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As a complete lay person, I’ve always understood dark matter to be our generation’s aether. Obviously there’s an undetectable medium in space for light to propa
by Swizec 3y ago
As a complete lay person, I’ve always understood dark matter to be our generation’s aether. Obviously there’s an undetectable medium in space for light to propagate through, how else could it work? We know from all our best observations and models that everything propagates through a medium.
Dark matter has a similar vibe, we need it for our best models measurements and understanding to work. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a crucial detail we’ll discover later that makes dark matter sound as silly as aether. Or we could find a way to directly detect/measure it! That too would be cool
- miramba 3y agoI never heard of aether before, so here is a reference for anyone else: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
- nobodyandproud 3y agoThat’s surprising. Proving/disproving the existence of a medium was the whole point of the Michaelson-Morley experiment.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoDisproving the existence of a medium with certain expected properties and behaviours - one of which was that light travelled through it like waves through water. The reality is that light travels through spacetime and has completely unexpected and non-intuitive properties, one of which is an absolutely constant velocity. This doesn't mean spacetime isn't a medium of some kind, it means spacetime isn't a medium of any familiar or intuitive kind, and the old waves-on-water metaphor is too simple to explain it. QFT suggests spacetime is filled with fields of all kinds and particles are excitations of these fields. But what these "fields" actually are, and what they're made of, and why there are certain kinds of fields and not others, and why they operate with relativistic geometry, is a complete mystery.
- tekla 3y agoAre you trying to discount Aether as a pseudoscience versus a serious theory? You're italicizing "Obviously" which makes me think that.
- Swizec 3y agoNo it was a serious theory that seemed obvious and logical at the time. But now it seems so obviously wrong that it’s almost laughable anyone could ever take it seriously. See also: phrenology. Same phenomenon, different field.
- j16sdiz 3y agoLiterally every Lorentz-violating theory introduce an aether like term. And, yes, they are published on peer reviewed journals every years. Not mainstream, but there are reputable physicist taking it seriously
- jacquesm 3y agoIf you think of 'Aether as a possible medium that we haven't discovered yet and that may not exist' then you wouldn't be too far off. The difference between that and pseudo-science is obvious: the existence of Aether can be proven (or disproven), the typical pseudo-science stays very far away from naming any testable hypothesis and instead focuses on how the proponents of pseudo-science are being repressed. But let me point you to a youtube link that will lay it all out in great detail...
- hutzlibu 3y ago"But now it seems so obviously wrong that it’s almost laughable anyone could ever take it seriously" Was it really that laughable? "Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a consistent idea of the constitution of the aether, there can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform body of which we have any knowledge.” (James Clerk Maxwell) We discovered there is no true vacuum. And we still don't know how exactly electromagnetic waves travel, or how gravitaion works. So the old modell of aether is clearly wrong, but before we have not come up with a consistent model explaining all of it, I would not call it laughable. It made sense at the time. And to me there still is some appeall to the basic concept, that there must be something allowing the spreading of the various waves. Or is that question solved by now?