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Study: Dark matter doesn't exist, the universe is 27B years old
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- Filligree 2y agoThank you for your submission of a proposed revolutionary theory to replace dark matter. Your new theory claims to be superior to dark matter models and will transform our understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, your theory will likely fail, because: [ ] It cannot explain galaxy rotation curves across all galaxy types. [ ] It fails to account for gravitational lensing observed in galaxy clusters. [ ] It cannot explain the Bullet Cluster observations where dark matter appears separated from normal matter. [ ] It is inconsistent with the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. [ ] It cannot explain the large-scale structure and formation of the universe. [ ] It introduces arbitrary parameters without physical justification. [ ] It lacks a sound theoretical foundation or violates established physics principles. [ ] It fails to explain the observed velocity dispersions in dwarf spheroidal galaxies. [ ] It cannot account for empirical relations like the Tully-Fisher relation. [ ] It cannot be tested or falsified by current or near-future experiments. [ ] Your claims are unfounded or exaggerated. —— I’m not a physicist, and cannot fill this in, but I thought I’d provide the template for the first physicist who turns up.
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- deknos 2y ago> It introduces arbitrary parameters without physical justification. you could argue the same about dark matter/energy. > It cannot be tested or falsified by current or near-future experiments. Did we actually directly observe dark matter or dark energy now?
- wavemode 2y ago> you could argue the same about dark matter/energy. Well, not really. The physical justification is, the multitude of observations that appear consistent with the theory that there is some form of matter out in space that does not interact with photons. It's not something someone just had a dream about one night - it's a real-world observation, with telescopes. If, tomorrow, a laboratory discovers a new or existing particle that is able to actually, or even just apparently, avoid interacting with photons and matter, then dark matter could be done and proven. By contrast, most dark matter competitors require us to rethink large swathes of what we know about physics and cosmology. That doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong, it just means the bar of skepticism is a bit higher.
- teamonkey 2y ago> Well, not really. The physical justification is, the multitude of observations that appear consistent with the theory that there is some form of matter out in space that does not interact with photons. It's not something someone just had a dream about one night - it's a real-world observation, with telescopes. This is it. Everything points towards it being some kind of invisible matter. Scientists know that the very idea is preposterous! But you can't make up some 'cleaner' hypothesis without also holding that idea up to the same standards as Cold Dark Matter, and to date they have tended not to.
- taylodl 2y agoThis hypothesis is based on the idea that the physics isn't uniform throughout the universe, a philosophical idea that has been debated for over a century and so far, all the evidence points to physics being uniform throughout the universe. Claiming physics isn't uniform throughout the universe is more problematic than positing the existence of dark matter/dark energy. Lacking any evidence for either position, the principle of Occam's Razor informs us to stick with dark matter/dark energy. One of the purposes of exercises such as this is to get people thinking of new ways to falsify existing models. So far, dark matter/dark energy are in remarkable alignment with observations. Falsifying either of these ideas would be huge.
- chrbr 2y agoThe paper calls out a few things that they didn't cover: > The CCC+TL model predicts the age of the Universe as 26.7 Gyr against the generally accepted value of 13.8 Gyr. This is of deep concern and needs the model validation against multiple observations, including BAOs, CMB, Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), and globular cluster ages. Our focus here is on BAOs. I am not in academia and therefore am not qualified to have strong opinions on any of this, but I do like the idea of papers not swinging for home runs all the time by explaining everything, and instead being happy with hitting a single by proposing something intriguing and asking for others to chime in.
- zigzag312 2y agoCan you also post a list of what dark matter models fail to explain or are inconsistent about?
- mr_mitm 2y agoThe dwarf galaxy problem might qualify: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_galaxy_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_galaxy_problem
- 1oooqooq 2y agobut doesn't the current models of DM also ticks all those boxes. and they were worked backwards to plug the ones they don't, right?
