New Theory Challenges Need For Dark Matter 302
New submitter elsurexiste writes "An Italian Physicist came up with a strange way to explain anomalous galactic rotations without dark matter, instead relying on the gravitational effects of faraway matter. The article explains, 'Conceptually the idea makes little sense. Positioning gravitationally significant mass outside of the orbit of stars might draw them out into wider orbits, but it’s difficult to see why this would add to their orbital velocity. Drawing an object into a wider orbit should result in it taking longer to orbit the galaxy since it will have more circumference to cover. What we generally see in spiral galaxies is that the outer stars orbit the galaxy within much the same time period as more inward stars. But although the proposed mechanism seems a little implausible, what is remarkable about Carati’s claim is that the math apparently deliver galactic rotation curves that closely fit the observed values of at least four known galaxies. Indeed, the math delivers an extraordinarily close fit.' As usual, these are extraordinary claims that divert from the consensus, so keep a healthy skepticism. The paper is available at the arXiv (PDF)."
The Bullet Cluster (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this explain the gravitational lensing in the Bullet Cluster?
This is the kind of theory that could have be viable prior to August 2006. When the gravity isn't pointing towards the baryonic matter, we have to postulate that there's some dark matter for the gravity to point to. Or, as Sean Carroll put it [discovermagazine.com]
Re:Yet another MOND (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. A theory which explains away the dark matter MUST explain the observable effects of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster [wikipedia.org] Then it should explain discrepancy between small and large galaxies.
Only after it passes these two tests it could be discussed seriously. Yet another "I can haz explain rotation curves!!!" theory is definitely not interesting.
Re:"Solves" one issue of dark matter only (Score:4, Insightful)
hey thanks for your contribution...seems like you know what you're talking about
I want to respond to this:
"this guy's explanation can't explain things like X, nor can they explain Y which, **in the field**, are considered much stronger constraints."
I dont want to squabble about X & Y...but ask you if X & Y were re-examined in a context that was absent a need for Dark Matter of any kind, is it possible that the researchers of X & Y would find another way to explain the observations?
Of course, yes, we could find that observations of the Bullet Cluster can fit a model sans-dark matter once we apply a comprehensive understanding of black holes...or not.
My point is, Dark Matter is as Dark Matter does...if its not an option, those PhD dissertations on galaxy collision physics are going to get written anyhow, and whatever explanation we can find will be the best until we find something better...
sure the CDM Theory of Cosmology fits observations...we can reverse engineer ANY result we want with the data analysis tools available...the point of my post is simply to ask, "What is more important to you, volume of published research on a topic or mathematic/scientific fitness?"
Your answer to my question is also the answer to your own questions of the External Validity of Carati's equations.
Re:what's going on in italy lately? (Score:5, Insightful)
Conventional leap of faith: this strange unseen matter exists and interacts gravitationally but somehow isn't available on Earth, cannot be created or observed or studied in a lab,
Unless supersymmetry is RP-conserving.
Electrical leap of faith: electrical processes explain the lack of mass through the electric force which is many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity and is more effective at long distances and is the only logical explanation for light-years-long jets of matter (Birkeland currents), can be observed in any laboratory with modest equipment and is known to scale both up and down, and through processes not yet understood there is enough charge separation in the Universe to provide the potential difference to cause these circuits to flow.
If you're willing to believe that far off galaxies have ridiculous amount of charge separation (something we have no theories or experimental evidence for), then believing that there are weakly interacting massive particles or other forms of dark matter can't be a stretch. Electromagnetism is strong (relatively), there would have to be something really trying to hard to convince the different charges to keep apart
I wonder how long it will be before science is forced to throw out dark matter and embrace electrical effects. Ten years? Twenty?
It's not a matter of time, it's a matter of evidence. If you can come up with a self-consistent theory that explains these electrical effects and have predictable effects that can be measured then you can have your moment in the sun.
