Space science contains big void - Astronomers admit they don't understand dark energy and matter

Mercury News ^ | 6/30/03 | Robert S. Boyd - Knight Ridder

[Rudder]

Did George and Jerry write it?

Who?

[Doctor Stochastic]

We know 3 things: God does not exist. Evolutionary Theory is definitely correct. We can absorb this new evidence without fundamentally re-thinking anything.

Perhaps you have a reference for this claim? Refereed journals only.

[freedom9]

He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.

[longshadow]

The thing is, there are some who would consider this stuff to not be science at all.

And they would be wrong.

As long as the theory behind this is capable of falsification, it meets the test of being "scientific." Every time we gather, and confirm, more evidence about the Universe, the set of viable theoretical explanations gets winnowed as the models that DON'T fit the data have to be modified or dropped, leaving us with a smaller list of theories that DO fit the data.

Over time, the surviving theories approach reality to a greater and greater degree. That's how real science works.

[Virginia-American]

IIRC, the threrad was about army ants.

You should have read the shouts of derisive laughter!

I don't remember any at all. Perhaps you could refresh my memory.

Can you provide examples from scientific journals instead of FR threads?

[Physicist]

Basically, we have some radio telescopes which produce data, which are massaged fifteen ways from Sunday through various mathematical formula.

Massage this. Those curvy things are the distorted shapes of very distant galaxies, whose images are being bent by the gravity of the intervening galaxy cluster. It is straightforward to calculate the mass of the cluster from the curvature of the distorted images. It's also straightforward to measure the mass of the normal matter in the cluster, by measuring its spectrum. The difference is the dark matter. It dominates.

Sometimes, new physics has to be sifted painstakingly from the white noise. Other times, it kicks you hard in the testicles. The effort it takes to ignore it is up to you.

[aruanan]

``We should be humble about dark energy,'' said Sean Carroll, a University of Chicago astronomer. ``We haven't a clue as to what is going on.'

Pink Matter Alert!! Let's invoke the presence of undetectable matter to rescue our theories instead of paying attention to what's right there and revising our theories accordingly. Some monkeys really want to hold onto the nut of their dreams and waste away with their hands trapped in the big cosmological jar.

[tang-soo]

Jordi, an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus ...

Cool, a fellow Buckeye!

[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

..."Who ordered that?!" of Isidor Isaac Rabi.

Upon the discovery of the muon, correct? That is by far my favorite physics quote!

My favorite physics dis, though I can't remember who said it, was a reworking of Newton: "If I have seen farther than others, it's because I've looked over the shoulders of midgets..."

[jlogajan]

it seemed to demonstrate that the speed of light is slowing at a very high rate (in astronomical terms), and the light speed figure was extrapolated to arrive at the initial speed, then the universe's expansion rate was recalculated from the time of the "big bang", and, assuming these light speed calculations were correct, it showed the universe to be only about 8,000 years old.

In our cold universe, a change in the universal speed of light has no meaning. The electric force is conveyed at the speed of light. If the speed of light changes, the rotation rate of the electrons around atoms changes, etc.

It's like changing length and the yardstick at the same time. You end up taking the same measurement values.

You would need some asymmetry somewhere -- something that was unaffected by the change in light speed, in order to detect such a change.

We know of know such thing in our cold universe -- therefore calculations that show a slowing of the speed of light are baseless.

[jlogajan]

We know of no such thing ...

[Ichneumon]

My favorite physics dis, though I can't remember who said it, was a reworking of Newton: "If I have seen farther than others, it's because I've looked over the shoulders of midgets..."

I've also heard, "If I can't see far enough, it's because there are giants standing on my shoulders..."

[dark_lord]

Massage this. Those curvy things are the distorted shapes of very distant galaxies, whose images are being bent by the gravity of the intervening galaxy cluster. It is straightforward to calculate the mass of the cluster from the curvature of the distorted images. It's also straightforward to measure the mass of the normal matter in the cluster, by measuring its spectrum. The difference is the dark matter. It dominates.

Sure. I mean, the logic appears to be: well, we have gravitational warping, and the only thing we know of that warps gravity is mass, and mass is a property of matter. So, it must be a whole bunch of matter out there doing the warping, and we can tell how much mass that has to be (roughly). But we can't see anything, so it must be some kind of "dark" matter, since matter is the only thing we know of that has mass. Well maybe it is and maybe it isn't. And here is an alternative.

M-brane theory assumes additional physical dimensions. By doing so it gets much closer to a unified field theory. Suppose that the gravitational warping is cause by the presence of "structures" that exist in those other dimensions? Since the properties of dark matter (other than gravitational warping) are kind of mysterious (like how come we can see through it) maybe the reason we can see through it is that it doesn't extend into 3-space? But if so, is it really "matter"? And since the properties of inertia are not well understood (the effects are understood, but not the reasons for those effects) maybe the "drag" of structures below 3-space for regular matter are the cause of inertial effects?

