6 ms·
Excellent! Dark matter is a kludge, the modern "ether". It's clear that we are missing something - maybe this is it...
by bradley13 3y ago
Excellent! Dark matter is a kludge, the modern "ether". It's clear that we are missing something - maybe this is it...
- V-2 3y agoPhlogiston, C-field... the list of such "placeholders" is pretty long.
- eigenket 3y agoThe list includes the neutrino (added to explain missing momentum in observed nuclear decays), the Higgs (added to explain mass which would otherwise not make sense in electro-weak theory) and arguably antimatter (added to fix incompatibility between special relativity and quantum mechanics). Reality is more complicated than slogans would suggest. Sometimes adding new types of matter to our understanding of physics was the right choice, sometimes it wasn't.
- analog31 3y agoAnother example might be anomalies in planetary orbits that could be explained by a missing planet.
- eigenket 3y agoThis is how Neptune was discovered, for example. Astronomers noticed Uranus was moving "wrong" based on their physics of the time and worked out where Neptune should be based on that. When they pointed their telescopes there they found it.
- sesm 3y agoDark matter is an observation, that several independent phenomena give the same estimation of baryonic matter mass, which is roughly 5 times higher than estimations of visible matter. Does the article explain or even enumerate all of them? At a glance, it is just a ‘quantum’ justification for MOND, which only deals with galaxy rotation curves.
- jacobsimon 3y agoYeah we should stop calling it dark matter and call it “missing matter” or “the unexplained matter issue” or something that is more obviously a placeholder.
- commentenjoyer 3y agoWhy should the academic community care about your opinion? Dark is a very accurate term
- T-A 3y agoNot really. "Transparent matter" would be better.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> "Transparent matter" would be better Dark implies the unknown. The Dark Ages weren’t literally dark, we just don’t have a lot of written sources from the era. Transparent matter implies a known property about something we don’t know. To the extent dark matter is a problematic term, it’s in the matter but.
- T-A 3y agoDark is ambiguous: it can mean light is not emitted, but it can also mean light is absorbed. Even going with the first one, it's an incomplete description at best. "Dark" matter does not simply fail to emit light; it does not interact with light at all (other than by gravity, and that only bends it slightly, no absorption or emission involved). Transparent fully captures this. The overloaded meanings of those words which you are invoking are not relevant to the description of a physical property.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> "Dark" matter does not simply fail to emit light; it does not interact with light at all We don’t know this. We have a parcel of observations from which we are trying to intuit a cause.
- mtillman 3y agoWorth noting the author disagrees with the theory and states as much a few times in the article.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoDark matter is a proposed explanation for an observation, that's all. All these other theories (MOND, etc) are also kludges. Nobody has a satisfactory explanation for galaxy rotation speeds, yet.