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I don't have a physics masters degree, or anything comparable, but when I read "Astrophysicists have a new suggestion: Dark matter could sap angular momentum fr
by rob74 2y ago
I don't have a physics masters degree, or anything comparable, but when I read "Astrophysicists have a new suggestion: Dark matter could sap angular momentum from the two black holes and nudge them closer" I also thought "Really? Is dark matter now the stand-in explanation for anything unexplainable?"
But who knows, when one day someone will come up with a better model that does away with the "dark matter kludge", it will turn out that these phenomena actually have a common root cause?
- red1reaper 2y agoI mean... isn't that the point of dark matter and dark energy? To be a stand-in name for stuff we have to account for but can't detect properly? The dark here means dark as in "we are in the dark about that". It does not really matter if those exist or are an artifact of current theories, replacing relativity is not that easy and there are already a ton of physicists working on that anyway. In the meanwhile of either having instruments capable of detecting these or a new theory that demostrates that those are artifact emerge... they have to exist. That's the point of them.
- at_a_remove 2y agoDark matter does not mean "we are in the dark about this," at all. It's astronomy. It means "anything that is not shining like a star but we can detect it via inference." Light matter is stars. Dark matter can include MACHOS: neutron stars, black holes, brown dwarfs, rogue planets. No new physics required for MACHOs, as opposed to WIMPs.
- dguest 2y agoMore positive spin: every "kludge" you add puts more constraints on what dark matter could be. If we can verify that the angular momentum transfer under this theory is consistent with other dark matter models, we can build a better framework to test a whole suite of theories with one experiment.
- ykonstant 2y agoIf it exists and is ubiquitous then it makes sense to contribute to all sorts of disparate phenomena; are we surprised that "mass" pops up in all sorts of places? Besides, epistemologically it is very good to suspect and investigate the effects of DM on all kinds of phenomena. Then, if it does not exist, we will have many more points of reference from which to derive experimental or theoretical contradictions.
- exe34 2y agoor conversely, I wonder how many different phenomena are "explained" by dark matter, since it's infinitely parametrisable.