Dark Matter is Stupid

[Mike]

No, not the Canadian sci-fi drama. That was pretty awesome. Slow start, but then they got a real budget and awesome writing, and sadly, it ended far too soon

And not the book by Blake Crouch. That one was trippy as balls. Loved that book.

No, I mean the physics concept. Dark matter that makes up 26% of the matter in the universe but somehow doesn't interact with the EM spectrum in any way. Remember back in the day when physicists assumed the universe was a static size and uniform density, and so they had to make up the cosmological constant to explain why the universe didn't collapse on itself, but then we discovered that the universe was expanding? Remember? Yeah... dark matter feels like that to me. Our understanding of how the universe works doesn't confirm to our observations of the apparent age of the universe and its seemingly variable rate of expansion. So we decide that all the energy and matter we observe is really only 5% of what exists. Another 26% is the completely undetectable but definitely real dark matter and the rest is the equally undetectable "dark energy" and that explains how our current models can still work.

It feels like we're positing the existence of invisible fairies or some such.

So then today I see something about a new theory that says dark matter doesn't exist, and it builds on combining two existing theories: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology theory and Tired Light theory. "Tired Light"? Hell yes! You have my full attention.

Now I'm not a smart man, and a lot of this is way over my head, but as I understand it Tired Light was proposed way back in the 1930's. The idea was that maybe the weird redshift values being observed came from light being "worn down" over great distances due to collisions with stray photons or particles or whatever in space. But that would result in scattering of light, not weakening. Energy just doesn't work that way. But now... NOW... some genius says, Hey, maybe it's not that the light gets weaker over distance per se... but maybe the fundamental forces of nature just get naturally weaker as the universe ages. Maybe? And that lines up well with observation (according to genius Rajendra Gupta) and would make the universe almost 27 billion years old.

Yeah, okay... that's plausible enough for a hard-sci-fi novel. Which is my only measure of judgment. I don't know enough to say why it might be right or wrong. But the he says that to make it work, he combines it with Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. This one says the Big Bang isn't real, and instead the universe is in a neverending (or beginning, apparently?) cycle of expansion and collapse. And CCC theory allows that that each successive cycle is connected to the last because even through all the deformation of space, the angles of things can be preserved or something similar that gives topologists erotic dreams.

And so the more I read, the more I bump into stuff that I don't fully understand but which nevertheless feel like they're reaching.

So I'm less smart now than I was when I woke up, BUT... I'm mad inspired. Is Gupta's CCC+TL theory the new paradigm? Maybe? Or something like it. Or maybe not. But I realize that maybe in 100 years, college courses will mention dark matter/dark energy in the history of physics, and students will giggle a little at the backwards ancients the way they do now about the plum pudding model of atoms. That feels kinda good. I hadn't realized how long I've just accepted that 95% of our universe is undetectable if we want to make our theories work. And after three decades, we have partial accelerators and telescopes and computing power that outstrips what we had then by orders of magnitude and yet we STILL can't find physical evidence to support this dark universe. I'm ready to move on.

[Eliahad]

If it makes you feel better, I still get stuck on the fact that calculus only works because we agree that some level of rounding error is acceptable. Then we crash rovers into planets. So, YMMV.

[Kyle]

No, I mean the physics concept. Dark matter that makes up 26% of the matter in the universe but somehow doesn't interact with the EM spectrum in any way. Remember back in the day when physicists assumed the universe was a static size and uniform density, and so they had to make up the cosmological constant to explain why the universe didn't collapse on itself, but then we discovered that the universe was expanding? Remember? Yeah... dark matter feels like that to me. Our understanding of how the universe works doesn't confirm to our observations of the apparent age of the universe and its seemingly variable rate of expansion. So we decide that all the energy and matter we observe is really only 5% of what exists. Another 26% is the completely undetectable but definitely real dark matter and the rest is the equally undetectable "dark energy" and that explains how our current models can still work.

It's sooo weird that you posted this, because when I say the title I thought, "Did I make this post and forget it?" JUST LAST WEEK I read an article about how the James Webb has confirmed the Hubble's original findings showing the universe's expansion and discussed how this was explained by a value we've assigned "dark matter"- and I had the EXACT SAME THOUGHT you did. I realized, "Oh. This isn't a thing. It's just a constant we've created to make sense of the systems we have." Which means... the systems we have are flawed.

I'm not saying "dark matter" or "dark energy" don't exist. I'm just saying that we don't have any idea what they are, if they are actually a force that exists. All we know is that we have an unexplained whole in our theories and this is the stand-in until we figure it out. Which means that I'd really like scientists (and alleged rapists like deGrasse Tyson) from going around and explaining exactly what "dark matter" is.

[Eliahad]

I was being a little flippant with the calculus thing, but I woke up with two thoughts.

1). This is why we should fund science for the sake of trying stuff even if it doesn't have an immediately practical purpose. Just so we can understand things better tomorrow than we do today.

2) What if one of the issues is that we're off in our numbers by, oh, I don't know, 0.0000000000000000002 and that matters if you're looking back billions of years? And what if we're off that much in a few places? Oh heck, I'll go Google it.

[Eliahad]

So you can calculate the circumference of the know universe with 38 digits of pi and only be off by an atom. I mean, ok, but it still bugs me.