Re:"Intelligent" gravity force (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: "I'm not bright enough to think about orbital dynamics, so I'll just try to start an offtopic religion-bashing troll thread instead."
Re:Why So Implausible? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why this theory is "implausible" and why the article is so dismissive of it. Dark Matter was created for the sole purpose of explaining the orbital momentum of stars. There is NO other evidence for it.
False. So completely and entirely false that I really can't see you being anything other than a troll, but on the theory that sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from malice, I'll point out what several others have already done above: the Bullet Cluster, various details of the CMB, and at various aspects of large-scale structure in galaxy clusters, up to and including the closure of the universe itself, are all evidence for Dark Matter of various kinds.
So all you've done here is declare, "I am completely ignorant of almost all of observational cosmology and THIS is my opinion on Dark Matter..."
After reading the first half of that sentence no one who knows anything about Dark Matter is going to be the least bit interested in what you have to say in the second half.
Re:what's going on in italy lately? (Score:5, Insightful)
A religious rant, condemning other theories as inadequate, antiquated, and conforming to orthodoxy. On the internet too. Wow, who would have anticipated that?
To be fair, using mathematical models on stuff we can see and measure seems a reasonable idea as opposed to inventing an invisible, incorporeal, magical material that we have no direct evidence even exists in order to compensate for our lack of understanding in how the Universe moves.
Re:recent years? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. ANY Coffee in America is overroasted dog shit
Re:Yet another MOND (Score:4, Insightful)
Theories trying to handwave dark matter seem to pop up about once a month these days
Can you blame them? We found a bunch of stuff that doesn't fit our model for how the universe works so instead of invalidating our model we just assume that there is something invisible influencing our numbers. I won't pretend like I know what is really going on but blaming some undetectable third-party when your model fails feels like grasping at straws to me.
Re:Don't know anything about Physics (Score:5, Insightful)
I just want to say- what little I do know, I've always disliked dark-matter. It always seemed to be a case of "we can't explain 'x' - so let's claim there is dark-matter and that will make our hypothesis match what we observe."
But you should realize that this technique has been used throughout the entire history of modern science, and its track record is actually quite good.
Back in the late 1700s, after the discovery of the planet Uranus, astronomers made careful calculations of its orbital elements and published a table the position of the planet in the sky over the years (and decades). As the years (and decades) wore on, they discovered a curious thing: the actual position of the planet was beginning to diverge from what had been predicted.
At this point, there were a few different explanations:
1) Perhaps the initial orbital elements were incorrect.
2) Perhaps our fundamental laws of gravity and motion were incorrect.
3) Perhaps there was a massive, as-yet-undetected eighth planet whose gravity was influencing the orbit of Uranus.
Most astronomers fell into the third camp; after all, the observations of Uranus's orbit had been made with considerable precision (for the time) and there was little reason to believe that the fundamental laws of physics would start to break down as you move further away from the sun. And so they made their calculations and narrowed down the location of this hypothetical planet to a fairly small window in the sky. After that, it was just a matter of pointing a telescope there and looking.
This is the story of the discovery of the planet Neptune.
Astronomers did not find this planet by accident. It was not discovered by a kid in the backyard with a streak of cosmic good luck. (In fact, many observers from antiquity had seen it, but had not realized what they were looking at.) They found it because they knew it had to be there.
Now, you might think that this comparison is a bit of a stretch. But it's just one example; there are countless more. Back in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli was studying beta decay in atomic nuclei. He realized that the process, as he was seeing it, could not possibly be happening unless there were (again, hypothetical) particles being emitted as a consequence. If there were not, then all sorts of fundamental principles of physics were being violated (e.g., conservation of matter / angular momentum / etc.)
This particle, eventually named the "neutrino", remained hypothetical and undetected for more than a quarter of a century until it was finally detected -- in 1956.
I could go on, but the point is that postulating the existence of something hypothetical in order to explain deviations between theory and observed results is part of the best traditions of natural science. It's not hand-waving or charlatanism. And it works more often than most people might think.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what's going on in italy lately? (Score:2, Insightful)
"The Electric Universe theory has been debunked over and over and over."
