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Study suggests a 'dark mirror' universe within ours where atoms failed to form
- tiagod 3y agoThe paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12286 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12286
- dang 3y agoUrl changed from https://futurism.com/the-byte/dark-matter-mirror-universe https://futurism.com/the-byte/dark-matter-mirror-universe, which points to this.
- SoftTalker 3y ago"Dark matter is the mysterious, unknown substance that seems to make up the bulk of all the mass in the universe; for every 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of regular matter, there's roughly 10 pounds (5 kg) of dark matter." ... "This symmetry would help explain why dark matter and regular matter have roughly the same abundances." So 1 is "roughly the same" as 5, or is this an orders-of-magnitude comparison?
- yokaze 3y ago"Roughly the same abundances" meaning, why we usually (but not always) find evidence of dark matter in places, where we see regular matter.
- delecti 3y agoIt seems that yes, they're saying that 1 and 5 are roughly the same. Basically, why is the matter in the universe ~20% "non-dark", and not 1%, or .001%?
- timeagain 3y agoThere’s that old joke that computer scientists think any numbers within a power of two are equal, physicists think any numbers within a power of 10 are equal, and mathematicians only distinguish between finite numbers and infinity. Edit: and engineers are as precise as they are paid to be.
- edu 3y agoAnd cows are spherical!
- pvaldes 3y agoAt some point of its lives. Yes. Is an universal true. Then the zygote starts splitting.
- munificent 3y agoFor software engineers, the only numbers are 0, 1, and infinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule
- groby_b 3y agobetween finite numbers and infinities. Plural, please, the discerning mathematician keeps a stable of infinities ;)
- Gibbon1 3y agoHaving proved the contribution of these second and third order terms are between plus 10 and 20% over the range of interest we will multiply by a constant 1.15
- xjay 3y ago"The 80/20 rule"/The Pareto principle > Mathematically, the 80/20 rule is roughly described by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters. Many natural phenomena distribute according to power law statistics. It is an adage of business management that "80% of sales come from 20% of clients." [1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
- hatthew 3y agoCould you elaborate on how this is related? To me, the 80/20 rule and the 1:5 matter ratio seem like entirely separate concepts that coincidentally share the same ratio.
- robertlagrant 3y ago1:4, no?
- hatthew 3y agoGood point, I wasn't thinking and I equated ratios and fractions. That should make the 80/20 rule even less related to the 1:5 matter ratio?
- delecti 3y agoWell 80:20 and 5:1 are pretty similar ratios. Though really the issue with the comparison is that it implies that 80% (or ~83.3%) of the <something> is correlated to the light matter, and the other 20% (or ~16.7%) of the <something> is correlated to the dark matter. Maybe eventually we'll learn enough about dark matter and discover that, yeah actually, 1/6 of the life, or unobtanium, or whatever, is actually in the dark matter. But for now, I agree that the Pareto principle seems pretty irrelevant.
- labster 3y agoIn astronomy and cosmology, 1 and 5 are the same number. Only the orders of magnitude matter when talking about large things. At atomic scales and in photon length the precise numbers do matter.
- PaulHoule 3y ago… if dark matter is something totally different from light matter there might be 1000x more of it.
- almostnormal 3y ago> In astronomy and cosmology, 1 and 5 are the same number. Only the orders of magnitude matter when talking about large things. At atomic scales and in photon length the precise numbers do matter. "I am not interested in a more accurate value." said no scientist ever. It's just easier to measure small things using big tools than to measure big things using small tools, hence astronomy has a disadvantage. Another one is that it isn't easy to create any experiments.
- BurningFrog 3y agoAlso in astronomy, all elements other than hydrogen and helium are considered “metals”: https://public.nrao.edu/blogs/astronomy-is-metal/ https://public.nrao.edu/blogs/astronomy-is-metal/ It's really not an exact science...
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoWell, at astronomical scales, everything's mostly just hydrogen with tiny bits of hard stuff mixed in. :p
- ClassyJacket 3y ago>It's really not an exact science... I think this is the first time I've ever heard someone use this phrase in reference to an actual science
- rolltrunhert 3y agobashing on "big science" seems to be the latest and greatest of the crapflood that is social media today i saw a video addressing it the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xglo2n2AMGc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xglo2n2AMGc
- Geisterde 3y agoWell, I would say social sciences arent exact, economics might be a hard science of rules, but the outcomes are subject to too many factors to predict precisely, but it is still a science. Though, well, I am not really qualified to speak on such things, but I would imagine we are fairly precise in the field you guys are talking about.
- pengstrom 3y agoEconomics is a social science, the study of how people interact with things of value. It cannot be hard, since it has a feedback loop.
