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.
Dark matter. Sounds like a catch all designed to make a math model work properly.
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!
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Do you think solutions to dark matter are tied up in a unified GR + quantum mechanics theory?
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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.
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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,
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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.
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.
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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.
“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.
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 pursuingOkay 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.
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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.
Respect looking into it further. If you’re into to this sort of stuff, you might like YouTube channel Isaac Arthur.
I wish more people were like you on the internet
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.
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.
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.
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
You would like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbmJkMhmrVI
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Can we not push more anti science rhetoric please
Chiropracty isn’t “scientific”.
That mothers shouldn’t co-sleep with infants. Every other primate I know of co-sleeps with their offspring. Until very recently every human mother co-slept with her infants, and in like half of the globe people still do. Many mothers find it incredibly psychologically stressful to sleep without their infant because our ancestors co-slept every generation for hundreds of thousands of years.
I would bet money that forcing infants to sleep alone has negative developmental effects.
The reason for this is that we tend to sleep deeper now than our ancestors. Because of this, we are more prone to roll onto a baby, and not wake up.
It can still be done, you just have to avoid things like alcohol, that stop you waking. You also need to make sure your sleeping position is safe. Explaining this to exhausted parents is unreliable, however. Hence the advice Americans seem to be given.
Fyi, if people want a halfway point, you can get cosleeping cribs. They attach to the side of the bed. Your baby can be close to you, while also eliminating the risk of suffocating them.
I think something on the UK’s NHS implied the risk is primarily for mothers with various kinds of problems (including drug or alcohol abuse). Made me wonder if it’s largely recommended for everyone to cover the many people who are at risk but don’t want to think they are.
A lot of the advice is almost insultingly obvious. You get treated like you have a single digit IQ. After a couple of months, I fully understand why we were treated like that! It’s a fight to keep your iq in double digits!
The baby shaking one is the big one. It’s obvious, you don’t shake your baby. It’s also obvious that they can be safe, even while screaming. After 2 hours of constant crying, combined with sleep deprivation, I fully understand why they reiterated not to shake your baby, the urge was alarmingly strong! It also made sense why they pointed out you could leave them to scream, if you really needed to. So long as they are clean safe and fed, 10 minutes down the garden is completely acceptable.
With the original advice, telling when it will apply to you is harder than you think. The default advice has to be to play it safe. Some can be deviated from, some can’t. Deviations must be consciously made however.
Relevant Graham Norton https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nKbjBciZBZU
Maybe if you can avoid stuff like alcohol (easy for most) but also you can avoid sleep deprivation - way harder with little to no maternal leave and forget about paternal leave here in the US.
If you (Royal you, not parent commenter) can live with yourself if a tragedy occurs on your watch while you are flaunting medical advice, then go ahead and risk it, but otherwise yes! Buy the bedside attached crib!
In the UK, it’s not an absolute no, but a “be careful”. Interestingly, my wife’s sleep habits changed considerably. She was instinctively aware of where our baby was, even while asleep.
The main dangers seem to be either the dad (my instincts were far less affected) or a sedated mum. It also becomes a lot less risky when the baby can move. Our daughter was perfectly capable of making her comfort concerns felt.
It’s not zero risk, but it’s far lower than you might think. New mother sleep deprivation is quite different to normal sleep deprivation. I see why the default advice is what it is, however.
The other thing is SIDS, if the baby can’t lift their head from a suffocation position they suffocate.
We have ours sleep in a cosleep crib beside the bed so you get the closeness and can make contact in the night.
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Fyi, you triple posted.
Thanks. I was having connection troubles.
What I’ve heard was that it is to build independence for the child, so the parent can leave the child to sleep and do something else. It depends on the age I guess.
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!!
I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?
Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.
You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.
the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence
Surprised you didn’t get downvoted here. It’s like if you tell people science is done by humans and humans arre flawed people flip out and call you a science-denier.
One of the first things you’re taught to understand when interpreting data is that you have a bias. It is impossible not to have a bias.
Take for example: 1+1=2. Is it an extremely simple equation, or a decades long mathematical pursuit to establish certainty?
Our bias tells us we can confidently assert such simple statements, but the truth is, unless we spend an agonising length of time understanding the most insignificant and asinine facts, we NEED biases to understand the world.
The point of understanding we have biases is to think more critically about which ones are most obviously wrong.
The scientific term is bias, the layman term is flawed. When interpreting skepticism from others, many are likely to be biased against the layman 😉
The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.
Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren’t more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.
That makes sense. There were tons of other smaller creatures around, why would you mess with something that’s like a boar up sized 30 times.
I always assumed that hunter gatherer division was mostly down to the individual, some traits make some better at hunting than others.
