EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something to add.
The singularity that supposedly lies inside black holes is more likely just a result of a huge gap in our understanding and a dead end in general relativity.
Dark matter. Sounds like a catch all designed to make a math model work properly.
Yeh, that’s how the scientific method works.
Observations don’t support a model, or a model doesn’t support observations.
Think of a reason why.
Test that hypothesis.
Repeat until you think it’s correct. Hopefully other people agree with you.People are also working on modifying General Relativity and Newtonian Dynamics to try and fix the model, while other people are working on observing dark matter directly (instead of it’s effects) to further prove the existing models.
https://youtu.be/3o8kaCUm2V8We are in the “testing hypothesis” stage. And have been for 50ish years
“Repeat until you think it’s correct. Hopefully other people agree with you.”
Dark Energy has entered the chat.
For those with time to spare: study all you can about neutron stars (including magnetars and quark stars), then go back to “black holes” (especially their event horizons and beyond) and there’s a good chance you’ll feel like a lot of aspects in BH theories are mythologies written in math - all of it entertaining, nonetheless.
For those who seek extra credit, study zero-point energy before reflecting on cosmic voids, galaxy filaments, galaxies, gravitationally bound celestial systems, quantum chromodynamics and neutrinos. Then, ponder the relativity between neutron stars, zero-point energy and hadron quark sea.
The attempts to measure dark matter directly have gotten incredibly sensitive and still haven’t found anything.
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Multiple experiments to detect dark matter directly here on earth have been constructed. They expected a handful of detections a year given the estimates of local dark matter densities. Those experiments have not yielded any detections. This sets very restrictive limits on candidates for particle like dark matter.
I’m fully aware of astronomical observations that suggest the need for dark matter. That’s not what I was referring to.
So far, astronomical observations are all we have, the lack of terrestrial observations have only been able to elliminate candidate particles, not measure them.
Yeah, it’s legitimate science being done, but some people treat it as sacred and would fight you to no end because they say Dark Matter is some certainty, rather than approaching it with the proper scientific skepticism or with a statistical outlook.
For the most part believers in Dark Matter are cool, but a vocal minority practically worship it as the only possible truth.
The certainty is that there is something there, we just don’t know what it is. The name “dark” anything is irrelevant.
If a new hypothetical model showed that either some far off unobserved mass(es) or the currently observable mass can have the gravitational effects that were previously explained by dark matter, or any other far off idea about the nature of gravity at large scale: then there would be evidence there is nothing there. Currently there is no evidence that something is there, just that there are forces and motions that are not understood.
Modified gravity theories are a well explored alternative to dark matter, but they aren’t popular for the simple reason that dark matter fits the observational data far, far better. Because currently there is evidence that something is there, extensive evidence.
“just that there are forces and motions that are not understood.” - aka, there’s “something” there… Doesn’t have to be a physical something. You’re intentionally misunderstanding or misinterpreting just to try and win points on the Internet.
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Okay I see what you mean, the meaning of your words missed me the first time, sorry. You’re saying something is happening, not necessarily that something else exists to cause it.
I mean, they are working on adjusting Newtonian dynamics for the situations where gravity between objects is low. This would fix the model for the strange galaxy spin and where 2 stars orbit eachother.
The issue with this is there are too many unknowns as we have a (relatively) fixed point of perspective. But statistical analysis is working on reducing the impact of those unknowns, and there is likely a paper published in the next few months regarding this.Then, I guess it’s a matter of understanding why this applies. And maybe it applies because of dark matter, and it all wraps back round to an undiscovered thing.
Or, perhaps Newtonian dynamics isn’t complete but has been accurate enough to withstand all our testing (like taking 9.8 as the value of G on earth, even though it varies across the globe, and the moon/sun/planets also have a miniscule impact. For everything we do on earth, 9.8 is accurate enough)Dark matter still has strong scientific support, although still undiscovered.
Modifying Newtonian dynamics has so far been disproven.
Both are worthy of pursuing
I am curious if the opposite of dark matter could be true; while dark matter inside galaxies would explain galactical motion, couldn’t the same be explained by something repulsive BETWEEN galaxies? If the latter were the case, it would also explain dark energy.
