this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Futurology
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This headline is pretty dumb. Dark matter is not a myth, it's clearly there in the data, so it exists for sure. Now the name might be completely wrong as it's neither dark and may not be matter, but it still exists. We should have just called it Pete or something, so the name wouldn't imply anything about it's properties. But the press always seem to think dark matter is something thought up to fix something, but that's not the case at all.
The numbers in the data don't match up and the difference is what's labeled as "Dark matter", simply putting another label on it or dismissing it doesn't fix the underlying data not matching up. And it isn't like a fault in the data, we've seen it in ALL the data, no matter what you look at or how you look at it, the signs of dark matter can be seen.
Listened to a dark matter researcher a while back and he said "Dark matter is a name for an observation, not a theory" and I think that's a pretty good description.
They saw something weird with large scale observations and gave it a bad name. It's something that's done on a pretty regular basis in Astronomy. They really need to stop naming things before they're fully described. Of course how do you talk about something before it's named? No idea.
Maybe they just need to be better about letting go of poorly named phenomena.
It's the same idea as "the dark ages". All it means is we don't have information about it.
I take “the dark ages” to mean a lot more than that. And I don’t think that’s particularly unique.
How do you mean?
It's just a term to describe not having enough information to know what happened.
It's "dark" because we can't see/have no knowledge of what the events were. For history we don't have written records that describes events during those years. For dark matter we don't have any information on what it might be.
That's simply the historical and scientific method of labeling things like that. There is no other deeper meaning to it.
Source. I use it in the former sense, which I think is more common.
Laymen may use the former. But historians use the latter:
That's literally the meaning of the the term, and why it's also used for 'dark' matter.
It doesn't matter how you decide to use it, what matters is how the scientific community uses it.
Or start calling it Ninja Phenomena. Why is the observation not matching with the models and vice versa? It's those Ninja Phenomena at it again, wrecking stuff and hiding away!
I don’t know, so just asking but you say dark matter is not a myth, but the paper’s author says,
(emphasis added) Is this one of those situations where you agree but it sounds like you don’t?
Well that's a perfectly valid question, thank you for asking. I think the key word here is "direct". He is totally right, there is no direct evidence of dark matter, regardless of what it exactly is. We have a bunch of observations that don't match up with our expectations and models. Where the difference could be explained by adding non EM interacting matter, it's categorized as being caused by dark matter.
Great examples for this are the rotation curves of galaxies and the Bullet cluster, but there are others. The interesting thing about the rotation curves is they are all different. Not only different from our expectations, but also different from each other. We can clearly see the rotations don't match up, but we can't see why this would be the case. Since they differ from each other, it seems like a physical thing which is different in each galaxy, rather the some fundamental systematic difference in reality from our models. With the Bullet cluster the same thing, looking at that thing it's clear something really weird is going on. It's hard to figure out what is happening, but it would be explained by some non EM interacting material, so it gets put down to dark matter.
But neither of these examples are direct observations of dark matter. Dark matter doesn't interact with em, but does seem to interact gravitationally. Since almost all of our observations of the universe are using EM radiation. Be it optical, ir, radio, xray etc. Since dark matter doesn't interact with EM seemingly in any way, we can't observe it. We can only model it based on things we can see.
So in that way the author is kinda reasoning in circles, there is no direct evidence because by definition we can't directly observe it. And I feel like inferring the existence of something based on other observations is perfectly valid. For example elements on the periodic table and the planet Neptune are well known examples (among many others) of something that fell out of models and were later confirmed. And since the observations don't match up, we know for sure there is something there regardless of what label gets put on it. It even might turn out there are several things combined that have the end result we see, although Occam's razor would have something to say about that.
There are several things we are trying to learn more about dark matter. For example giant gravitational wave detectors can help to figure some stuff out. But great progress is also made in WIMP detection systems. I feel both of these paths would qualify as "direct" detection, if any of these pan out.
Great answer, thanks!
I agree with the other commenter, this is a great answer.
As far as I know, all so far proposed models that eliminate dark matter have other problems that are greater than"just" adding invisible mass. Would be cool though to just activate gravity without the need for mass.
Is defining something as the difference between a prediction and measurement not exactly the same as thinking something up to fix the discrepancy?
It's not there in the data. There's a hole in the data and we're making up dark matter to plug it.
You are wrong, just look at rotation curves of galaxies for a very easy to understand example. It's right there.
If it was right there and easy to understand we wouldn’t still be trying to justify it or figure what it might be. But I’m sure you’re working on a counter publication to refute all of this since it’s so easy right.
The question is what exactly dark matter is, nobody knows at this point. We have a bunch of data and a lot of different ideas, but nothing that neatly explains everything.
The point was that the publication was questioning whether dark matter exists. It exists for sure, there is nobody who has seriously looked into it and thinks it doesn't exist. We don't know what exactly it is, but it exists. And we also know for sure the name sucks, but hey that's the name we're stuck with.
Like what the other comment said, dark matter is an observation, not a theory.
No ‘Dark matter’ is a theory trying to explain an observation based on our incomplete understanding of gravity. Same as ‘dark energy’. They saw something, couldn’t explain it and came up with a theory of ‘something’ rather than simply saying ‘We have no clue. That shit don’t fit’