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Physicist Claims Universe Has No Dark Matter and Is Twice As Old As We Thought (sciencealert.com) 243

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims. "The study's findings confirm that our previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist," says Gupta. "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy." [...]

Current cosmological models make the reasonable assumption that certain forces governing the interactions of particles have remained constant throughout time. Gupta challenges a specific example of this 'coupling constant', asking how it might affect the spread of space over exhaustively long periods of time. It's hard enough for any novel hypothesis to survive the intense scrutiny of the scientific community. But Gupta's suggestion isn't even entirely new -- it's loosely based on an idea that was shown the door nearly a century ago. In the late 1920s, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered if the reddened light of far distant objects was a result of lost energy, like a marathon runner exhausted by a long journey across the eons of space. His 'tired light' hypothesis was in competition with the now-accepted theory that light's red-shifted frequency is due to the cumulative expansion of space tugging at light waves like a stretched spring.

The consequences of Gupta's version of the tired light hypothesis -- what is referred to as covarying coupling constants plus tired light, or CCC+TL -- would affect the Universe expansion, doing away with mysterious pushing forces of dark energy and blaming changing interactions between known particles for the increased stretching of space. To replace existing models with CCC+TL, Gupta would need to convince cosmologists his model does a better job of explaining what we see at large. His latest paper attempts to do that by using CCC+TL to explain fluctuations in the spread of visible matter across space caused by sound waves in a newborn Universe, and the glow of ancient dawn known as the cosmic microwave background. While his analysis concludes his hybrid tired light theory can play nicely with certain features of the Universe's residual echoes of light and sound, it does so only if we also ditch the idea that dark matter is also a thing.
The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Physicist Claims Universe Has No Dark Matter and Is Twice As Old As We Thought

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  • by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @06:08AM (#64330039) Homepage Journal

    Is the theory that constants vary, light gets tired, and someone else should figure out why galaxies rotate as if they have unseen matter?

    • ...and things like the Bullet Cluster? Dark energy might be explained otherwise, but the observational support for dark matter is really quite strong by now.
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @08:46AM (#64330343)

        the observational support for dark matter is really quite strong by now.

        The observational support for luminiferous ether and Planet Vulcan was also quite strong until suddenly it wasn't.

        Physicists can be led astray by the siren call of a simple and elegant theory. Have you noticed nobody talks about string theory anymore?

        Nobody has observed dark matter, we have no idea what it is, and all the evidence is circumstantial.

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          IIUC, string theory was never proven wrong. It's just that the math was too hard to handle, and it predicted too many different universes. It could still be correct, but it's not very useful. (I'm no expert, but that's what seems to have happened.)

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            The only thing string theory consistently predicts is supersymmetry but that didn't pan out.

          • by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @03:22PM (#64331533) Journal
            String theory is not falsifiable, which makes it a lousy theory.
          • String "theory" is not a cogent scientific theory. It's mathematical masturbation fronting as science. There are no experiments that can support string theory in the same way as there are no experiments to support God.

            There was a time many years ago when we were still hopeful that the LHC would find a way for string theory to be right but all it did was prove nothing like string theory exists.

            String theory proponents were either graduate students who need to publish, crackpots, or armchair physicists.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Tired Gravity!

      The era of Dark X is over: dark matter, dark energy, dark gravity, and dark time will be replaced with tired matter, tired energy, tired gravity, and tired time.

      It's like when over-done OOP was replaced with over-done web services, waiting for the Next Big Overdone Thing. AI?...

    • Dark matter is obvious, it's anything that doesn't emit light. But the problem is with dark energy which to match observations would need many magical properties that are not only not detected but also contradict physics we know at home.

      • Dark matter is the opposite of obvious, and what is really puzzling is why there appears to be so much of it.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by blue trane ( 110704 )

          But why does it cherry-pick its locations?