The observations of systems like the Bullet Cluster imply that dark matter is actual material – baryonic matter. Stuff that exists in specific locations and has mass. Modifying the math of the physical laws does not explain these observations without absolutely going into contortions where dark matter explains them quite elegantly.
You’re not wrong. According to the current scientific understanding of the universe, that’s exactly what it is. They just gave it a badass name.
Do you want slightly darker matter? Cause that’s how you get slightly darker matter!
I know, I was so hype a few years ago when a new gravity well model supposedly eliminated the need for Dark Matter, but recently it’s been in the news as a scandal that also doesn’t fix everything.
There’s no scandal. Some people who are leading proponents of MOND theory recently published a new paper using what might be the best scenario we currently have to detect MOND (wide binary stars), and their more precise calculations…are not consistent with MOND. They published evidence against the very theory they were betting on.
The best kind of researchers, I bet that really took a lot of courage to do since it’s so far from human nature.
Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). It’s been the dissenting voice in the modern Great Debate about dark matter.
On one side are the dark matter scientists who think there’s a vast category of phenomenon out there FAR beyond our current science. That the universe is far larger and more complex than we currently know, and so we must dedicate ourselves to exploring the unexplored. The other side, the
On the other you have the MOND scientists, who hope they can prevent that horizon from flying away from them by tweaking the math on some physical laws. It basically adds a term to our old physics equations to explain why low acceleration systems experience significantly different forces than the high-acceleration systems with which we are more familiar – though their explanations for WHY the math ought be tweaked I always found totally unsatisfactory – to make the current, easy-to-grock laws fit the observations.
With the big problem being that it doesn’t work. It explains some galactic motion, but not all. It sometimes fits wide binary star systems kind of OK, but more often doesn’t. It completely fails to explain the lensing and motion of huge galactic clusters. At this point, MOND has basically been falsified. Repeatedly, predictions it made have failed.
Dark matter theories – that is, the theories that say there are who new categories of stuff out there we don’t understand at all – still are the best explanation. That means we’re closer to the starting line of understanding the cosmos instead of the finish line many wanted us to be nearing. But I think there’s a razor in there somewhere, about trusting the scientist who understands the limits of our knowledge over the one who seems confident we nearly know everything.
I mean that is pretty much correct. We don’t know what it is, but we can see it’s effect
Even more so Dark Energy
All of physics is a “math model”. One we attempt to falsify. And when a scientist does prove some part of the model wrong, the community leaps up in celebration and gets to working on the fix or the next.
Dark matter started as exactly a catchall designed to make the model work properly. We started with a very good model, but when observing extreme phenomenon (in this case the orbits of stars of entire galaxies), the model didn’t fit. So either there was something we couldn’t see to explain the difference (“dark” matter), or else the model was wrong and needed modification.
There’s also multiple competing theories for what that dark matter is, exactly. Everything from countless tiny primordial black holes to bizarre, lightyear-sized standing waves in a quantum field. But the best-fitting theories that make the most sense and contradict the fewest observations & models seem to prefer there be some kind of actual particle that interacts just fine with gravity, but very poorly or not at all with electromagnetism. And since we rely on electromagnetism for nearly all of our particle physics experiments that makes whatever this particle is VERY elusive.
Worth observing that once, a huge amount of energy produced by stars was an example of a dark energy. Until we figured out how to detect neutrinos. Then it wasn’t dark anymore.
In short, you’re exactly right. It’s a catch-all to make the math model work properly. And that’s not actually a problem.
My personal dark matter theory is that 80% of all stars are surrounded by Dyson Spheres.
Well that’s a fun hypothesis that should be falsifiable. Why not write a paper with some maths predictions? That is a pretty extraordinary claim, but definitely fascinating.
I just read up on it a bit, and there’s multiple things disproving my theory:
- to reconcile our models with our observations, dark matter would have to be primordial, i.e. created shortly after the big bang.
