Dark Matter and Dark Energy

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Dark energy is just a place holder for our ignorance of why the cosmos appears to be expanding at an increasing rate.

ruveyn

How does one find an answer if one questions nothing? If there where no mysteries and no one ever bothered to try to find answers then how would we ever learn anything about anything? I misspoke when I said explanation, I should have gone into a long discussion about how there are more questions then answers and how there is evidence of something that exists and takes up enormous "space" and uses, or is of, enormous energy and that the numbers show that there is much about the universe that is far from being understood, but I thought the article would make that clear. I have always looked at the way these things are named and discussed before they are completely understood as preemptive naming, SOMETHING is doing SOMETHING and right now we are calling it dark matter and energy, regardless of what the end finding will be I would not be surprised if it is still called Dark matter and Dark energy similar to how the quarks had been theorized to exist and were found to be some of the most basic particles of the universe by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig who named them after a James Joyce novel, up, down, and strange. It was not till later in the 70s that other physicists found proof of these sub atomic particles using particle accelerators, and it was not until 1995 that the last of the six quarks, the top quark, was found by a group of physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois. This was also a case of imaginary particles that were part of a numbers "game" in which the numbers did not add up and the answer seemed to be particles that had behaviors that were affecting the outcome,and they were named before the proof was documented or found, in this case it proved to be right. The dark matter, dark energy has yet to be proven or even completely conceptualized which was what I meant when I said the piece about the same thing happening when people first began studying microbiology, it would be a very hard task to study microbiology without the microscope. In the same way that we do not have the instruments at this time to study dark matter or dark energy (what ever it may turn out to be or not be).

The Accelerating Universe and Dark Energy Might Be Illusions
By Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer
I liked this article and they are doing exactly what scientists should be doing, instead of discrediting a theory because they think it sounds ludicrous they are coming up with a theory and testing it and asking others for input, No theory is complete until it has been tested and reproduced by many people many times and even then all it takes is for it to be proven false once for a new or tweaked version to be introduced which will also have to run the gauntlet.

Dark this or Dark that, however you want to name it, it is an explanation of the behavior of the universes motion or lack there of. Like gravity, which took hundreds of years to quantify and which we still do not have a perfect understanding of, the theories will be tweaked and changed until they fit with the reality our universe is working with (from Newton to Einstein and farther to scientists working on quantum mechanics and unification of the forces), not that I mean to get into a debate on multiple universes or other deep theories, I am just using that as an expression. Try not to twist the words too much. The premiss of calling it dark matter or dark energy or dark flow is that it is obscured from our vision or understanding in some context, much more then I have the patience to type about.

That would not be science.
I have a hard time understanding your main point, could you please clarify it for me as concisely as possible..

i think that dark matter is matter that has a very low radiance.

i think dark energy is energy at extremely low frequency (and amplitude).

i think that that the active universe we can see and explore, is a small fraction of the underlying potential contained in the vastness of penultimate dormancy.

i have looked at things in detail, but i think that it is wise to roll the microscope back a bit and look at wider pictures.

no body seems to know as yet.

Last edited by b9 on 29 Oct 2011, 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

We keep chipping away at it until we know enough to get more definite answers to our questions.

What we need are more facts.

ruveyn

i think we need to find the right ways to look for those facts,
the subjects are incredibly abstract so to find a real way to test these exotic theories looks to me to be the biggest challenge.

both dark matter and energy are placeholders, we simply have no real pointer to what it may be as of today.

I put my main points in bold.
Look into a theory and use some brain cells to discuss it.

I don't know how to make it any more clear or concise then that. If you have something interesting to say or a fact or study that we don't know about that somehow proves that something is not possible then by all means tell us, but I don't think any body is interested in an argument that follows the "it can't be true cause it can't be true" formula. I love a GOOD debate but if there is no thought put into the topic then it is not much of a debate now is it?