          "Dwarf galaxies are supposed to be the most dark-matter dominated galaxies in the Universe. At least according to the standard Einsteinian/Newtonian-gravitation and dark-matter based LCDM model of galaxy formation (Battaglie & Nipoti 2022). In this LCDM model, the dark-matter-dominated dwarf galaxies must, if they are satellite galaxies, be distributed spheroidally around their host galaxies. But several studies focussed on the dwarf galaxies in the nearby Uni

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I'm rather certain you misunderstand what the cosmologists mean by "dark matter". I *think* that they require that it be non-baryonic rather than just "not illuminated". (Well, I'm pretty certain that they don't just mean "not illuminated".)

        • Well⦠thereâ(TM)s pretty ubiquitous acceptance that itâ(TM)s some combination of the two. But where the line is varies considerably, especially whether you consider things like the Bullet Cluster to be the norm or an outlier.
    • by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @08:12AM (#64330245) Journal
      The headline and article - even a quotation from the Gupta himself - appear to be conflating dark energy and dark matter, and what cosmological phenomena each is trying to explain. Sooooo, I'm going to not give this a lot of attention right now.
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        It could be a language problem. But I'm going to wait for review by someone who understands what he's trying to say. (I pretty much agree with your recommended action, but I don't feel quite as dismissive, instead suspecting a translation problem.)

    • Exactly what I thought. You can't solve the Dark Matter problem ignoring the observations made by Vera Rubin.
  • Crank physics (Score:5, Informative)

    by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @06:09AM (#64330041)

    Ugh. Don't give this stuff exposure. "Tired light" has a similar status in physics as "Electric universe"and other cranky theories. It tries to explain something while completely ignoring all the other data. This stuff was invented by Zwicky in the 1929 and rapidly debunked because we already know why redshift happens we dont need an entire new explaination that disregards doppler effects.

    • Re: Crank physics (Score:5, Insightful)

      by simlox ( 6576120 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @06:42AM (#64330079)
      Dark matter is also a new explanation to make observations fit theory. You can't claim "we know" how things work. We don't know anything, we can only check if a model fits with data or not.
      • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @06:56AM (#64330093)

        If the data doesn't fit the model (upon which my entire career was built) then the data must be wrong.

        • So is this really just about careers and money, not actual knowledge. and data can be easily cherry-picked and manipulated to fit any narrative?

          • Re: Crank physics (Score:4, Insightful)

            by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @07:46AM (#64330159)

            Unfortunately, we have seen a lot of that in many fields going back to the beginning of science. The Greek philosophers were essentially early scientists. There are no cases I'm aware of where one of them ever said, "Oh hey, Joe, your idea is better than mine, I'm going to change what I teach my students!"

            Galileo was excommunicated for teaching the wrong science. The Catholic Church was the primary source of science at the time, such as it was. Some of it was good, such as monks creating tomes of creatures and plants they saw in the wild. Others not so good such as including dragons in those tomes. Or coming down hard on Galileo despite the Bible never saying the earth was the center of the universe.

            In fact, since the earth wasn't created on the first day, it's actually pretty silly to say God made the sun and stars and other stuff first, just sort of out there and then stuck the earth in the middle a few days later. But there it is.

            There are numerous fields where we can see the same thing going on today. Plate tectonics is now accepted fact but until the previous generation of geologists died out, it was crankery. There are a tiny number of scientists with hard evidence that humans were in North America 35000+ years ago but the previous generation says no more than 14000. Until the 14k guys die out, the 35000 evidence will continue to be suppressed as crankery. My guess is it'll take another 20-30 years and we'll start seeing 35000 as the "new exciting update to humanity in North America!" despite this evidence being around for 20-30 years already.

            With a little effort you can find many other fields with this going on. Cosmological physics is just one area. I find it very odd that from our one tiny planet out in relatively nowhere, some unexplainable observations from a few short years, and nothing more solid than that, an entire industry of dark matter/energy/stuff has popped up as "fact" when really, we have no fucking clue. Prior to dark everything we had string theory, and this n that theory, and turtles all the way down. As we gather more data and science progresses, I assume something better will replace the current odd concept that there's a -lot- of otherwise invisible magical "stuff" out there just floating around doing nothing but conveniently filling in holes in our knowledge. I consider dark stuff to be a place holder until something better comes along. The way these people talk about it, if you strip away all the big words, it's magic.

