Galaxy Clusters' Stunted Growth Confirms Dark Energy 167
A new study of 86 galaxy clusters in the early universe has provided independent confirmation of the existence of dark energy. In its absence, gravity's pull should have caused the number of clusters to increase by a factor of 50 over the last 5.5 billion years. What is observed is a factor of 10 increase. "Together with earlier observations... the new data strengthen the suspicion — but do not prove — that dark energy is a weird antigravity called the cosmological constant that was hypothesized and then abandoned by Albert Einstein as a 'blunder' almost a century ago. If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight. ... Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, said: 'If this was a fox hunt and dark energy was the fox, I think they have closed off another escape route. But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur.'"
Logic (Score:2)
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Yeah, I often wonder about how I manage to breathe. There's all this stuff I can't see, and I'm not really sure it's really there.
(Hint: Just because something doesn't interact with photons doesn't make it pseudo-scientific.)
Re:Logic (Score:5, Funny)
You think that's air you're breathing now?
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No, I nearly died choking on my lunch when I read your reply. ;O
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That whooshing sound was GP's Matrix themed joke flying right over your head. Turn in your geek card at the desk on your way out please.
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I think missing a reference to a the Matrix should only burnish ones geek credentials--it's like the star wars prequels. I've tried so hard to forget.
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I think missing a reference to a the Matrix should only burnish ones geek credentials--it's like the star wars prequels. I've tried so hard to forget.
Lies that quote was from the first movie; the real one. Your thinking of those two bootleged movies put together by well meaning fans who didn't have the talent to pull it off.
Animated series? (Score:1, Offtopic)
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The good one? You mean the animated series? 'cause everything later, and certainly those three live action movies, sucked rocks.
/shock
You didn't like the first Matrix movie?
Burn the Witch!
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I'm not completely convinced that Carrie Anne is all that hot. But Monica, man, don't bother giftwrapping her, I'll take her right here, right now! Not that she'd let me anywhere near her, ofcourse. Too bad, her loss.
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I'm not completely convinced that Carrie Anne is all that hot.
Not at all. Don't get me wrong, given the opportunity, "I'd tap that" in a heartbeat, but that sentiment applies to just about every "decentish" looking gal out there. She's definitely nothing special though.
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Is there a list somewhere of what movie references you are required to be familiar with to work in the field of Technology or Science?
I'd like to edit it.
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Is darkness not the absence of light?
Perhaps Dark Matter is to Matter as Darkness is to Light. The absence of matter? Or something altogether different.
Basically, we would have to look the absence of something rather than the existence of something. A scientific conundrum indeed.
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(Hint: Just because something doesn't interact with photons doesn't make it pseudo-scientific.)
*cough*
Air does interact with photons. Just not ones we've evolved to see. Because, you know, what would be the point otherwise?
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It also interacts with the photons we can see. Otherwise, the refractive index of air would be exactly 1, instead of 1.00029
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That's really interesting, I didn't know that.
Is the effect too small to notice or do our brains compensate?
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Yes, what an impossible thing. To think, that humans, the pathetic little barely-smarter-than-a-chimp creatures on a rock in the middle of nowhere might have... *gasp* limits ;)
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That comment is ample proof that the wrong people are allowed to moderate here.
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In either case dark matter may not be necessary at all. This is because in logic necessary has a hugely different meaning than the way you used it
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I agree dark matter may not be the correct answer, but more like, the current best fit answer, given current available evidence. One concept that could explain what is going on, without the need for dark matter, is the idea of Dark Flow.
If Dark Flow can be proven, (big if?!
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Provide the same for another viewpoint without starting out at the proposed solution and your argument may be taken more seriously. But I'm sure armchair physicists who haven't taken the time to understand astrophysics know more then those who have dedicated their lives to the practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org]
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Article Confirms kdawson Doesn't Read Articles (Score:5, Informative)
"Together with earlier observations... the new data strengthen the suspicion â" but do not prove â" that dark energy is a weird antigravity called the cosmological constant that was hypothesized and then abandoned by Albert Einstein as a 'blunder' almost a century ago.