- to explain the movements we see, dark matter must be mostly concentrated in a ring far outside of a galaxy. Dyson spheres would probably be concentrated in clusters spreading from the center of a civilization.
- Dyson spheres would radiate heat we can detect with infrared telescopes, unless you hand-wave it with “aliens found tech that breaks thermodynamics” and at that point it’s the same as saying it’s magic.
I wish more people were like you on the internet
Respect looking into it further. If you’re into to this sort of stuff, you might like YouTube channel Isaac Arthur.
Interesting tidbit for you. You’d think if it was a math model not working properly that could be explained away with adjustments to the model that we’d be wrong looking at all galaxies. And yet there are galaxies out there that appear to be missing dark matter!
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/mystery-of-galaxys-missing-dark-matter-deepens
https://www.space.com/galaxy-no-dark-matter-cosmic-puzzle
It doesn’t solve the problem but, it adds to the intrigue I think.
I’m with you here, I don’t understand dark matter and dark energy and the expansion of the universe. We see shit moving all the time in the universe. I’m still not convinced we just don’t understand the motion of the universe outside our envelope of observation and it’s explainable with conventional matter and energy. Im trying to learn a lot tho. I’m gonna watch that video someone posted to you.
Great example, and this brings up a great point about this topic - there’s a difference between what’s a scientific pursuit vs. what is current established scientific understanding.
Dark matter is a topic being studied to try to find evidence of it existing, but as of now there’s is zero physical evidence that it actually exists.
Its observed gravitational effects is evidence. Otherwise nobody would have given it a name.
Proof of gravity from an unknown source affecting an object isn’t indicative of that source’s characteristics, though.
We don’t even know if the force involved is gravity. In fact we don’t even know if a force is involved at all.
I mean yeah that’s why it’s called dark matter. Because we know nothing about it except that it has gravity and doesn’t interact much (if at all) with electromagnetic waves.
The problem is Dark Matter is a theory that proposes specifically currently unobserved matter exists to solve our math problem. That’s not something we can automatically assume, imo. It’s looking highly probable, but not certain. It’s not just a blanket term for impossible to understand forces, okay, it’s not a pseudonym for C’Thulu, it’s a very specific solution among many.
Nobody “automatically assumes” anything. Dark matter is the best candidate of possible explanations because it explains observation and still fits the standard model. Even if they find the necessary particles eventually, nobody would call it certain though. Certainty is a unicorn.
People in this thread literally are calling it a certainty. I’ve basically said the exact same thing as you and gotten downvoted to heck for it.
but as of now there’s is zero physical evidence that it actually exists.
There’s extensive evidence of it’s existence. We just don’t know much about its nature.
Other way around, the math model worked fine without dark matter, and it was experimental observation that revealed DM. And yes, the term dark matter is a catch all by design because we don’t have a single theory on it yet.
Do you think solutions to dark matter are tied up in a unified GR + quantum mechanics theory?
I would be surprised. Quantum Gravity becomes relevant in very extreme energy conditions, while dark matter is relevant in the normal universe.
That sounds like it’s trying to take large scale phenomena and make them work on the quantum scale. What if the solution is the other way around: make modified quantum mechanics work on the large scale? (I guess those are effectively the same thing. You’d need a quantum gravity theory one way or another. Sorry, layman here. Just spitballin’ ideas)
The experimental observation did not reveal Dark Matter. Nobody has seen or proven Dark Matter, actually. That’s why it is called Dark Matter. The observation just showed that the math model was flawed, and they invented “Dark Matter” to make up for it.
My personal take is that they will one day add the right correction factor that should have been in the fomulas all the time.
Just like with E=mc² not being completely correct. It’s actually E²=m²c⁴ + p²c². The p²c² is not adding much, but it is still there.
I know that it is not a simple scale thing here. So it might be something else. My bet is that is has something to do with angular momentum,
And how does this fit the data?
I’m no astrophysicist - I just design computer chips. But this issue of “We need dark matter” came up with rotating galaxies, didn’t it? So I’d look into that direction if there is a potential connection. Classic bug hunting technique.
So have you actually looked into the data at all?