            • That's a great analysis - no clue why you were downmodded. So much of what you said also seems to apply to the history of humanity's efforts in general, and sometimes the back-and-forth can be measured in years rather than decades or centuries.

            • Re: Crank physics (Score:5, Informative)

              by RoccamOccam ( 953524 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @08:27AM (#64330297)

              Galileo was excommunicated for teaching the wrong science.

              Sorry to be a bit nit-picky, but Galileo wasn't actually excommunicated. His book was banned and he served one day in prison and then he was under house arrest for the rest of his life. When he died, he was buried in consecrated ground (the Basilica of Santa Croce).

              Your point still stands, though.

            • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

              Right but I really don't think scientific progress simply advances as the previous generation dies out. The guy literally blowing smoke up your arse to 'balance the humors' might have said the same things about the witchcraft people.

              Theories have a certain inertia to them even when it is clear there is perhaps some incompleteness. However that keeps us from lurching to new equally flawed theory that has just as many problems but happens to address what most bothered its author about the existing ideas.

              I am

            • Re: Crank physics (Score:4, Interesting)

              by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @12:53PM (#64331095)

              I find it very odd that from our one tiny planet out in relatively nowhere, some unexplainable observations from a few short years, and nothing more solid than that, an entire industry of dark matter/energy/stuff has popped up as "fact" when really, we have no fucking clue.

              1) By a few short years, you mean over a hundred then you would be closer to be correct. Dark matter was first discussed by Lord Kelvin in 1884.. By the 1960s, observations started to show there was more matter than could be accounted for. You seem not to know the history of it. 2) By "an entire industry" you mean cosmologists who spend their entire career focusing on these subjects. The current state of the problem is different measurements by different scientists disagree. And that discrepancy has been verified by other scientists. Dark matter and dark energy are the two leading explanations so far. Pixie dust is another one but so far no one agrees with me on that one.

              Prior to dark everything we had string theory, and this n that theory, and turtles all the way down.

              Except that String Theory was an explanation of the merging quantum mechanics with general relativity. It however did not address nor propose how cosmologists found discrepancy in their measurements.

              As we gather more data and science progresses, I assume something better will replace the current odd concept that there's a -lot- of otherwise invisible magical "stuff" out there just floating around doing nothing but conveniently filling in holes in our knowledge. I consider dark stuff to be a place holder until something better comes along. The way these people talk about it, if you strip away all the big words, it's magic.

              No. Dark matter and dark energy have specific definitions, not magic. Dark matter is non-baryonic and does not react to EM.

              • Dark matter is non-baryonic and does not react to EM.

                Honestly, have we found anything that doesn't interact with ElectroMagnetism? The only thing I can think of is Space itself; however, there is a Red Shift, so technically, even Space itself interacts with EM.

                Logically, it looks like Dark Matter is utter nonsense. Why would we continue looking for something external when it is clear that the issue is purely internal. In other words, some of our assumptions are wrong, despite us being incredibly certain that we are right.

                Personally, I would argue that we just

      • Re: Crank physics (Score:5, Informative)

        by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @07:27AM (#64330125)

        Then you dont know what dark matter is.

        Dark matter isn't a theory. Its an observation. We see the gravitation effects of a huge amount of matter, but we dont know what it is, and we can't see it. Hence its "Dark". The whole point of "Dark Matter" is its a placeholder term until we understood what is causing that massive gravitational effect.

        Thats the difference here. Tired light is a concept that directly contradicts the observational data. Dark matter is observational data looking for a theory to explain it.

        In science we do data, and if the theory doesnt match the data, the theory is wrong. And tired light does not match the data.

        • Re: Crank physics (Score:5, Insightful)

          by famebait ( 450028 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @08:00AM (#64330205)

          Dark matter isn't a theory. Its an observation.

          No, it's an inference based on observation *and* the prevailing understanding of gravity.
          I'm not challenging either, but let's be open about our assumptions.

