and ultraviolet, and infrared, and x-rays? There's nothing weird about feeling the heat from something and not seeing the rays that carry it, correct?
Everybody knows that nuclear radiation can kill you while being completely invisible, right? Gamma rays and neutrons don't look like anything.
It's not weird that gases are invisible, like air. We all accept that air is around us and without contaminants is transparent.
Gravity itself is invisible, and we take for granted that it exists. Gravitational wave detectors correlate sometimes with visual events, meaning the invisible gravitational waves have definitely traveled over unimaginable distances, passing through everything in the way without being affected.
Neutrino detectors are old hat at this point. Neutrinos are incredibly unlikely to interact with what they pass through, so the detectors have gigantic amounts of material underground with detectors to see mindbogglingly rare flashes when a neutrino hits something. I think neutrinos may still be a candidate for dark matter.
Sound is normally invisible, even though it is the motion of atoms around us which are real.
Heat is invisible within a normal range. If a frying pan is 350 degrees it doesn't look different from 250 degrees.
Electricity in a wire is invisible. Magnetic fields are invisible.
Even lasers made of light itself are invisible if you look from the side and there's no dust in the air.
Are any of these besides "dark matter" unbelievable?
- JackFr 5y agoThe fundamental difference is that we observe and interact with gases, electricity, heat and sound. Dark matter is a plug. We observe the mass of galaxies and based on our understanding of gravity the galaxies should fly apart. The most parsimonious explanation is that there is a large amount of matter we don’t/can’t observe. We don’t observe it and we don’t interact with it. While it’s the best explanation we currently have, it rankles to have to admit that the majority of the universe is made of something literally unobservable to us except through gravitational effects.
- ericbarrett 5y agoWe do observe dark matter though, just not directly through the electromagnetic spectrum. Much as the first extrasolar planets were found through deviations in stars' movement before we first imaged them.
- dnautics 5y agono. We infer dark matter. To use gravitation to say "there might be dark matter" and then later say 'dark matter exists because we see gravitational anomalies' is begging the question.
- colordrops 5y agoEverything is infered. That's why pretty much every scientific model eventually gets overturned or at least refined.
- dnautics 5y agono, you can deduce a new observation that is then observed. In the case of dark matter, this would most convincingly take the form of a multimodal observation. Predict that X particle is DM. It then has interaction Y that isn't gravitational. Then Y, which we were not looking for yet, is found.
- thewakalix 5y ago
- zuminator 5y agoI don't have any problem with the existence of dark matter. But one way that it's different from all those other things is that we can generate them or observe them locally. We have landed on asteroids. Heat, gamma rays, electricity, neutrinos, gases, all can be made in labs. Yet if there are dark matter particles, we haven't found them yet. Perhaps dark matter is just a victim of its own success. If it were just referred to as non-baryonic matter of a currently unknown construction instead of a catchy name like dark matter, perhaps few people would care.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoIt's obvious why though: most of the things in the universe can be observed using the electromagnetic spectrum, but dark matter doesn't interact with that. Instead we have to use gravitation, a force some 36 orders of magnitude weaker. That means we pretty much only observe it when the scale is large enough that we can notice its effects, which means it'll be very hard to observe on any kind of local scale.