The Bullet Cluster, among several other systems, are very strong evidence that dark matter is actual baryonic matter that does not experience significant (or any) electromagnetic interactions. What we see when we look at these kinds of systems is that there is all evidence of STUFF there, but we cannot see the stuff. It’s not an indication of a poorly-performing math model missing a function term.
It would be like if we saw ripples in the water like we know exist around a rock. But we don’t see a rock. Sure, MAYBE we just fundamentally need to rewrite our basic rules of fluid mechanics to be able to create these exact ripples. But the more probable explanation is that there’s a rock we can’t see, and falsifying that theory will require just HEAPS of evidence.
The evidence we have suggests overwhelmingly that there is actual stuff that has mass that we simply do not have the tools to observe. Which isn’t all that surprising given that we are only JUST starting to build instruments to observe cosmological phenomena using stuff other than photons of light.
You would like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbmJkMhmrVI
Carbon capture 🥀
I’m infamous on Reddit as “that moon landing denier gal”. Sorry but I just don’t buy it. No goalpost was safe that decade and you don’t need the analytical videos to tell you that.
My main come back for this: It was the height of the Cold War and the Soviets didnt question it. Also, recently, the Chinese moon missions has photographs of modules left by the Apollo missions on the moon.
To be fair, the Soviets also thought the space race to be all done with once they put their astronauts in orbit, and they weren’t really paying attention when America went to the moon.
No they didn’t. They had their own moon program and announced their intentions to land in 1961 before the Americans announced in 1962
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_crewed_lunar_programs
If making a statement, why be quiet about it? That ruins the whole point of making a statement like how better someone is at something, doesn’t it? The civilian population in particular didn’t really care.
I don’t understand what you are saying. They had a moon landing program.
Also, do you really think that if the Soviets had the opportunity to embarrass the Americans by proving the landing was fake, they wouldn’t take it? Of course they would. Instead they were able to track the Apollo mission all the way and knew it was real.
But they also said they weren’t interested in the space race. Note that you can be interested in an endeavor other people are interested with without wanting to engage in a “race” with them. In this case they are claimed as being interested in showing off while simultaneously being insecure about said thing. I would be puzzled if someone’s method of showing off was precisely that, to not show off.
You say the rest like they did see it that way, that we absolutely went to the moon. How do you think censorship works? There is plenty of documentation about the case against the moon landing. Despite looking like plot armor though, the power of our culture has promoted the counters to it over it though.
Even if the Soviets had given up on the space race, they still had a vested interest in embarrassing America. They had every motivation to prove that America faked it, but they didn’t do it, because they had all the evidence that it was real. They could track the space craft and listen in on the same signals everyone else did.
All documentation against the moon landing has been thoroughly debunked many times. But you don’t care about that.
You don’t have to trust the Americans, there is plenty of independent third party evidence from multiple sources
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_evidence_for_Apollo_Moon_landings
At the time anyways. Especially the population at large wasn’t interested. It strikes me as weird to say you’re not interested in proving superiority in a certain field when you are when the whole point of making a statement is to be declarative about it.
Bullshit you actually believe somethig that can be disproven by buying a $60 kids toy and looking up at the moon through it
Or at least, you only believe it at this point because changing your view would rock your tiny world too much
What do you think about the event when about Buzz Aldrin punched a moonlanding denier in the face after they called him a coward, liar, and a thief?
Genuinely curious. I know I can’t know for certain - I cant go back in time and ride on that rocket with them. But the guy that supposedly went there seems pretty convinced he did. Even if I did believe it was faked, I’d have a hard time believing he didn’t think he went.
There wouldn’t be any other way I could think of it aside from it being nothing short of escalation. Aldrin’s defenders would later claim the accuser “cornered him”, but this is certainly neither true nor would make sense in the context. Sometimes the narrative is going to do what a narrative does, though I (unlike some here) do not judge others for having different conclusions than me.
Cool, thanks for the response!
You’re welcome :) I’m glad there’s at least one happy person here.
Disbelieving in evidence doesn’t make you more moral
Judgment thereof does though.
Yikes
So much for honestly answering the question OP had. What did people expect, the status quo?