          • But its not inferring anything. Its just saying "Somethings supposed to be there but we have no fucking idea what!". Thats it. Thats dark matter, its literally all it is. We have some clues. It behaves *strongly* like its some sort of non-baryonic matter, and it also seems to be structured (Ie we can sort of map out where it is by looking at the light bending around it), and it appears to not react in any way we can detect with EM forces, we have no idea if it interacts with the strong and weak nuclear forc

            • we have no fucking idea what!

              We don't know what DM is, but we know what it's not.

              1. It is not micro black holes.
              2. It is not dust
              3. It is not clouds of gas
              4. It is very unlikely to be any form of baryonic matter

              • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @09:27AM (#64330437) Journal

                We also can't rule out that "dark matter" may be some distortion/modification to known forces (or new ones?), and "tired energy" is one of multiple proposed modifications.

                The particle-vs-force models fight for supremacy.

                Maybe it is both: half particle and half force mod? The wave versus particle argument for light used to be framed as either-or, but quantum physics kind of said "it's both" under different circumstances.

                There is certainly more odd shit we haven't discovered/solved yet. Quantum physics is unlikely the last head-stretching odd-ball.

                When we try to extrapolate what works in our labs or inner solar system into cosmic scales, it seems to be hitting a snag. Just like newtonion physics eventually had to be supplemented at very big and small scales with relatively and quantum physics, at cosmic scales there may even be more stuff at play. The past shows we tend to be "scale myopic". This is understandable as our tools tend to match our size because scaling them either direction takes a lot more effort & resources from us.

                But extrapolation has limits, we'll have to get creative to measure outside our comfort zone.

                • We also can't rule out that "dark matter" may be some distortion/modification to known forces (or new ones?)

                  We can and have ruled out distortion/modification to known forces though. Dark matter gets stripped from galaxies through tidal forces [arxiv.org] but only when the right collisions happen which makes galaxies with the same visible mass have drastically different rotation curves. Given constant laws of physics and a given mass distribution results in only a narrow band of stable velocities. Since these galaxies aren’t flying apart or massively distorted that rules out modified Newtonian dynamics.

                  Note that t

            • But its not inferring anything. Its just saying "Somethings supposed to be there but we have no fucking idea what!"

              That is most certainly inferring something. You are inferring that something is supposed to be there. It's a pretty well-grounded inference, but it's still an inference, not an observation.

          • Neutrinos are dark matter: they don't interact with electromagnetism. We can create and detect neutrinos, so we know dark matter exists (in the same sense we know electrons exist). However, neutrinos don't match our models for galaxies: we'd need stupidly large numbers of them, and they'd need to cool down, and those requirements conflict with other models.

        • exactly this! All the physicists I have known always fit the model to the Data... NOT the other way around. Finding a flaw in an excepted theory? They are happy to see that because then they can work for better understanding.
      • It’s not a new observation. Zwicky himself came up with the concept in 1933.
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Dark matter is NOT an explanation. It's the name for a series of effects observed. The "dark" there is to indicate that we don't understand what's going on. The "matter" is to indicate that we're talking about gravitational effects.

        It's not the best of names, but don't confuse it with an explanation. It's just a name. When there's a real explanation it will get renamed/

    • Re:Crank physics (Score:5, Informative)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @07:32AM (#64330135) Homepage Journal

      > Ugh. Don't give this stuff exposure.

      This here sums up why Scientism isn't science.

      > Anti-intellectualism does not make you sound smarter.

      Wow, the irony is off the charts.

      > Read the goddam paper first before shooting your mouth off.

      OMG you didn't even comment on his abstract (from a respected journal).

      He offers reasonable speculation on a mechanism for CMB anisotropy and suggests a fix for Relativity that Einstein knew was a problem and predicts Webb observations in conflict with CDM with a single model and you're like "cut out his tongue! Nothing here can have value!"?

      Does your paycheck depend on him being wrong?

    • Re:Crank physics (Score:5, Informative)

      by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @07:56AM (#64330185)
      It’s a tired explanation.