Science is the practice of coming up with a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and putting forth a new hopefully more accurate hypothesis until said hypothesis is tested with repeatability and is found to be correct. That is science, nowhere does it say that science is the automatic disregard of a hypothesis with out testing. If we all did this then many opportunities and discoveries would have never been considered because it did not sound like a good hypothesis.

The other point that I was trying to make was that, we do not yet have the tools to investigate some things in the universe like dark matter and dark energy. Does that make sense, I don't think I am the only one who mentioned this point. But I will not be swayed either way until I either find some new information or have some kind of epiphany. In the mean time I enjoy reading the posts that actually contain information and thoughts on how to look at these things and the different approaches and angle people are looking at them from. I was going at it from a unified theory angle and trying not to ignore any relevant info that might possibly point to one way of thinking or the other.

I certainly believe that there is much more to the universe then what we know of now.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167

My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. J. B. S. Haldane



ruveyn

You sound really offensive so I prolly do too. What I wanted to know is that how quoting my post was relevant and what were you saying since I got lost in all that history you did not bother to write out. I wanted to understad what were you arguing. So I thought that you were making some kind of philosophical point which I asked you to clarify. How can there be a debate if you refuse to rephrase you position for someone who asks for it? Judging by your bold sentences you are trying to teach someone what science is. I would think that here I am encountering arrogance of someone who thinks that knows better. Please do not assume my scientific background I can assure you it is more than sufficient. Which makes me question what I am doing here anyway. Bye.

I had not meant to be or sound offensive,(I did not mean you as in YOU, I meant you as in the people who make the comments with no substance) I apologize if my words came across as a personal attack. I was not sure what you wanted me to be more clear about, it never occurred to me that you were talking about the history, ironically, you were not clear about this. Also, I was speaking in general about the comments that something is impossible with out any information to back up the stance, the old "that sounds dumb" or "I hope nobody believes that". Earlier I had complimented you on the article that you had posted a link to, it had some good points and was interesting.

I only quoted because I had been told before that if you are going to respond to something you should quote to save the confusion and I was talking with you, not about you. I had not meant that you were the person who was not giving a decent debate, I thought I was clear but I guess I was not.

The history I was referring to was about a previous mathematical hypothesis that was thought to be ridiculous but was eventually proven. I boldened the main sentences because I thought that you said you could not (literally) see my points.

This all says more about how hopeless I am at communication then trying to verbally attack anyone, again I am sorry that it came across that way. I will try to proof read, be more clear, and avoid any offensiveness as best as I can in the future, thanks for pointing this out I am not very good at being clear about my thoughts or organizing them into coherent sentences, I am hoping that forums and threads like these can help me be better about this. I like to talk about science but I can't if I can't make sense.

I used history as an excuse for not reading your lengthy posts. Actually I did read them, obv, and got lost in what you were saying and wanted some concise summary which I often inquire of people to keep everything in tact. So yes in a sense I literally could not see your points b/c unfortunatelly most of what you said seemed irrelevant to me. I think that the problem was that I was not really familiar with what was going on before me so I did not feel the need to connect your words with whatever you were saying before me. Uh, okay, I think I am starting to understand how forums work, lol. My bad. //

To make up for that here is another interesting recent article on how dark matter does not quite seem to be working in explaining observations:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 124344.htm

So it poses even more questions but is nevertheless very convenient. Also as for Tsaga's paper:


Talking about tools (sorry for SA links ) they don't do much good either:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ark-matter
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs ... ing-place/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ark-matter

It's very amazing, can't wait for this to unfold further. And hopefully by the time it does Ill be equiped to understand it.. I am all for quantum gravity interpretation, (i.e. what we call dark matter can be explained with graviton field) too bad I barely grasp anything in it. It is somewhat elaborated, say, in here:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Mar ... ne.ws.html
In particular:

So if anyone has come across any new or cool stuff please do share.

I think threads kind of flow and ebb so that there is really no WRONG way to do them. I am wondering if anybody knows where to get to the actual data? If it is even possible for the public to review it. I know it would be "biting off more then I can chew" but it would be interesting.