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- skyechurch 3y agoSince no one knows what dark matter is, there's no known connection between it and real matter, so 1:5 seems coincidental if it's free to be anything within the range 0 .. infinity. But there's no reason to think there is or isn't any connection, since nobody knows what it is. Cosmology error bars can be very big, depending on the measurement. 500% difference is certainly bigger than some, but since the vacuum energy density appears to differ by a factor of 10^60 from prediction, it's not necessarily a show stopper. Arguably the biggest discovery in cosmology in the last few decades is how much we do not understand at all.
- woah 3y agoWaiting for the sci fi movie
- AlienRobot 3y agoDark Hero: The Revenge of the Failed Atoms A 2 hour long liberal movie adaptation of Hollow Knight. Release date: before Silksong.
- StevenXC 3y agoI've seen stranger things.
- pmlnr 3y agoWould a mirror universe Star Trek episode be enough?
- tanvach 3y agoCurious about conservation of charge - if all dark protons were to decay then there must be also an abundance of dark positrons?
- ars 3y agoYou misread the article, it was not saying there are dark protons. It was using proton decay as an analogy. But to answer your question anyway, if a proton did decay then yes, it would be to a positron plus something else.
- ben_w 3y agoAlong similar lines, I've been wondering (I am not a professional) about what would happen if charge wasn't always conserved. What would violating that symmetry do? If such a bias was in one direction, like the matter-antimatter near-symmetry appears to be, what would the universe look like if there was a small non-zero charge density everywhere that couldn't be fully cancelled out? Alas, my understanding of physics is only enough to look like a kook, which almost entirely prevents serious answers from people capable of providing them.
- op00to 3y agoMy lay opinion: Without symmetry, such as in conservation of momentum, you’d be able to create and destroy energy arbitrarily. Maybe like magic? Let’s say there were no proton/electron charge symmetry. That could mean atoms would be unstable. Maybe do some imagineering from this point!
- regpertom 3y agoI’ve wondered what it would take to be able to create energy arbitrarily. Gravity and mass and light seem to be suss in that context. I’ve been having a laugh to myself about the aether, a comment in here mentions Hinduism also. But if there’s some big goo of stuff, then could it be that the ‘perfection of the universe’ (sorry I know that’s a loaded phrase but chill) is what can emerge into reality from that goo? If there wasn’t symmetry or whatever, then it couldn’t get to us. Kind of like the atoms that make us would have remained as mud instead of standing up and looking around? As someone else says encrypted vs plain space. Figure out some suss things like what’s going on with light and some kind of arbitrary infinity awaits? And those things are suss because they’re operating at the interface/affected by both ‘worlds’, like flying around in atmosphere; suddenly there’s sound barriers and what not. Which is why (I think) we scratch our heads and wonder like, what’s the deal with electrons?
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoSo that's where we go when we die?
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoAnd now it’s a sci-fi horror movie.
- generic92034 3y agoOr when we sublime? :) https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sublimed https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sublimed
- amriksohata 3y agoUnrelated, but somewhat interesting in Hindu cosmology and ancient scriptures the edges of the bubble of the universe store everything happening, that has happened and is to happen.
- bookofjoe 3y ago"The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones." — Albert Einstein in a letter to a friend
- CyanBird 3y agoSame in actual cosmology, it is called the holographic principle. The concept is that 3D bodies can be losslessly represented on a distant 2D plane which envelops them or alongside the spherical perimeter of a black hole if they are squished to it It is not all that applicable, but it is interesting to think about and there are people studying it
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoCan we tap into this to make predictions about the future?
- amriksohata 3y agoOnly spiritual beings on other planetary systems can, who have "siddhi" (powers beyond mundane earthly humans). The message of the Gita however is tapping into all of this is a waste of time as you want to escape from it (moksha/salvation/liberation)
- ChrisClark 3y agoI have joked before about the apparent lack of life in the universe, that we are just living in unencrypted 'plain text' mode. But all the developed aliens have moved to encrypted space. ;)
- disadvantage 3y agoHumans have went dark considerably over the years. I don't know the exact date when encrypted comms became the norm, but we rarely transmit plaintext out into the Universe anymore. We still leak plaintext, but the vast majority is encrypted now.
- sva_ 3y agoTV? FM Radio?
- eep_social 3y agoBoth switched to digital broadcast format years ago. Looks like FM might be simulcast. And I am definitely not an expert so I can’t speak to the contents but I would assume encoded but not encrypted.
- andrewflnr 3y agoEverything is encoded somehow. That's not terribly germane to whether it's encrypted.
- eep_social 3y agoNaively, I guess that non-digital signal decoding is trivial compared to digital signal decoding where the signal might be indistinguishable from encryption without a reference spec or unencoded sample.
- andrewflnr 3y ago
- aaroninsf 3y ago[flagged]
- newaccount7g 3y agoMan this abstraction sounds like another abstraction that sounds cool wows!
- screenoverload 3y ago[dead]
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThey could call it "the upside down".
- akomtu 3y agoThe idea of metaphysics isn't foreign to science, as I see. Once the science acknowledges that 90% of our universe is invisible something, and that something has a structure, it's one step from the hypothesis that there are lifeforms in that "dark mirror" universe.