      Fritz Zwicky himself was one of the earliest people to propose the concept way back in 1933. Since then dark matter is popular because of the explanatory power it has. Gravitational lensing, galaxy rotation curves and star velocity dispersions, and the cosmic microwave background [wikipedia.org] are all separate chains of observations that confirm something analogous to dark matter exists.
    • Re:Crank physics (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @07:57AM (#64330189) Homepage

      Ugh. Don't give this stuff exposure.

      On the contrary: look at what he is saying and then try to show why he is wrong. An emotive reply of "he contradicts currently accepted ideas" does not advance science much. Finding flaws in different explanations makes the current model stronger.

      We know that the current model has holes in it, for instance it requires dark matter & dark energy - which we do not understand. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, these will be explained or shown to not be necessary by some tweaks to the current model -- but quite possibly by big changes to the current model.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Does his theory explain the rotational speed of galaxies? I've heard claims that it doesn't.

    • because we already know why redshift happens

      The only thing we are truly certain of is that light is propagated through interstellar space by aether. It's one of those settled science things that everyone agreed on and everyone who spoke against it was considered a quack. ... Until they weren't.

      Scientists do not "know" anything. They postulate providing a model to explain observed reality.

    • It tries to explain something while completely ignoring all the other data.

      I mean that's necessarily step one. You start with something like "eating certain fruits prevents scurvy" while completely ignoring stuff like the motions of the planets, and then hopefully end up with something like vitamin C which matches the rest of physics instead of with "fruits are magic".

    • by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      And made up "dark matter" and "dark energy" that has never been observed nor is there any way to experimentally confirm, is better... why?

      Dark matter and dark energy have always been questionable...

      If a new theory doesn't require them, then it is already superior.

    • Re:Crank physics (Score:4, Informative)

      by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @08:16AM (#64330265) Journal

      No, we just need to invent dark matter and dark energy to make our models work. Certainly our imaginary kludge is MUCH more plausible than someone else's.

      I'm not saying he's right, I'm not even saying he's not a complete kook, but you may want to be careful of all those windows when you're chucking those stones at him.

    • Ugh. Don't give this stuff exposure. "Tired light" has a similar status in physics as "Electric universe"and other cranky theories.

      You know, exploring absurdities is not an entirely absurd idea. Pre-categorizing inputs affects your outputs in subtle ways. You can find truths deep inside of absurdities which can inform your overall perspective effectively and coherently. Reality is far more subtle and complex than you or I think.

  • The whole dark matter concept has never made sense to me. If it only interacts with regular matter by gravity, why do we not see it everywhere on earth. If I look at a stone and add up the regular matter in it I do not see any dark matter. If dark matter exists, there has to be a reason that gravity has not caused it agglomerate with regular matter. There is no reason that I can see based on conventional physics to explain why it is not all around us.
    • The whole dark matter concept has never made sense to me. If it only interacts with regular matter by gravity, why do we not see it everywhere on earth. If I look at a stone and add up the regular matter in it I do not see any dark matter. If dark matter exists, there has to be a reason that gravity has not caused it agglomerate with regular matter. There is no reason that I can see based on conventional physics to explain why it is not all around us.

      The main reason it’s the preferred explanation by nearly all astrophysicists is because it explains the data so well. You wouldn’t have different galaxy rotation curves for the same visible matter distribution if it was just our understanding of gravity that was wrong. Nor would our counting of the visible matter in galaxies and galaxy clusters be so far off from observed lensing, in fact those structures could not exist without it. For non gravitational evidence you just need to examine the

    • If it only interacts with regular matter by gravity, why do we not see it everywhere on earth.

      Picture yourself observing (how?) the descent of an asteroid made of dark matter that somehow holds together. What happens? It falls. It reaches the ground you're standing on. It does not stop, because it can only interact with normal matter via gravitation, not electromagnetism, so it does not bounce. It continues falling. If its interaction is strong enough to result in a kind of friction, it might not settle to the center of the Earth. But it probably will.

    • If I look at a stone and add up the regular matter in it I do not see any dark matter

      This is because the density of dark matter, given a uniform density distribution, would be around 4 protons per cubic meter. A stone you lift up would average less than a proton out of the trillion trillion you picked up, less than one part in 10^24.

