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Particle physics has a pretty good track record of inventing undetected particles to solve missing item problems, then finding that particle later. I'd guess we
by ChrisLomont 4y ago
Particle physics has a pretty good track record of inventing undetected particles to solve missing item problems, then finding that particle later. I'd guess we're up to hundreds of such particles like this so far, with really big finds being positrons (and all anti-partickes, needed when adding relativity to spin), neutrinos (needed to account for missing mass), all the quarks (needed for certain symmetries, among others), and the Higgs bison itself (needed to explain masses).
So don't discount adding currently undetected things as explanations for surprising measurements. It's been extremely fruitful.
- beeforpork 4y agoI want a Higgs bison steak, please! :-) Medium rare!
- ncmncm 4y agoGot no objections to inventing particles to take up and carry off whatever bit of stuff has to conserved: neutrinos, virtual particles, gluons, what-have-you. I don't really even object to inventing five times the mass of the known universe. It just feels, as I said, un-parsimonious. It feels quite a lot like inventing God to patch a "missing link" in your evolutionary succession. Maybe you'll find God there somewhere, but it doesn't seem like the first thing to try. So, maybe dark matter really will turn out to be an ordinary axion or something detectable only if you manage to squint just right, and God just loved those so much that almost everything is them, and we are all made out of just leftover scraps. Maybe there are dozens of elementary axions, with relationships and exciting interactions we can never figure out because we can't touch them in any way but gravitationally. But I still want to know how they cool.
- kahnclusions 4y agoI don’t think you’re giving enough credit to physicists. Dark matter isn’t just adding a fudge/“God” parameter to the equations to make the numbers work. The “stuff” that’s thought to be missing is described with very precise properties… the fact that it’s “dark” means something, the fact that it’s “matter” means something.
- ChrisLomont 4y agoWell, in this case they're not just inventing nonsense to fix one little thing. There are a lot of various pieces of evidence, all pointing to this fix. If you want to patch up a lot of little pieces of evidence, each with it's own magic, that would be even more "un-parsimonious". The evidence for dark matter is pretty solid. As this [1] article states, while giving 5 independent reasons scientists think dark matter exists, "No other idea explains even two of these". Wikipedia lists eleven different places it shows up. The research literature has more. And AFAIK there is no other unified (or even close to unified) explanation for all these observational pieces of evidence. [1] https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-dark-matter-exists-a122bd606ba8 https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
- ncmncm 4y agoThey would be more persuasive if they were seen to be working on the observations it is manifestly incompatible with.
- vimax 4y agoOn the flip side, why would you expect us to be equipped to observe more than 20% of matter give the narrow range of our vision and hearing? Anything that doesn't interact strongly at our scale wouldn't be useful evolutionarily.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoSadly, the Higgs bison has been extinct since the last ice age. Too bad, it would have been wonderful to see such a beast. (Lovely typo.)