- OutOfHere 2y ago> Your claims are unfounded or exaggerated. That's not true though. It says in its abstract that it can fit the Type Ia supernovae Pantheon+ data as accurately as the ΛCDM model, and also fit the angular size of cosmic dawn galaxies observed by the JWST. It is the data produced by the JWST that has led to this model. The article goes on to say: > The galaxies observed in the early Universe, some less than 500 million years after the Big Bang, appear to have shapes, structures, and masses similar to those in existence for billions of years
- dang 2y agoDid you copy this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760747? I just noticed that the two comments are almost identical.
- Filligree 2y agoAbsolutely. More’s the pity that I cannot tag them, because they were 100% right. It was only nine days ago, and here’s the next one. Yet, we have several fields that are only indirectly coupled to EM — neutrinos come to mind - and if you graph the fundamental fields you get a rather sparse graph. It should be a surprise to no-one that there are disconnected segments.
- WithinReason 2y agoI wonder if CCC would also explain the Fermi paradox: We're alone because physical laws are exactly right for life only here, even the smallest change reduces the probability of intelligent life significantly
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- adventured 2y agoThe distances are so great and the duration + resources that it takes to cover that distance with high function and accuracy is so ridiculous, that it ends up being pointless to attempt it. Intelligent life expires long before it spreads widely. The answer to Fermi is that there's no point to expanse, which culls the effort given enough time (the exploration effort is very expensive in exchange for rapidly diminishing returns for most civilizations). Intelligent life that makes it to our stage and beyond chooses to go inward long before it spreads super wide outward. There is vast, unlimited, easy, lower cost satisfaction inward (virtual space), there is nothing of great value outward at any reasonable cost of resources and time (humanity doesn't grasp this widely yet, it's still in the naive, neighborhood exploration stages). The only thing out there is disappointment, once you discover it's almost all low value repetition (extraordinarily vast repetition of very low value entities).
- mr_00ff00 2y agoThis entire theory seems to be based on only current technology. Tell someone in the 1600s about the concept of cellphones and they would say it’s impossible to ever instantaneously communicate with someone around the world. It’s so energy intensive with our current technology, which isn’t really an answer to fermi.
- thomascgalvin 2y ago> Tell someone in the 1600s about the concept of cellphones and they would say it’s impossible to ever instantaneously communicate with someone around the world. I don't know that they would. In the 1600s, they'd just invented the printing press, so communication was already undergoing a fairly massive change. A book that once took a lifetime to copy could now be printed in three days. From there, it's a short walk to "this book that used to take a lifetime to copy can now be printed more or less instantly." And from there, we can start laying the groundwork for what we would eventually call telecommunications. Cell phones rely on technology that people in the 1600s hadn't discovered yet. Interstellar travel would require us to not only discover new technologies, but technologies that actively violate what seem to be pretty hard physical laws. If the speed of light really is a universal maximum, and something like an Alcubierre warp drive isn't possible, leaving this solar system is vanishingly unlikely.
- oidar 2y agoThe paper under discussion: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1bc6 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1bc6
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- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoWould make things a lot simpler
- uticus 2y agoOutside the field, but generally acquainted with scientific studies of things much closer and easier to study: I wonder how much guesswork really goes into astrophysics vs other areas?
- exitb 2y agoMaybe it's a messaging problem. Even for that article, the headline appears more decisive every time it's repeated. How long until it appears in mass media as "Science wrong again?"
- teamonkey 2y agoGuesswork is part of forming a hypothesis, as it is with any science. The thing about astrophysics is that it's very hard (or impossible) to conduct an experiment to prove a hypothesis, and with very few exceptions it's impossible to see something happening in real time. What you do have is a vast amount of data in the obseravable universe. So for a theory to be valid, it needs to not contradict all that out there which we can see. Or if it does contradict it, it needs to explain why that is and not contradict other things. Often, as with particle physics, we're limited by what we can see, so we need new technologies (such as the JWST) to give us greater insights. Just as with modern particle physics, in a lot of cases this helps to reduce the size of error bars in observations or hypotheses, which then helps to reduce the problem space and weed out theories that then fall out of these error bars. This is why you can have several competing theories at once (for example, various alternatives to dark matter). Some may be more popular than others, or may be more likely than others, but they stay on the table until actually disproven[1]. (Have an astrophysics degree, not a professional astrophysicist) [1] Although as far as I was aware, Tired Light was actually considered off the table.