Wait, what?
Re:Article Confirms kdawson Doesn't Read Articles (Score:5, Informative)
Dictionary: confirm
1. To support or establish the certainty or validity of; verify.
2. To make firmer; strengthen
See definition 2. Incidentally, in science, "confirm" always means 2. Certainty is impossible to establish using the scientific method. An experiment that produces the expected result confirms the theory, but certainly does not prove it.
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What about the scientific consensus though? CNN tells me that the scientific consensus is that Global Warming is real.
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global warmin is real. the CAUSE of global warming is debatable.
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I hope you don't try to evaluate regexps in your head.
1) ((To support) || (establish) ) ( (the certainty) || (validity of) ); verify.
Number one works--to support the validity of.
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Isn't dark energy a general name for whatever it is that causes our universe do things that aren't explained by our equations?
So I guess this confirms Dark Energy even more because it invalidates even more equations than before. So it isn't the old equations that are wrong; it is only because part of the equation does not include variable D.
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Nope. Dark energy is something that fits into our current equations. But we don't know what it is, and there are several alternatives that match the observations.
Then there's the alternative explanation, that our equations are wrong and there is no dark energy.
The support seems to be gathering on the side of dark energy (and dark matter too) being real, but it's still far from being "a fact".
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>Any true scientist will agree that #1 God exists (for things we can't prove through science) #2 what we can prove is far removed from popular thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fox Hunt? (Score:5, Funny)
You got it wrong, he wasn't talking about fox, the animal, but about Fox Mulder.
Dark energy is what took his sister to a distant galaxy and that distance is growing every day. The FBI are closing escape routes, but the dark energetic abductor has still much galaxy to run.
The glimer of fur thing must be a reference to the sister.
Re:Fox Hunt? (Score:5, Funny)
NASA confirms it! [nasa.gov].
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Seeing as fox hunting involves a bunch of extremely rich (inherited rich, never worked a minute in their life rich) people with a taste for animal blood riding horses around, sending a small army of dogs after a fox and ripping it to shreds just for the sake of it, I think your analogy is actually better.
I'm not sure there are many rich physicists out there that ride horses round their labs wearing red jackets and joppers, nor am I sure how dogs would help track down dark matter but I am at least sure it's
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...nor am I sure how dogs would help track down dark matter...
Duh! You take one of dark matter's old socks give the tracking dogs a whiff. It doesn't take an astro-physicist to figure that out.
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Except in Australia where Foxes devastate the native wildlife.
And hunting foxes is hard, you rarely see them in the day and at night, when you hunt them you can only see the gleam in their eyes, which they learn to close so they can hide - very cunning animal. In the meantime they have ripped apart thousands of species of birds and marsupials, so if those "extremely rich" want to come over here and
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They're also intelligent and very arrogant, one walked past where I was bar-be-queing, not more than 3m away; he looked me dead into the eye, threw his nose up into the air, arched his back, curled his tail and began prancing to taunt me!
Not exactly (Score:2)
Obligatory xkcd (Score:5, Funny)
The Ultimate Fate of the Universe (Score:5, Informative)
If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight.
Not only that, but depending upon the key value of state w, the ratio between dark energy pressure and its energy density, if the value of w is less than -1 then the universe will eventually be pulled apart as the rate of expansion begins to accelerate towards infinity. First the nearest galactic clusters will fade from view, then the nearest galaxies in our cluster, then the stars in our galaxy. Finally, approximately three months before the end, the solar system itself will become gravitationaly unbound, in the last minutes stars and planets will be torn apart, and finally, an instant before the end of everything individual atoms and their subatomic pieces will be ripped into ever smaller pieces until there is nothing left (i.e. the last bits just wink out of existence). The end, if it were to occur in this way, is around 50 billion years, or approximately 3.8 times the current known age of the universe, into the future. This hypothesis is known colloquially as the Big Rip [wikipedia.org].
Re:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe (Score:5, Insightful)
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"And AC said: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light--"
Timescales (Re:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe) (Score:4, Informative)
In that sort of model, the Hubble redshift is only proportional to the expansion ratio as a first approximation (whose range is roughly analogous to the range within the elastic limit of a spring).