I struggle to locate static objects, I for the fucking life of me just can’t see it. I’ll be looking for something and either look right over it or walk past it multiple times
But if I go outside and look in the trees I can spot all the squirrels within seconds. Not like that’s a talent or anything special, but my point is that I’d starve if I had to look for food in the brush, and likely I imagine these types of traits are what defined who did what job, meaning who was good at what, and likely considering lots of hunting was endurance based and not skill based at all, then most adults probably participated to some degree.
I’ve also gone shroom hunting and had to come back empty handed because I can’t see the god damned things.
Is this why I could never find stuff and then when my mother looked she would just go right to it?
Yeah, exactly that. It’s RIGHT FUCKING THERE but I’m not gonna see it.
i’m rather convinced that stuff like ADHD and autism was at least co-opted by evolution (if not outright created by it) because tribes with a certain percentage of it had an advantage.
For example ADHD seems great for foraging, that provides the stimulation that is desired and the ability to completely lose track of time is pretty nice to stave away boredom from trudging through the forest for hours on end;
and autism is pretty obvious in how a defining feature is having special interests that you LOVE doing and get extremely competent in.I myself have autism and i have no doubt that in a hunter-gatherer tribe i would have been having a blast creating tools and stuff like wicker baskets and trying to improve them as much as i can.
When you start looking at older debunked theories that lasted for a long time you can see the human bias in them. Not just a human bias but a a western bias.
Two that stick out for me:
Trees compete for sunlight - I think it makes sense to us humans because we compete for resources but in truth trees are way more ‘community’ based
The male alpha wolf - It’s how the western world has been organized for centuries so it’s easy to see that in a wolf pack even though its not true.
Hunting was mostly running a marathon while tracking until the animal collapses.
No reason to believe women didn’t participate in that.I don’t think I ever heard that hunters and gatherers would have been divided by gender.
This has to be a troll comment. I’m utterly bemused.
I am pretty sure that modern archeology agrees with you in at least some ways (know an archeologist, not an archeologist). I don’t have any specific evidence for mammoth trapping but there are these really interesting stone funnel traps that were used to trap gazelle herds https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2011/04/ancient-gazelle-killing-zones.html
Also consider how long humans have walked the earth as hunter gatherers. Agriculture goes back to around 10.000 BCE. The entirety of time between 300.000 BCE and 10.000 BCE was likely (mostly) spent as hunter gatherers. Imagine in how many ways local roles and culture could have differed in that time!
Haha, if fucking mammoths were scared of falcons then they deserved to go extinct
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.
cut funding to your black hole detection chamber
I knew you’d come for my fucking black hole detection chamber you swine
Curses! You’ve found me out! I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME! MYA~HEHEHE!
First they came for the black hole detection chambers and I said nothing because I was researching Computer sciences.
Then they came for my HPC clusters
The idea that animals do not have feelings. I don’t believe complex thought is necessary for emotion. You can take away all our human reasoning, and we would still get mad, or sad, or happy at things.
It’s definitely NOT science that animals don’t have feelings. Maybe 50 years ago.
Now, there’s a concerted effort to discern thoughts and emotions in animals.
I don’t think there is a scientific concensus on this. We are constantly finding previously unknown similarities between the minds of other animals and humans. I’ve put together a small lemmy community on animal communication and digital bioacoustics, it is somewhat related to this stuff.
If anything I think emotional response is the least advanced part of a human mind. However, if we’re talking about brains of sharks, small lizards, or ants then I think emotion would be a word with a lot more nuance than whatever it is they do.
The range of what “emotion” can cover is very broad as well. Like feeling good or scared and shame or respect.
I have remind my partner that dogs don’t share all of the complex emotions we do or at least it’s a lot easier to deal with them if you act like they don’t.
I.E. my dog is never going to care if feeding is fair, and they aren’t going to listen to you out of respect about it. They will however eat a certain way because the like being obedient and knowing their place in the pact, but that takes repetition, rewards and punishments.
I recently heard someone make the argument that pain is could intense for simpler animals since they need more explicit punishment for doing dangerous things
We don’t have much way of knowing afaik but it seems plausible
that comes from religion not science
Bees play with toys and do happy actions when given toys. I’m of the opinion that some form of internal experience extends at least as far down the brain size scale as at least some bugs, and might extend into single celled organisms and plants.
It’s scientifically proven that rats giggle when tickled:
It’s very widely accepted in science that animals feel an array of emotions.
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.
Lots of stuff from both social sciences and economics.
Social science suffers greatly from the Replication crisis
Economics relies largely on so-called natural experiments that have poor variable controls.
Both often come with policy agendas pushing for results.
I take their conclusions with a grain of salt.
We don’t need more anti science rhetoric in this world. Why even start this thread?
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).
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.
I’m probably going to get eviscerated for this, but that sexuality is purely genetic. I think that for the vast majority of people, sexuality is way more fluid than not, and much more influenced by environment than people would like to think.
I also don’t think that has any bearing on people’s right to choose.