      If dark matter exists, there has to be a reason that gravity has not caused it agglomerate with regular matter. There is no reason that I can see based on conventional physics to explain why it is not all around us.

      Neutrinos are all around us, have mass, do not clump around regular matter, and are nearly unobservable. Dark matter is expected to have a higher mass, lower velocity around 500k mph, but also have no charge and not interact with normal matter.

    • Re:Dark matter (Score:5, Informative)

      by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @08:40AM (#64330325) Journal

      The whole dark matter concept has never made sense to me. If it only interacts with regular matter by gravity, why do we not see it everywhere on earth. If I look at a stone and add up the regular matter in it I do not see any dark matter. If dark matter exists, there has to be a reason that gravity has not caused it agglomerate with regular matter. There is no reason that I can see based on conventional physics to explain why it is not all around us.

      The reason one does not see the effects of dark matter in day-to-day life is because it is really, really diffuse and insubstantial at human scales, and only becomes significant when you accumulate its effects at galactic and intergalactic scales. How diffuse? Something like a few proton masses per cubic meter [google.com].

      As for agglomeration: it is gravity that causes large scale stuff - like nebulae - to compress together. But it is electromagnetism that ultimately lets that matter stick together. There are multiple mechanisms here. One mechanism is that EM interactions allow for the gravitational energy of a system to get radiated away as photons, which reduces the gravitational energy and brings things together. Another mechanism is interatomic forces - like ionic bonds - which can allow particles to glom together if they get close enough and with low enough velocity. Those interatomic forces are usually stronger than gravity (at close range), which allows for matter to accrete into larger and larger discrete units - stars, mostly, with a few other interesting bits like planets and living creatures. If we relied solely on gravity to not only bring things together, but also hold things together, they wouldn't, and all the cosmos would be a bland cloud of diffuse matter.

      Dark matter appears not to interact via EM, and so there isn't anything to force it to stick to itself or to baryonic matter.

      • If it only interacts by gravity, it should not be diffuse. It should attract itself and normal matter into lumps because there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Normal matter lumps up despite being affected by other forces, so why shouldn't dark matter. Large lumps of dark matter would disclose themselves by gravitational lensing if nothing else. This whole business smells like epicycles to me. Ad hoc additions to the model to make the data fit.
        • If it only interacts by gravity, it should not be diffuse. It should attract itself and normal matter into lumps because there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Normal matter lumps up despite being affected by other forces, so why shouldn't dark matter. Large lumps of dark matter would disclose themselves by gravitational lensing if nothing else. This whole business smells like epicycles to me. Ad hoc additions to the model to make the data fit.

          False, if it’s non interacting like neutrinos are and if it has velocities of something like 500k mph in the Milky Way, then it absolutely would not be clumpy any more than a gas would clump. In fact there is evidence the halo dark matter forms around large structures like galaxies does have a gas like structure with lower density out at the edges and a greater density in the center and the equations used in dark halo calculations are of a very similar form.

        • by necro81 ( 917438 )
          A collection of gravitationally bound particles will be attracted together. But as they come together, their velocities increase. They’ll come to some close approachand generally whizz right past each other, sailing outward again before being attracted together again. Even if two particles smash head on, they’ll likely just ricochet in a perfectly elastic collision (tough to know for certain - all other examples of particles clashing together involve other forces. A purely gravitational coll
  • Once we see it is consistent with most cosmological observations like some DM models are, we can consider it more seriously.

    Currently, it is still largely an exercise in math.

    • Almost all cosmological data is not direct but is derived from some observation using constants assumed from *drumroll* LCDM.

  • by pitch2cv ( 1473939 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @07:58AM (#64330197)

    How does this theory explain SN1a time dilation at high redshifts? Reshift due to tired light does not make high z SN1a's take longer to decay.

    Also the CMB harmonics are for dark and then barionic matter. How does he explain those?

    These are no small feats to explain. LambdaCDM does all that. This new suggestion does not.