- monero-xmr 3y agoAt least the abstract says some experimental verification is possible. When physicists start proposing innumerable parallel universes that can never be proven nor falsified, they may as well be proposing a religion.
- Syzygies 3y agoThis is the same website that publishes stories with ignorant, idiotic headlines like "There's an asteroid out there worth $100,000 quadrillion. Why haven't we mined it?". Um, don't write about economics if you don't understand it. Doesn't HN have a policy mandating original sources?
- RugnirViking 3y agoThat headline sounds like it could start a really interesting discussion on economics, actually. Of course, worth is meaningless when you get to quantities that large. But there are costs, and benefits, of mining it. And analyzing weird interactions and schools of thought from classical economics on those would be super interesting
- Syzygies 3y agoIt's easier than that. You access the asteroid, the prices drop.
- RugnirViking 3y agothats the most surface level, obvious concequence. Thats why I said " worth is meaningless when you get to quantities that large." But how much? how much would it have to drop to make the cost of launching too high, when it might give you monopoly power over the supply of an entire fundamental chemical element. How much would you be able to exploit that monopoly ? political consequences? even outside of anticompetetive practices, When the price of a fundamental good drops like that, new industries and new uses become viable. Sometimes the market then grows to the point that you make more money than you might expect
- 8bitsrule 3y ago>one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. Of course it could be that cosmology is wrong. There was a time (until 99 years ago) that the Milky Way was the universe.
- eru 3y agoDo keep in mind that when science is 'wrong' in that way, the new theory still has to explain all the observations that the old theory got right.
- simpaticoder 3y ago>Of course it could be that cosmology is wrong. That's true, and physicists are actively working on that possibility, too, under the umbrella term "modified gravity".
- timeagain 3y agoEvery scientist is painfully aware that their field of science is “wrong”. That’s why they are employed. It’s just the least wrong thing anyone has thought of yet.
- eru 3y ago> Dark matter is the mysterious, unknown substance that seems to make up the bulk of all the mass in the universe; for every 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of regular matter, there's roughly 10 pounds (5 kg) of dark matter. The units here are pretty silly. They are only talking about proportions, so they could have gone with banana-equivalents, and it would still have worked.
- aik 3y agoI think standard units are more common even if proportions. Not sure who speaks in bananas.
- incompatible 3y agoThey could have just said "5 times as much" to save us the bother of doing the calculation ... which needs a tiny bit of care because of the dual units.
- projektfu 3y agoOr tonnes, which has meaning in both systems.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThe calculation involves dividing 5 by 1; most people should be able to handle it. Note that they've correctly not bothered with providing equivalent quantities in each unit - 5 kilograms is 11 pounds, not 10 pounds. This doesn't matter, because the ratio 10 to 2 is equal to the ratio 5 to 1. But it does raise the question of why they provide pounds at all, and if they're going to, why not just say "for every pound (or kilogram) of matter, there are roughly 5 pounds (or kilograms) of dark matter".
- reaperman 3y ago> why not just say "for every pound (or kilogram) of matter, there are roughly 5 pounds (or kilograms) of dark matter". Your suggestion is better writing. As for why? Likely the author and editors rushed the content or lack strong skills in this particular style of writing. The author Paul Sutter seems to have a strong background in writing. The original sentence is awkward enough that it looks like it was written by one person and edited by another. > Dark matter is the mysterious, unknown substance that seems to make up the bulk of all the mass in the universe; for every 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of regular matter, there's roughly 10 pounds (5 kg) of dark matter. If I had to guess, I bet it only originally had one set of units and an editor added converted units to match some style guide. I doubt that Paul would have originally gone with > for every 2 pounds of regular matter, there's roughly 10 pounds of dark matter. Because 2:10 ratio is not a natural thing to write. He's an astrophysicist who did post-doc fellowships in Paris and Italy, so most likely he submitted an article with SI units: > for every 1 kilogram of regular matter, there's roughly 5 kilograms of dark matter. And I bet a livescience.com editor changed that to pounds to match a US-centric style guide.
- kromem 3y agoMy favorite works to date regarding a mirror universe answering cosmology open questions is the stuff Neil Turok's been spitting out over the last decade: https://insidetheperimeter.ca/a-mirror-universe-might-tell-a-simpler-story-neil-turok/ https://insidetheperimeter.ca/a-mirror-universe-might-tell-a... Highly recommend for anyone into this topic.
- nocoder 3y agoTangential - what is the a good book to catchup on the latest state of cosmological research?
- devaiops9001 3y agoThere are non-mainstream explanations for how what keeps the universe going that have a much simpler model and a much better track record on predictability. There are six prevailing different incompatible theories for black holes and if you ask someone which of the six theories they are talking about when they insist that black holes do exist it's very rare that they will be able to tell you which. "The invisible substance called dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology." Gee I wonder why. Maybe it's because your goofy dark matter model is so broken you're borderline just making s** up.