There then becomes an upper limit to the possible size of the universe, that corresponds to the total (finite) massenergy contained within it. As we approach that limit, things unravel. The resulting increase in atomic instability can then be expressed as an effect of decreased nominal inertial mass due to the reduced background field strength (nuclear stability is a function of inertia).
But a decrease in local inertia also corresponds to an increase in the local rate of timeflow. The absolute end of the universe then represents a point in time where the nominal rate of timeflow is infinite (although, by then, there's nothing left to measure it with), so the period at which the universe nominally ends, measured in "insider-time", is in the infinitely far future. Okay, so its not quite infinitely far away, because the last proton evaporates at a finite time, but the timescale is effectively infinite to most intents and purposes, as far as we're concerned.
The advantage of this form of time-scaling is that it tidies up the Hartle-Hawking model - it allows the "equator" of the H-H bubble to represent the apparent end of the universe for insiders, and to be totally smooth. This removes the messiness that we'd otherwise tend to get when the bubble reaches its maximum size and parts of it start to contract. Contraction implies reversed entropic timeflow, so the HH bubble has a problem in that an observer living through the expansion-contraction region might see some mightily strange things going on. Some regions might be seen to be ageing in opposite directions to others. But if the interior rate of timeflow goes to infinity at the equator (as the angle of "proper" time approaches the angle of axial time, and its angle with the radial time-parameter 'a' tends to 90 degrees), then interior detail is totally erased at the equator, and the apparent inconsistencies with observerspace physics disappear ... you can never survive a transition past the equator, and the event-meshes of each hemisphere are isolated from each other by the equatorial evaporation zone.
The expansion and contraction phases of the bubble then both effectively belong to two separate universes, both of which think they're expanding, and both with opposite senses of proper time. The equatorial evaporation zone keeps both sets of causalities isolated, and prevents nasty messy phase transitions where the two "worlds" collide.
If we look at the geometry of one hemisphere of the extended H-H bubble model, and we use axial time as our reference, or we take a tangent to a given zone and extend that zone's local sense of proper time as as a straight line to give us our time-reference for the rest of the bubble, then what we end up with is a description that seems to describe a "Big Rip" at a definite, finite time. Our projection tells us that the universe contents speed up and start to "fizz and whizz" at an increasing rate before finally disappearing altogether. But to physics performed inside that universe, things aren't hotting up, they're cooling down -- instead of matter mysteriously evaporating after few billion years, it's decaying more conventionally over rather vaster timescales.
Cosmological timescales and reference systems
The thing one has to be careful o
Re:Timescales (Re:The Ultimate Fate of the Univers (Score:3, Funny)
Oops. wrong model. (Score:2)
You've written quite a long-winded screed, ...
Yeah, sorry about that. Much too long. Some personal stuff on my mind today. Will try to be a bit more concise in future.
... but the problem with it is that astronomers usually do use proper cosmological time — i.e., the actual elapsed time — not coordinate time. Yes, sometimes it's easier to write down the metric in some kind of projective coordinates, but when people talk about "X years ago" or "Y years after the Big Bang", they almost always convert from coordinate to elapsed proper time. In particular, the Big Rip scenario uses a FLRW metric (albeit with an odd equation of state), and in the conventional FLRW coordinates the 't' coordinate is proper time, so no conversion is necessary.
Really? Ah. (trundles off and checks arXiv) Ohhh-kay. Hm. This is a bit unfortunate, their starting assumptions aren't what I expected. Damn. I should really have checked before diving in. :(
None of this has anything in particular to do with Hartle-Hawking quantum cosmology, by the way. It just has to do with coordinate time vs. proper time in ordinary general relativity.