[Clinging Bitterly]

>> That would put a damper on the carbon dating system...

Uh, yeah. But (and I know only enough about these things to be dangerous), the constants used in calculating all kinds of scientific measurements tend to interact. Still, it's hard to imagine the known history that has been dug out of the earth being crammed into a span of 8,000 years.

Clarke wrote a couple of nonfiction works that touched on the field of astrophysics that were meant to explain, among other things, how events in his fiction were theoretically possible. These were published maybe 25 years ago. I bought them and read them with some fascination. Those, and a few other lightweight articles (things like the subject article of this thread) I have read in years since pretty much sum up all I know about the state of the universe. He really did a good job of outlining what we knew about things at the time in those two compact volumes, much more interesting work than that Art Bell type stuff he wrote & narrated in that dreadful Fox TV series he did in later years.

Dave in Eugene

[Ichneumon]

Not to turn this into an anti-Evolution thread, but my peeve with them is that everytime some new evidence comes out that refutes any part of Evolutionary Theory, some scientists immediately announce: "We know 3 things: God does not exist. Evolutionary Theory is definitely correct. We can absorb this new evidence without fundamentally re-thinking anything."

I can't recally any FR crevo thread, and especially no exchange in the scientific community, which has ever actually resulted in the kind of cartoon version response you describe. I submit that you're either misrepresenting those discussions, or misunderstanding them (probably the latter).

1. I have never seen anyone on these discussions be so bold (and silly) as to say that "we know God does not exist", because anyone with any sense knows that we can't know such a thing for sure (i.e., "know" in the "it has been proven" sense) -- nor can we know for sure that he *does*. What I *have* seen (and what you're probably mistaking for the above) is people provide counterarguments to the folks who claim to have some sort of unarguable evidence that God "must" exist. That predictably brings responses of "oh, yeah, what about *this*?", and "the thing you describe could also have occurred without a supreme being", etc.

2. I've never seen anyone say "Evolutionary Theory is definitely correct" in such an unqualified way. What you may have mistaken for that is when people say that a) the amount of evidence for the *occurrence* of evolution (i.e., common descent and so on) is so overwhelming that it is accepted as a fact in the scientific realm, and b) there is a hell of a lot of evidence indicating that much of evolutionary theory (i.e., *how* common descent occurred) is correct and can't just be hand-waved away without good reason (although there are always going to be refinements and new discoveries made as time goes by).

3. As for "We can absorb this new evidence without fundamentally re-thinking anything", there's nothing wrong with that. Most of the time new evidence can indeed be understood as an interesting consequence of current theory (actually, "most of the time" new evidence simply reconfirms existing theory without even raising a ripple). I'm sorry if this disappoints the creationists who run in with something and yell, "this completely disproves everything about evolution, by gum!", but usually it turns out the example was actually something fits evolutionary theory just fine -- the creationist had just misunderstood the theory in the first place and thus didn't know what would actually fit and what wouldn't.

But if you think you know of a thread that actually fits your description, feel free to link it.

[Ichneumon]

No matter what I read on this subject I always arrive at the conclusion that God is real.

Zeus lives! Praise be! I always knew that stuff about coming to women in the form of a swan to seduce them was true, thanks for confirming it.

[Ichneumon]

Clarke wrote a couple of nonfiction works that touched on the field of astrophysics that were meant to explain, among other things, how events in his fiction were theoretically possible. These were published maybe 25 years ago. I bought them and read them with some fascination.

Collected in "Profiles of the Future", one of the coolest books ever. Each chapter discussed a sci-fi concept (i.e. time travel, invisibility, faster-than-light travel, teleporters, anti-gravity, etc.) and then discussed as seriously as possible whether such things were theoretically possible, and if so what various technologies might be able to achieve them and how. For example, he pointed out that invisibility might be possible if you wore a suit of electronic gear or optics which bent/carried the light arriving at any part of your body and retransmitted it from the other side -- any person looking at where you were would just see what was behind you.

[Not now, Not ever!]

ping, must read when I have the time!

[Russian Sage]

...Those curvy things are the distorted shapes of very distant galaxies, whose images are being bent by the gravity of the intervening galaxy cluster...

The article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dark_matter_030522.html says:

On larger scales, however, concentrations of dark matter force gravitational alliances between galaxies that can be noted based on the distance between the galaxies and the speed with which they orbit each other.

Which seems to mean it is the observation of orbital motion that these conclusions are based on. Are you refering to a different set of observations?  Could you reference them?

Thanks.

[nuconvert]

"known history that has been dug out of the earth being crammed into a span of 8,000 years."

Less than that if the article said the universe was 8,000 yrs old.

Sorry. No way no how. Were the people who wrote that actually PhD's?