- wtcactus 2y agoInteresting. How do we explain the missing mass in the galaxies then (the observed rotation curve of galaxies needs a bigger mass than that of the stars that it is made of)?
- abakker 2y agoI haven't read the original paper, but my assumption is that if their model suggests the universe is much older and that things like light speed actually decay over distance, then maybe they are suggesting that some of the other constants of the universe are also decaying leading to the different observed rotations. But, I'm not a physicist.
- slowmovintarget 2y agoSpeed of light decay should be fairly easy to disprove. Anything that contradicts Special Relativity requires an exceedingly compelling argument or preponderance of evidence in favor, and Tired Light does not have it.
- abakker 2y agoI'm not a physicist, but, why should this be fairly easy to disprove? The person proposing this theory seems relatively informed and obviously still published, so it's obviously not trivial. My (naive) assumption reading the article was that he wasn't proposing that a photon loses velocity over long distances, but that the value C was not constant on a multi-billion year time horizon. I don't see an easy way to prove that it is not changing if the rate of change is functionally unobservable. But, maybe I am way too uniformed to speculate on this.
- wtcactus 2y agoBut we observe this everywhere, even in the Andromeda galaxy, so, universe age is not a factor for the rotation curve of galaxies.
- deeznuttynutz 2y agoQuantized Inertia is a new theory that works and is interesting. Although, not rigorous and is speculative at best
- adventured 2y agoI've got another one for you. "Spacetime" also does not exist. Time doesn't exist as a force of nature or tangible entity, it's nothing more than a subjective measurement. It exists like your height measurement exists, or the measurement of four meters of distance from you to the wall exists. The matter contained in the space of distance being measured exists, and the events between (subjective) time measurements existed, time itself does not exist. You can measure your height from the ceiling to your head (impractical but you can do it). You can measure time based on Mars going around the Sun. Neither entity exists (your height, nor time; both are subjective based on the anchor chosen). It would be silly to think height measurements are a tangible force of nature, we'll call it HeightSpace, now we must discover how it rules over the universe and seek to observe its magic principles. The bogus nature of "spacetime" has held back multiple fields for many decades. It has wasted a generation of brains that fell for it.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago... uh, that is (sort of) the common place view since a couple centuries.
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- brianf0 2y agoThis seems obvious and is how I have always understood it. How is this not the case? Where is time treated like a tangible entity?
- sebzim4500 2y agoWhere does your view diverge from special (or general) relativity? The fact that the time axis is observer dependent has been an accepted part of physics for a century.
- agos 2y agoluckily, a serial entrepreneur from hacker news has seen where theoretical physicists could not!
- vundercind 2y ago
- bluejay2387 2y agoCould somebody else take a turn posting the related XKCD comic? I did it last time.
- debo_ 2y agoAre you asking for comic relief?
- indigodaddy 2y agoCan this “tired light” theory attempted to be actively tested somehow, instead of analyzing/coming to conclusions upon {b,m}illions-year old data?
- mr_mitm 2y agoTired light has been thoroughly debunked. This paper came up a few times now on HN, and it's almost crackpottery. I know shallow rebuttals are frowned upon, but it's such a waste of time. I'll at least link this: https://www.iflscience.com/why-its-extremely-unlikely-the-universe-is-267-billion-years-old-69904 https://www.iflscience.com/why-its-extremely-unlikely-the-un... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39726388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39726388 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39742010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39742010 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760006
- Twisell 2y agoProposing new competing hypothesis is the very nature of scientific progress. Dark matter and cords theory are still imperfect working draft compared to other paradigms. Unless you can link to a systematic study proving the CCC+TL is flawed there is no guarantee you are on the good side of scientific progress. Flat earthers where once convinced they were not on the side of crackpotery.