Citations needed.
"It's as real as orgone energy or homeopathic medicine or Scientology -- meaning completely quackery with no foundation in science or reality."
Citations needed.
"All crackpot theories have the same defense: that all of academia is making a group effort to discredit the theory because accepting it goes against too many well-established norms."
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. "crackpot" is generally a term used to designate a well qualified individual conducting research frowned upon by the mainstream so disdain by said mainstream establishment is a given regardless of the validity of the research in question. Your implied argument is that anything which is not accepted by the mainstream establishment implicitly has no validity is a BIG citation needed.
This all falls back to what I like to call the anti-conspiracy fallacy. It goes something like this. Non-mainstream believer, group, or idea X depends on a group Y acting inappropriately, this is obviously false because group Y is too large to coordinate such an effort and probably also lacks motive. This is a fallacy because group dynamics do not depend on concerted conscious efforts. Large group effects can be an emergence phenomenon that may or may not be intentionally seeded by key individuals. The fact that they are emergence phenomenon does absolve members of group Y for responsibility in the result.
The reason this cracks me up is the people who scoff at such an idea generally do so because of their unshakable belief in the quality of group Y's efforts... which is itself the same kind of emergence phenomenon they are pretending does exist!
Re:"Intelligent" gravity force (Score:4, Insightful)
"Athiesm takes as much of a leap of faith as belief in a diety or dieties"
Yes. And not collecting stamps is as much of a hobby as collecting them.
"It's sad how so many athiests think religion is anti-science"
Maybe because, well, it is. While science can't accept the 'argumentum ad auctoritatem', it is the only valid one for (theist) religion.
"if they don't believe in a diety why do they even mention one?"
It might be because people like you don't stop talking about it.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I agree. Dark gravity deniers should be kicked out of their profession. Once a consensus is reached, it is recognized as FACT!
Heh. A few years back I was modded into oblivion when I stated that I thought Dark Matter was utter BS, a way for some scientists to make the math work despite any real proof. I think I said something like "They can't just come out and admit 'I don't know', so they pulled this out of their ass. 'The cause? Ummm. Ummm, hey, it's.... dark matter! That's the ticket!' ".
And that's pretty much what it is. The observable universe doesn't agree with their equations, so they made something up to make the equations work. And as someone else said, "you can't fight consensus, right?".
Re:what's going on in italy lately? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gravitational lensing has been observed in a bodies of dark matter... so we can see it too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Galaxy_clusters_and_gravitational_lensing
Re:what's going on in italy lately? (Score:5, Insightful)
Electromagnetic force can be easily and cheaply measured here on earth and is thus measured all the time. I find it hard to believe that we have had the wrong formula all this time and nobody noticed. And if this is the case, and Electromagnetic force decreases linearly and not quadraticaly you should be able to provide experimental proof pretty easily.
Re:what's going on in italy lately? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been around for a while and listened to Electric Universe proponents spout off about it for some time. I can assure you that, at one point, the party line in the posts I saw was that stars were basically just big iron-nickel anodes and cathodes in space surrounded by a relatively thin layer of plasma. Similarly, the trails behind comets weren't water reflecting sunlight, but were in fact an electrical aurora, etc., etc. Maybe such claims have been abandoned now, but they were there in the past. Electric Universe theory surely keeps changing just like most things. The only real constant seems to be that proponents insist that all other forces must bow to the electromagnetic force and that conventional physicists who don't subscribe to the theory are soulless minions of orthodoxy. Essentially, the entire point of EU theory seems to simply be contrarian.
