Astronomy / Space 30 years of funding wasted looking for something that simply isn't there...... Dark Matter

[Von Roerich]

Interesting news coming out that finally indicates that mainstream scientists have been looking in the wrong place for a theory instead of observing the Universe.

I wonder how long before the nonsensical 'Black Hole' theory is put to bed too.

http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-hunt-fails-to-find-the-elusive-particles-1.22970#/b1

 

[Iskariot]

Interesting news coming out that finally indicates that mainstream scientists have been looking in the wrong place for a theory instead of observing the Universe.

I wonder how long before the nonsensical 'Black Hole' theory is put to bed too.

http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-hunt-fails-to-find-the-elusive-particles-1.22970#/b1

Very interesting.

The funding is not wasted. This is simply how science works.
A large part of science is discovering you were wrong and then developing a better hypothesis and eventually developing a better and improved theory.

A renowned dutch scientist Verlinde has a very interesting alternative theory for the dark matter hypothesis.
https://phys.org/news/2016-11-theory-gravity-dark.html

I am not sure what you are referring to when you mention a Black hole theory to be nonsense.
There are several kinds of black hole theories and hypotheses.

 

[Zenith]

Just because you think a theory is nonsensical doesn't mean others think it is.
The theories relating to and applying to black holes are firmly established and have weathered rigorous peer review.

 

[Iskariot]

I had to laugh at this sentence in the article:

"the world’s most sensitive dark-matter detectors"

Because how sensitive can the detector be to 'dark matter' when perhaps there is no dark matter to detect at all.

I have a very sensitive smurf detector at home. It is really extremely sensitive.
I think I need one that is even more sensitive, because I have not discovered any smurfs yet.

 

[Para Handy]

V..........

A renowned dutch scientist Verlinde has a very interesting alternative theory for the dark matter hypothesis.
................

Every time I mention Verlinde's Emergent / Entropic Gravity hypothesis on here it gets greeted with the sort of whispering sound of tumble-weed blowing across a desert.

 

[Iskariot]

Every time I mention Verlinde's Emergent / Entropic Gravity hypothesis on here it gets greeted with the sort of whispering sound of tumble-weed blowing across a desert.

Because when push comes to shove we don't really get it I suppose?
Verlinde was on dutch tv not too long ago and he explained his hypothesis rather well, but I would have a hard time explaining it with clarity to others. I am not a physicist. At the time it sounded so obvious that I wondered why so many scientists are still so fixated on this elusive dark matter.

I would love to hear the opinion of someone like Kraus, Caroll, or the now depearted Stenger on this topic.

 

[edd]

I had to laugh at this sentence in the article:



Because how sensitive can the detector be to 'dark matter' when perhaps there is no dark matter to detect at all.

I have a very sensitive smurf detector at home. It is really extremely sensitive.
I think I need one that is even more sensitive, because I have not discovered any smurfs yet.

It makes perfect sense to talk about the sensitivity of such detectors. For one thing they do detect other sorts of events in the course of their operation - it's not that these detectors have detected nothing, just that what they have detected is entirely consistent with the signal you'd expect without dark matter. And understanding their sensitivity is of course crucial to understanding whether they've found something of interest.

On one of the other matters mentioned, I think it's still quite early days for Verlinde's theory.

 

[Thatchinho]

Interesting news coming out that finally indicates that mainstream scientists have been looking in the wrong place for a theory instead of observing the Universe.

I wonder how long before the nonsensical 'Black Hole' theory is put to bed too.

http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-hunt-fails-to-find-the-elusive-particles-1.22970#/b1

Your post is how false stories get spread.

The article in no way says what you're saying it does. The article is simply talking about a potential elimination of WIMPs as a candidate for Dark Matter. This has no impact whatsoever on whether Dark Matter is real or not.

 

[Thatchinho]

Every time I mention Verlinde's Emergent / Entropic Gravity hypothesis on here it gets greeted with the sort of whispering sound of tumble-weed blowing across a desert.

Hey, no fair! I said that it's certainly an intriguing model, but it's not without its own flaws and it has its own mismatches between what it predicts and what is observed, and that it's still in it's infancy though, and it'll be interesting to see whether anything comes of it.

Because when push comes to shove we don't really get it I suppose?
Verlinde was on dutch tv not too long ago and he explained his hypothesis rather well, but I would have a hard time explaining it with clarity to others. I am not a physicist. At the time it sounded so obvious that I wondered why so many scientists are still so fixated on this elusive dark matter.

I would love to hear the opinion of someone like Kraus, Caroll, or the now depearted Stenger on this topic.

The things is, sounding obvious is in no way a criteria for whether something's right.

Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have a lot of things in there which seem almost nonsensical, but they've been demonstrated to incredibly high levels of accuracy. (I'm ignoring General Relativity here as it's part of what's under discussion.)

 

[EnemyTrait]

It makes perfect sense to talk about the sensitivity of such detectors. For one thing they do detect other sorts of events in the course of their operation - it's not that these detectors have detected nothing, just that what they have detected is entirely consistent with the signal you'd expect without dark matter. And understanding their sensitivity is of course crucial to understanding whether they've found something of interest.

On one of the other matters mentioned, I think it's still quite early days for Verlinde's theory.

So, if your Smurf detector has detected the cat not chasing Smurfs, that's data.