  • More observation. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @08:04AM (#64330215)
    Observation is the great and dreaded pruning shear of the theorist community. Occam's Chainsaw. Every second invested in observation saves an hour of academics debating how cute their models are for this or that phenomenon, revealing many to be butterfaces at best.
  • Yeah, some kid at MIT figured out the real truth ... it's "Dark Fluid" (anti gravity) that doesn't "hold" the galaxy together, it pushes it together. All you have to do is flip a few operators from + to -, and voila. Even that guy from 100 years ago... ummm.. .Eisenstein?... Yeah, he thought it could be true.

    Also, I get all my news from Pocket, don't judge. I hear most of the kids get their news from TikTok, so....

    Click the links, it's actually pretty thought provoking

    https://getpocket.com/explore/item/biza
    • All you have to do is flip a few operators from + to -, and voila.

      If you are consistent this is perfectly acceptable and you can think of galaxies being pushed together instead of pulled. I’ve been calculating current backwards in circuits my entire career, just like every other electrical engineer because some idiot thought electrons carry a positive charge and now it’s taught that way. I was told to think of it as hole flow lol. However it makes no difference and the calculations produce identical results.

  • by Holi ( 250190 )

    I always saw dark matter as the modern day aether anyway. Just a sign we don't know as much as we think we do.

    • Space is a medium, that's for sure, one that allows for small things to both vibrate (be a wave) and still be particles.

  • Cosmology has, it seems to me, always been a collection of hacks bolted on top of a system that acts differently than our older models predicted it should. I'm not equipped to judge whether this particular hack actually explains things, or whether it simplifies more things than it complicates. I wasn't even qualified to judge whether epicycles of crystal spheres made sense or not. I have to go with expert consensus, and I'm guessing the consensus is against this one lone voice.

    The problem there is that e

    • The religious part of me agrees with the "universe as an egg"-hypothesis. We are just bacteria on its shell. "God"* is what will come out of it, not that it cares for bacteria. That it's just "branes" temporarily overlapping, is equally plausible.

      I don't care, it will not be disproven or proven in my life time, if ever. I don't buy that there is some entity outside (or inside) of the universe that would bother caring for the particles that believe in it, I find such a notion moronic.

      * As in something that h

  • Title says universe has no dark matter. The summary quotes indicate no dark energy.

    I'm a little skeptical of both. They're both effectively a placeholder/corrective value to make the math work.

    Sometimes that is indeed the case. Using effectively a placeholder value like this looking at the orbit of Uranus they found Neptune. Other times it doesn't. Looking at the orbital data for Mercury they deduced using a placeholder value the existence of the planet Vulcan. In that case it just turned out that the

  • Saying "Physicist Claims" is only slightly better than saying "Physicists Claim". I don't give a damn what one claims, and I care even less when one ascribes a single weird conclusion to the collective.

    "It's hard enough for any novel hypothesis to survive the intense scrutiny of the scientific community."

    No... it's hard for novel hypotheses that don't propose anything measurably different to gain traction. As it should be.

    Instead of saying that, say, God was responsible for making the college athlete catch

  • by Don'tJoin ( 6185656 ) on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @11:55AM (#64330941)

    I agree that the estimated age of the universe is most likely wrong, also that dark matter is just a concept they introduced because they couldn't say "we don't know".

    But tired light is a really bad name, if not a bad concept. The light doesn't need to tire to be affected by the expansion of space as it travels through it. Conservation of energy doesn't really like that, if light actually got tired (as in lost energy) as it moved along it would have to loose that energy to something else that would gain energy... voilá; Dark Energy!

    Just to clarify: I don't believe in an acceleration of the expansion rate of the universe, nor dark matter or energy. I do believe that the universe is a 3 (or more) dimensional surface of a sphere, and the age of the universe is equal to the radius where the circumference is farthest from the center, the light we see from distant objects has traveled in a spiral out from the origin point towards us as the radius got bigger and bigger. And only every single person is at this very moment further away from the center (of the universe) than any other being that it sees, since that which we see belongs to the past.

All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin

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