Posting a decades long debunked conspiracy theory just isn’t a very interesting response.
OP didn’t ask for interesting responses, OP asked for honest responses. Should I have been dishonest?
No, you’re reply is perfectly fine. It’s just boring, so it will get downvoted.
TIL why people here downvote, i.e. in vain. So much for adding the downvoting feature.
I think it’s working pretty well.
But if you don’t like it there are frontend that hide/disable votes for you.
I don’t agree with you but I thank you for participating in the prompt, and I want you to know that you have value.
You’re welcome. Seeing the reaction, I’m wondering if people read the title of the OP and were expecting popular opinions. Lemmy is more Reddit than Lemmy probably wants to admit.
Well there is not much meaningful discussion to be had about a decades old conspiracy theory that has been memed on plenty in the past. I think that is where the downvotes are coming from.
If that’s the standard, there aren’t really a lot of meaningful discussions anywhere on this thread to be honest. Any documentaries on mothers co-sleeping with infants, humans fighting bears, or one for each of the three people denying the big bang theory?
All of those are more interesting topics than a dumb mega-debunked conspiracy theory. Seems like your standard for interesting is History channel at 2 am?
You say that like the opposing standard for interesting ever had a timeslot on any channel. I wouldn’t hold this against anyone though, I for one am not one to be as judgy or to come to a question like this expecting narrative conformity.
This is all performative. You knew you’d draw ire and that was your goal. Otherwise you probably wouldn’t have announced you’re reddit famous for believing a slew of debunked lies
The Big Bang being a singular event that only happened once, as if we are so special we just happen to be at the point of time, within the spectrum of infinity where matter is in a state that can support life. (I’m not aware if that’s the prevailing theory anymore)
Also the double slit experiment. We aren’t a phantom observers, we are impacting the experiment. With our equipment.
We don’t have to be special though. We can only exist at certain points in space time, under certain conditions. Those conditions are currently met, therfore we can exist, regardless of the infinite time/space conditions where we can’t.
On your second point, that’s what the science actually says. “Observer” or “observation” is used in a scientific sense and was probably a poor word choice. Science journalism gets carried away with anything that has the word “quantum” in it and it drives us mad.
You’re absolutely right that the mechanism that’s causing the wave function to collapse is the presence of whatever piece of equipment the particle is hitting. Whether that collapse happens at the two slits or the back wall changes the pattern, and that change is what shows wave-particle duality.
Also: physics doesn’t claim to know that the Big Bang only happened once. That’s just as far back as we can rewind with our current models. This is again something that science journalism takes a lot of liberty with.
You’re absolutely right that the mechanism that’s causing the wave function to collapse is the presence of whatever piece of equipment the particle is hitting.
It’s by no means clear that this is true; it depends on where you fall on interpretational questions. Hell, probably the leading approaches suggest that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all, it just appears to when our brains become entangled with the experiment.
the leading approaches suggest that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all, it just appears to when our brains become entangled with the experiment.
Aren’t you just moving the point of the wave collapse from the experiment to inside the brain? I mean if the wave function never collapsed, shouldn’t we see all superpositions at once? But instead, the brain seems to collapse to one possibility, i.e. still collapsing the wave function.
Kind of, but technically no. The idea is, when doing the double slit experiment, that you start with two essentially separate wave-functions; the wave function of the particle, which is in a super position of going through slit A and slit B, and the wave function of the experimenter/surrounding world, which is in a singular defined state.
However, by doing a measurement, the experimenter entangles their wave function with the wave function of the particle, forming one wave function for the whole system, which evolves into a super position of ‘particle goes through slit A and the observer measures the particle going through slit A’ and ‘particle goes through slit B and the observer measures the particle going through slit B’.
Importantly, the super position doesn’t contain a portion for ‘the observer measures both outcomes at the same time’, so there’s no way for us to see all superposition’s at once.
The question of why we only experience measuring one outcome is exactly the same as the question of why an identical twin only experiences one life, and not both, essentially.