In a lot of ways it reminds me of creationism. When I was a kid, dinosaur bones were just a few old bones that scientists had put together wrong and misinterpreted. When it became far too clear to everyone that only a complete idiot could really believe that, dinosaur bones because a trick planted by the devil. Today, dinosaurs are antediluvian life which didn't make it onto the ark... they're even mentioned in the bible!!! The creationists trail real science and keep changing their story, but never, ever, ever admit error. What they believe is always the absolute truth and always has been and if you remember having hours long arguments with them over something which they now believe to be the case but didn't then, your memory is faulty! The thing that's important to them isn't really any particular set of facts, it's that all those scientists with their fancy degrees aren't really so smart and are, in fact, actually stupid fools who can't see the truth, which is obvious to any of the superior (yet humble) believers.
Oh, gee. I am embarrassed to admit, I wrote the previous two paragraphs without reading the links you provided. Nothing but demagoguery and misrepresentation from me. I clearly never even your alternate theory a fighting chance. But, now I have read those pages and I am enlightened. In the spirit of enlightenment, I present an excerpt from this [holoscience.com] article which you linked to:
Now, this is not exactly "big balls of iron" like I wrote (of course that was just what I'd heard from other EU proponents), but your response that "they claim they are balls of ionized plasma (i.e. gas-like, not solid-like)" after berating me for my idiocy seems a little disingenuous in light of what that article says. It seems to fit what I said a lot better than what you said. Solid core, lots of iron.
Fusion as a secondary effect of huge arc discharges doesn't seem like it would be sufficient to create all the higher elements in the universe given how ridiculously small the yield would be with plain hydrogen rather than tritium and deuterium like we do it on earth so, as far as I'm concerned, at present, the EU theory doesn't explain where all those elements came from. I'm sorry, I don't think that I'm drinking someone's poisoned kool-aid by finding EU theory to be flawed. I think I'm just looking at a heavily flawed theory and seeing it for what it is.
Re:what's going on in italy lately? (Score:5, Insightful)
DISCLAIMER: I am not a astrophysic, and I have the good sense to not to claim that the new theory looks like better (fits observations better) than dark matter. The scientific process will eventually sort it out (and not through an /. poll). This post is not about the theory but about the posts on it.
When Wegener postulated its theory, even if the underlying details were not fully understood, it was a scientific one because it answered to observation (size of continents, identical fossils found at different continents, etc.).
Fortunately, there was no internet then, because there would be a deluge of posts by uninformed people who didn't knew shit of what they were talking about, but felt that theory too "radical" and that they had to restore order (go read the GGP talking about "totally divorce the mathematics from natural philosophy").
The most funny things about those guys is that they would look at the abstract of a full scientific study and counter it with and abstract... "similar fossils? they have been spread by African swallows. Hey, that solves it, I am so sure that I won't ever check if this can be possible."
Nowadays, we have some amateurs who take several years of observations, heavy mathematical work and just threw out of their asses "I'd look at friction of intestellar gasses around the ejection plumes from black holes". Where is your data? Your correlation of the expected results with observations? Your predictions and/or experiments?If you have some of it, don't send it to me, publish the paper to help science, please.
Don't get my wrong, I am not annoyed by it. It could be annoying if those people were wasting someones time for this, but no scientific is going to come to /. searching for theories, so it is mostly harmless entertainment that brings a smile to my face :-)
The funny thing is that those nutjobs always leer in the same direction, opposing the "unnatural" posibilities. Are they afraid that the world is becoming too complicated? I feel there are too many camouflaged ludites out there.
And, finally, my goodbye present. [xkcd.com]
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
As a physicist: You are Idiot and uneducated in the history of physics. Lets take some instances of when people invented something "to make the math work" (uhm yes, thats what physicists are trying to do in the end.....)
a) Ether Wind. They made is up "to make the math work" as an alternative to "change the underlying euquations".... And the winner was "change the underlying equations". Without specific predictions from the Ether WInd Hyphothesis one could not have constructed the Michelson-Moreley Experiement
b) Neutrinos. Long predicted, because some momentum was missing. At that moment the neutrino was "dark matter". As we all know, Neutrinos exist. Is everybody would have believe that Neutrinos are utter bullshit because they "just ake the math work" nobody would have developed a theory for detecting them.