Do you reckon Verlinde's theory might only apply to big stuff, like quantum only applies to diddy things? Sorry if I'm being too technical.

Loved the post.

 

[Para Handy]

Hey, no fair! I said that it's certainly an intriguing model, but it's not without its own flaws and it has its own mismatches between what it predicts and what is observed, and that it's still in it's infancy though, and it'll be interesting to see whether anything comes of it.

.....

Quite right, absolutely, I was merely using hyperbole.

 

[Para Handy]

..............
The things is, sounding obvious is in no way a criteria for whether something's right.

Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have a lot of things in there which seem almost nonsensical, but they've been demonstrated to incredibly high levels of accuracy. (I'm ignoring General Relativity here as it's part of what's under discussion.)

Didn't Einstein's inspiration also stem from looking at a problem from a different perspective, seeing something obvious to him and then working out if the maths fitted? (I'm working from very old memory here so excuse me if I am mis-remembering.)

 

[Monk]

Your comprehension of the article is flawed.

Dark matter hasn't been ruled out. It just seems that one of the best guesses out there for what comprises dark matter is turning out to be, potentially, incorrect thanks to the failure of several sophisticated experiments.

You see, dark matter isn't this definable 'something' that we are searching for...scientists are literally making best guesses at what it could be and then building experiments to prove out those guesses. They should be wrong many many times before someone figures it out. Further, 30 years is nothing when it comes to scientific pursuits. People have spent their entire life's work on things whose results are collected by their successors.

For goodness sake, it is called 'dark' matter because it represents a significant gravitational mass (likely matter but could be something mimicking matter) whose origin is a mystery (in the dark, as it were). The effects of this dark matter have been observed and calculated, we just don't know what it is, yet.

My pet theory is that dark matter is a result of a holographic universe/dimension. We see the shadow of dark matter cast upon our lower dimensions, but its physical properties are only observable from a higher dimension that we can't measure. To me, dark matter is like the shadows of Plato's prison/cave. We can see and know it is there but knowing what it is and why is beyond our observable capability.

 

[Thatchinho]

Didn't Einstein's inspiration also stem from looking at a problem from a different perspective, seeing something obvious to him and then working out if the maths fitted? (I'm working from very old memory here so excuse me if I am mis-remembering.)

Not that I'm aware of tbh. As far as I'm aware, what Einstein did was more akin to starting with some basic principles, working out the consequences mathematically, resulting in testable predictions which were then confirmed experimentally leading to the necessity of rejecting what would have been previously considered obvious. (Most of that 'obvious' is still probably considered obvious by a lot of people too.)

I'm talking about Relativity here though.

The work Einstein won the Nobel prize for was his work on an explanation of the Photoelectric effect (how some materials emit electrons when subjected to light).

The Photoelectric effect is a good example of what I'm talking about generally. Electrons are emitted, and have a velocity/kinetic energy. If you wanted to increase their energy then the obvious answer classically would have been to increase the intensity/brightness of the light. However, experiments showed that this was wrong. Increasing the intensity means more electrons are emitted, but it doesn't increase their velocity/energy. The velocity/energy can only be increased by using light of a shorter wavelength. Einstein provided an explanation for this.

 

[Para Handy]

.............
The work Einstein won the Nobel prize for was his work on an explanation of the Photoelectric effect (how some materials emit electrons when subjected to light).
.....................

This is what I was referring to - his approach to Maxwell's work, leading him to come up with the quantum packets idea (excuse my layman's poor description).

 

[Iskariot]

The things is, sounding obvious is in no way a criteria for whether something's right.

I agree.
It sounded obvious because that is the manner in which Verlinde explained his own hypothesis.
He might have been slightly biased .

 

[Manticore]

Every time I mention Verlinde's Emergent / Entropic Gravity hypothesis on here it gets greeted with the sort of whispering sound of tumble-weed blowing across a desert.

Tumbleweeds aside it is quite an interesting theory and application of entropic forces....

 

[Dsign]

Because you didn't find something doesn't mean you wasted anything. Finding nothing is still a result.

 

[Han Zulu]

Interesting news coming out that finally indicates that mainstream scientists have been looking in the wrong place for a theory instead of observing the Universe.

The dark matter idea comes from a problem which is that the observation of the universe (as you ask them to do) doesn't match up with what the things we know about. The galaxies behave in such a matter that there's a lot more mass in it than we can see or calculate, and the only theory to explain it is that there's some kind of particles that have mass but can't be seen. So the "dark matter" idea arises from exactly what you're asking them to do, to observe the universe. But the problem is, we observe the effects of this elusive thing, but we can't directly observe what it is that's causing it. Dark matter is so far the most likely explanation, but perhaps there's another explanation to the odd behaviors of the galaxies that we observe.

I wonder how long before the nonsensical 'Black Hole' theory is put to bed too.

??? I think it's quite clear and obvious that black holes exist.

Oh, I get it. You're just being funny.

Yeah. Soon they'll give up on the spherical Earth too... (it's oblate spheroid)

 

[xondk]

Interesting news coming out that finally indicates that mainstream scientists have been looking in the wrong place for a theory instead of observing the Universe.

I wonder how long before the nonsensical 'Black Hole' theory is put to bed too.

http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-hunt-fails-to-find-the-elusive-particles-1.22970#/b1

Hardly wasted, its how you actually figure out right or wrong.

And what do you mean nonsensical black hole theory? do elaborate?