Futurology

1731 readers

118 users here now

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

133

Gravity can exist without mass, dark matter could be myth: Study (interestingengineering.com)

submitted 2 days ago by Espiritdescali to c/futurology

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Thorry84@feddit.nl 56 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (17 children)

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.

[–] mipadaitu@lemmy.world 40 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago (4 children)

It's the same idea as "the dark ages". All it means is we don't have information about it.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I take “the dark ages” to mean a lot more than that. And I don’t think that’s particularly unique.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The concept of a "Dark Age" as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity.[1][2] The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding).[1] The phrase Dark Age(s) itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 when he referred to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.[3][4] The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, and became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.[1] Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages.

Source. I use it in the former sense, which I think is more common.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Laymen may use the former. But historians use the latter:

Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages.

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.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (13 replies)