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Thank you for sharing your insights, dear LomanBill!

My own belief is the missing “mass” is due to an incomplete understanding of space itself.

It was Einstein's dream to transmute the base wood of matter to the pure marble of geometry.

General Relativity can be visualized geometrically. Indeed, he was able to pull Riemannian geometry off the shelf to explain it.

That, btw, is one of my favorite examples of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Wigner) which I view as God's copyright notice on the cosmos.

High positive gravity regions (such as the earth or sun - ordinary matter) are space/time indentations. An object must achieve escape velocity to exit the well.

The path of light bends under the influence of these indentations.

The very high positive gravity regions (such as the center of galaxies or black holes - dark matter) are extreme space/time indentations. Not even light has the velocity to escape a black hole. (Black holes however are subject to entropy but that is another subject.)

Conversely, the regions between galaxies (dark energy) can be seen as negative gravity or space/time "outdents" which of course would accelerate the expansion of the universe.

This of course points to extra dimensional theories, i.e. the region appears to be negative gravity in four dimensions (three of space and one of time) because it exists across other additional dimensions of space/time. Some physicists theorize that gravity is so small by comparison to the other fundamental fields (strong and weak atomic, electromagnetism) precisely because it is inter-dimensional.

Also pointing to extra-dimensional theories is the failure so far to create or observe the theorized Higgs field/boson (ordinary matter under the Standard Model.) If not found, the absence would suggest that matter in four dimensions is a shadow of momentum components in a fifth dimension which we cannot as yet detect.

And at least one theory suggests a fifth time like dimension whereby the matter we observe in four dimensions is actually multiply imaged from as little as a single particle in the fifth time-like dimension. (Wesson) In that theory, this four dimensional physical "reality" might actually be a single particle.

Interestingly, if there exists another expanded dimension of time - then what we experience as an arrow of time (past, present, future) traveling a worldline is the illusion. Time itself would be a plane or volumetric - past, present, future existing concurrently in the continuum of space/time.

When a person considers geometric or mathematical physics, his sense of physical reality will likely change. This is especially true of mathematical Platonism.

Tegmark for instance suggests in his Level IV Parallel Universe cosmology that physical "reality" of whatever dimensions and universes is a manifestation of mathematical structures which actually exist outside of space and time.

A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime — the bird perspective — these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta — a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.

The Platonic paradigm raises the question of why the universe is the way it is. To an Aristotelian, this is a meaningless question: The universe just is. But a Platonist cannot help but wonder why it could not have been different. If the universe is inherently mathematical, then why was only one of the many mathematical structures singled out to describe a universe? A fundamental asymmetry appears to be built into the very heart of reality.

Tegmark: Parallel Universes

Roger Penrose is also a mathematical Platonist, btw.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss, Alamo-girl. :-)

[Interestingly, if there exists another expanded dimension of time - then what we experience as an arrow of time (past, present, future) traveling a worldline is the illusion. Time itself would be a plane or volumetric - past, present, future existing concurrently in the continuum of space/time.]

I don't believe time necessarily exists independently from the system in which it is observed. I see it as simply an observed progression of state change. Under special relativity, the rate of change in state is relative to the Mass within the inertial frame, which increases with E. More speed = more E = more Mass = greater inertial resistance to state change = "time" slowing down as speed increases.

The observed gravitational lensing often attributed to the pull of "dark matter", can be explained if the space itself, through which light is traveling, is not uniformly dense. IOW, there are regions of space not dense enough to have manifested the strong physical forces required for the formation of matter - but still dense enough to produce the observable weak force of gravity - and thus the observed effect of gravitational lensing. I believe this is consistent Riemannian geometry, applied localy.

I simplify my view of the cosmos by thinking of it as a flat plane with points of localized distortion that bind the plane up into 3 dimensions (sort of like a bed sheet that's wadded up in the laundry basket. Or better, like a stick of gum that's been chewed into a sticky wad). The degree of localized distortion being equivalent to E. As entropy progresses, space becomes flat again... ultimately flat and changeless. Wound down like a stopped clock in the hand of the One who created it all - who exists, incomprehensibly, beyond it all.

Incomprehensibly except for the relationship that was manufactured, by Him, when He became like one of us and allowed Himself to be sacrificed to effect the reconciliation of the Created with their Creator.