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Although i'm not a physicist and i have an average understanding of these things, dark energy and dark matter always felt to me like physicists had created myst

Although i'm not a physicist and i have an average understanding of these things, dark energy and dark matter always felt to me like physicists had created mystical entities with magical properties because they couldn't explain some experimental results. And my average brain always thought and still thinks that instead of chasing these unicorn entities that still can't be found, maybe we should reconsider some things, as it seems to be the case presented here in this article.

Ekaros 2y ago
Also not physicist, but they always felt like smudge factors. Put in this stuff we don't know what it is and only interacts in certain ways to right places and finally math works out. Well it is obvious that they can work if you can mostly freely tune parameters until they do. But then you need two different things... Somewhat reminds me of aether...
- exmadscientist 2y ago
  Former physicist here! I used to work on this stuff. I don't think anyone has ever been a "true believer" in dark matter or dark energy. There was a pattern in late-19th- through late-20th-century physics wherein someone noticed something weird, said "hey, if X were true, it'd be kind of weird, but it would explain it all", then people went out and looked for evidence of X. In many, many cases, people did indeed find X, some closely related X', or at least got strong evidence in favor of something else Y, which might have disproved X but at least settled the matter. This has not happened with dark matter or dark energy. The questions still remain open, with no good evidence for any explanations. So... what I'm saying is, don't think less of people for trying to explain things, just because they tried and it didn't work out yet. You're seeing the scientific method play out right now: there is a whole lot of wrong. There was a lot of wrong in the old days, too, but we weren't around to see it; only the successes got passed down.
baq 2y ago
That’s… kinda how it always worked. They invented something that fit existing observations. Remember when ether was a thing? The other problem is that nothing else really fit… until now. Science works, turns out.
p2detar 2y ago
It feels somewhat like the Aether theory [0], which fell out of place after special relativity got introduced. It was interesting to me that the Aether was proposed by Isaac Newton. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
gdavisson 2y ago
Except that sometimes chasing these unicorn entitles leads to... finding the unicorn entities. That's basically what happened with the neutrino. Neutrinos were originally proposed in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to solve apparent violations of energy and momentum conservation in beta decay. He suggested that the missing energy and momentum were being carried off by some additional -- undetected and mostly undetectable -- particle. For a while, it looked like these proposed ghost particles might never be detectable, but Fred Reines finally managed it... in 1956, 26 years later. So don't write off unicorn particles. Sometimes they're real, even if you have trouble detecting them.
tekla 2y ago
You realize this is how basically every single scientific discovery ever has worked right?
mr_mitm 2y ago
So when you find yourself in the situation in which the vast majority of professional physicists, especially those who dedicated a good chunk of their life to study this one phenomenon, believe one thing, and you, as a self-proclaimed layperson, believe another thing, don't you wonder whether you would actually start believing the first thing as well if you knew what the aforementioned professional physicists know? I mean obviously not, I just don't understand the thought process behind coming to the conclusion that it's the professional physicists who must be wrong or have failed to reconsider something and not the layperson whose knowledge about the thing is dwarfed in comparison.

Ekaros 2y ago

Also not physicist, but they always felt like smudge factors. Put in this stuff we don't know what it is and only interacts in certain ways to right places and finally math works out. Well it is obvious that they can work if you can mostly freely tune parameters until they do. But then you need two different things... Somewhat reminds me of aether...

exmadscientist 2y ago
Former physicist here! I used to work on this stuff. I don't think anyone has ever been a "true believer" in dark matter or dark energy. There was a pattern in late-19th- through late-20th-century physics wherein someone noticed something weird, said "hey, if X were true, it'd be kind of weird, but it would explain it all", then people went out and looked for evidence of X. In many, many cases, people did indeed find X, some closely related X', or at least got strong evidence in favor of something else Y, which might have disproved X but at least settled the matter. This has not happened with dark matter or dark energy. The questions still remain open, with no good evidence for any explanations. So... what I'm saying is, don't think less of people for trying to explain things, just because they tried and it didn't work out yet. You're seeing the scientific method play out right now: there is a whole lot of wrong. There was a lot of wrong in the old days, too, but we weren't around to see it; only the successes got passed down.

baq 2y ago

That’s… kinda how it always worked. They invented something that fit existing observations. Remember when ether was a thing? The other problem is that nothing else really fit… until now. Science works, turns out.

p2detar 2y ago

It feels somewhat like the Aether theory [0], which fell out of place after special relativity got introduced. It was interesting to me that the Aether was proposed by Isaac Newton. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

gdavisson 2y ago

Except that sometimes chasing these unicorn entitles leads to... finding the unicorn entities. That's basically what happened with the neutrino. Neutrinos were originally proposed in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to solve apparent violations of energy and momentum conservation in beta decay. He suggested that the missing energy and momentum were being carried off by some additional -- undetected and mostly undetectable -- particle. For a while, it looked like these proposed ghost particles might never be detectable, but Fred Reines finally managed it... in 1956, 26 years later. So don't write off unicorn particles. Sometimes they're real, even if you have trouble detecting them.

tekla 2y ago

You realize this is how basically every single scientific discovery ever has worked right?

mr_mitm 2y ago

So when you find yourself in the situation in which the vast majority of professional physicists, especially those who dedicated a good chunk of their life to study this one phenomenon, believe one thing, and you, as a self-proclaimed layperson, believe another thing, don't you wonder whether you would actually start believing the first thing as well if you knew what the aforementioned professional physicists know? I mean obviously not, I just don't understand the thought process behind coming to the conclusion that it's the professional physicists who must be wrong or have failed to reconsider something and not the layperson whose knowledge about the thing is dwarfed in comparison.