Importantly, the super position doesn’t contain a portion for ‘the observer measures both outcomes at the same time’, so there’s no way for us to see all superposition’s at once.
I feel like here you’re just moving the goal post again, if you’ll excuse the expression :)
Even if there is no superposition in which an observer sees both outcomes, there must be some point in space and/or time that decides which of the two superpositions we see. Whether that is in the experiment, in the brain or in consciousness or whatever. I mean we only see one superposition, so there must be something that “decides” (randomly as far as we know) which one it is. And that decision is a kind of collapse of the wave function, no?
I am not a physicist though so this is just me rambling from my limited understanding.
I don’t think a unique big bang has ever been the prevailing theory in science. If you ask science what happens before the big bang, the answer is “we don’t know”, and if you ask has there been other big bangs, you might get a “not that we’ve observed”, but science has not attempted to explain what happened before the big bang because in the most literal sense, we just don’t have the data to make an attempt.
Predictions do state that the future of the universe will look different from the beginning of the universe (by which I mean the universe since our big bang) and the maths suggest that before the big bang, we think there was a singularity of incredible density, but that doesn’t really deal with how many other big bangs there can have been.
IQ score is a sham - the tests are quite fallible, and historically they were used as a justification to discriminate against people who are poorer or with worse access to education. Nowadays, I see it quite a lot in the context of eugenics, where some professors and philosophers attribute poor people being poor due to their low intelligence (low IQ score), and that they can’t be helped while rich people got where they are due to their intelligence (as in they have a high IQ score on average).
Not sure why you mentioned chiropractors, I thought this was about scientific things.
Homeopathy. All about it.
There is nothing scientific about homeopathy.
True - when it’s scientific, it’s called “Medicine”
Right, but that can never be true for Homeopathy. It’s pseudoscience bullshit through and through. That said, many people conflate homeopathy with “natural remedies”, but that’s not what homeopathy is.
Homeopathy is built on the concept of “like cures like” and that as a solution becomes more dilute it becomes stronger. A newer idea (at least compared to homeopathy’s history) is that water has memory and that it “remembers” whatever it was mixed with in the past. They added this on to explain why diluting a solution so much that there’s virtually no chance of there being even a single molecule of the “medicine” left in it doesn’t actually make it not work because water remembers what you mixed it with.
So, say a person is suffering from poisoning. A typical homeopathic “cure” would be to take an amount of the poison, mix it with water, shake and stir it in a specific way, then dilute it with more water. Repeat lots of times, since the more dilute it is the stronger the “medicine” is.
Practitioners prey on the ignorance of their customers to swindle them out of their money for something that amounts to nothing more than a placebo. And while it’s possible that the placebo effect can have some beneficial effect, that doesn’t justify the existence of homeopathy.
God I hate this pseudoscience bullshit.
“By definition”, I begin “Alternative Medicine”, I continue “Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. You know what they call “alternative medicine” That’s been proved to work? Medicine.”
— Tim Minchin, Storm
There’s absolutely nothing scientific about Homeopathy, despite what its practitioners would have you believe.
Anything I think is ideologically motivated. Having a study to cite doesn’t make you right if the study is bullshit.
For me it’s the origin of the universe. This shit has to be a simulation.
I am out to revoke degrees from chiropractors.
Giving them a degree is like calling myself a writer because I post bullshit comments on Lemmy.
Yes we should be out to revoke chiropractors’ degrees, but I’m not sure why that’s coming up here since you asked about science specifically. Which chiropractic is not.
No one should be ok with people who run around pretending to be doctors and occasionally paralyzing babies and crippling people by trying to work magic. It’s also revolting that any of it is covered by insurance and health plans, which materially takes real resources away from real medicine for people.
You are aware that chiropractic is not backed by any scientific results, but rather dangerous to your health?
Op: what are some inherently enraging opinions that fly in the face of everything we know about logic?
Also op: omg guys stop downvoting these inherently enraging opinions. I implicitly made that rule …triple stamped it no erasies!!
The moon not being made of cheese. The moon is in fact made of cheese. I do not care how much a bunch of nerds insist that it is not made of cheese. I am objectively correct about this and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