- mr_mitm 2y agoAs someone with a PhD in cosmology I'm well aware how scientific progress works. This paper is simply not well done. It's lacking basic plausibility checks. It's a waste of time to give every badly formulated idea your attention, you'll drown in noise. > there is no guarantee you are on the good side of scientific progress I know, but I'm very confident. To quote Carl Sagan: 'It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.'
- vegetablepotpie 2y ago> Researchers are hard at work trying to find ways to test the CCC+TL model. It’s not a scientific theory unless it’s testable. I’m going to withhold judgement on this and take it for what it is: an interesting idea, and nothing more.
- sbergot 2y agoI am not an expert but is the dark matter theory testable?
- mumblemumble 2y agoDark matter is not a theory, per se. There are many, many theories that attempt to explain dark matter. Some of them have yet to produce testable hypotheses, others have already been tested.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoThank you. Dark matter is the issue in cosmology that "it appears as though undetectable matter is present in the universe causing X, Y, Z phenomenon." The issue that I have with people calling dark matter a theory is that they think it requires matter to solve. It doesn't. MOND is a dark matter theory. It explains(in part) why it appears as though undetectable matter is present in galaxies causing disc velocity to not match expectations.
- Rumengol 2y agoIt's not, but it's accepted as it is the theory that best fits the observations. It has holes, but not as much as others. It will continue to be the accepted model until another one is an even better fit to the data or we can prove/disprove the existence of dark matter.
- mr_mitm 2y agoOf course it is. It already passed many tests (for example gravitational lensing) while some dark matter candidates (WIMPS, primordial black holes) have effectively been ruled out through tests.
- austin-cheney 2y agoI am not sure why people become so emotionally invested in the defense of something which they have no evidence of. In the context of religion that investment is called faith, which makes sense in the context religion but not in science. Theology is the exploration of a belief system, but science is the exploration of knowledge. It seems dark matter and dark energy exist to balance deficiencies observed in our current understanding of particle physics applied to a cosmological model, particularly for observations that span vast distances extremely far away. From a purely logical perspective we should anticipate great deficiencies the further away we look because our entire understanding of the universe is derived from observations of various EMF transmissions only and only from Earth, or near Earth in the case of JWST. That is an exceptionally limited perspective. We have much to learn and more evidence to gather before conflating one avenue of science into a practice more akin to a religion.
- meindnoch 2y agoI'm convinced.
- whatshisface 2y agoThis article confuses dark matter with dark energy. They're totally separate concepts.
- wrsh07 2y agoLet's talk about the article and then dark matter, I guess: > We’ve always been taught that the fundamental constants of nature — like the speed of light or the charge of an electron — are unchanging. But what if they aren’t fixed after all? I mean, sure, what if? Honestly, if you can vary things like gravity, I don't think you need any additional components to explain the dark matter observations. > The CCC+TL model needs to provide testable predictions that can be confirmed or refuted through observations and experiments This step is important! Ok, so dark matter generally: this YouTuber [1](physicist/physics PhD) notes that there are many theories that explain the dark matter observations. But to her, "dark matter" is the data that we need to explain. Essentially: we have a bunch of weird observations where it looks like there's way more matter than we see. But the actual explanation for what it is, there are tons of those. So throw one more in the pile (this one says "oh there's no extra matter, the universal constants are different over there and light maybe moves slower as it travels farther") [1] https://youtu.be/qS34oV-jv_A?si=z2KcSSIhezXppNAc https://youtu.be/qS34oV-jv_A?si=z2KcSSIhezXppNAc
- MattPalmer1086 2y agoThe article confuses dark matter and dark energy. The theory in question relates to dark energy, not matter.
- m3kw9 2y agoTo me "light loses energy" is as absurd as scientists making up "Dark matter". This really tells me they are like math researchers solving problems by assuming a "constant" and solving it.
- dang 2y agoRecent and related: New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760006 - Oct 2024 (36 comments)