Well, I knew that this sort of "evaporating universe" description showed up in one approach to trying to fix the "disorderly time-reversal" problem in Hartle-Hawking, and I knew that (with that appro
blunder (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:blunder (Score:5, Funny)
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With the technology available in his time, not only was it impossible for him to verify atomism, but in fact if he had tried to do so experimentally, then the only reasonable conclusion would have been that atomism is highly unlikely, since matter can easily be subdivided indefinitely to the limit of visual perception. As such, steadfastly maintaining the truth of atomism would mark him out as a crackpot nowadays, a
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Wasn't there a doctor/gravedigger that theorized invisible tubes connecting arteries to veins, and yet could not see them?
I would say that the test would be subdividing until non-existance (by ancient world standards) and devising tests if something fundamentally the same (perhaps flammability) was there.
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If you kept going with that approach, you would end up retracing the main ideas of alchemy and chemistry. And of course once you had the periodic table, you'd have accumulated strong evidence of atomicity. Physicists were only able to smash atoms into components somewhat later.
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Brownian Motion? OK, maybe that doesn't actually show atomism, but molecularism.
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Democritus' atomism was an ancestor of atomic theory in the same sense that "a broken clock is right twice a day".
Which is something I've never been comfortable with -- something that is broken should never give the false impression that it is working by being correct.
That's why, twice a day, one minute before they'd be correct, I turn all my broken clocks ahead 11 hours and 58 minutes, and they never tell the correct time as God intended.
Also, this is why digital clocks are better than mechanical ones. Cu
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Sadly I don't have mod points, but I laughed.
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There's nothing here that isn't also entirely consistent with infinitely divisible matter. Yet given the two conclusions "matter is infinitely divisible" and "matter is made of atoms", the only way to know which one actually applies is to exhibit some piece of matter which cannot be divided further.
That's (approximate
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I'm sick and tired of the "Aha! Einstein was right all along and he didn't even know it!" comment that has to be stuffed in every cosmological constant story these days.
Still it is mostly accurate anecdote. The only real problem with it is that it gets overused.
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True. Look at it this way, if Einstien had known about dark energy and the 'big rip', he probably would have put yet another term in his equations to balance everything out and make the universe last forever.
The point of the constant wasn't science, it was designed to make his science line up with his philosophy. People just don't like to hear that Einstien could fall into the same kind of trap that creationists and and young earthers fall for.
Re:blunder (Score:5, Informative)
Einstein invented his "repulsive" effect to explain why the universe was static, and neither expanding or contracting. Unfortunately for Einstein, Hubble's redshift observations a few years later indicated that the "static" property of the universe that Einstein's CC had been invented to reproduce within GR, wasn't correct.
Dark energy was invented to explain why, when we take an expanding universe model decribed with general relativity, and try to compare it with reality, the numbers still don't appear to match up with the theory.
----
Einstein's Cosmological Constant was an attempt to force GR to produce a wrong answer that Einstein (at that time) happened to think was a mathematically elegant one. The system seemed to describe a universe that would have to be expanding or contracting, and Einstein said ... "Well we know that THAT has to be wrong, so to make things nice and static, I'll write in an additional term for a necessary effect that I've just made up, that would exactly cancel the large-scale effect of gravity ... "
The motivation, function, and results for the two hypothesised effects are different. Both effects are repulsive, and both of them are essentially "made up" as accounting fudges without any deeper physical or philosophical justification, to force a theory that generates one result to generate a different result that we like better, but that's about all they have in common.
They're really different animals. Dark energy isn't an effect designed to explain why the universe is static. However, if you're inventing an arbitrary effect to bring your theory into line with experiment, the awkwardness of admitting that you're basically making stuff up to force the answer you want is reduced if you can claim some "provenance" for the idea, and present your "new" effect as if it's a logical historical development of an earlier idea by a Famous Physicist. That adds an air of legitimacy.
But if we think that the DE idea is any good, then the idea that DE is a historical extension of Einstein's CC is phoney. Einstein's CC is dead and buried. The only way that DE might turn out to be able to claim descent would be if DE turns out to be a rotten idea too, in which case we could say that there's a common theme running through both bad ideas. :)
But if the Dark Energy idea is good, then it's really not "bringing back Einstein's cosmological constant in revised form".
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Try again to rewrite it, but this this it has to fit in a single short sentence.
Guilty as charged. Will try again. How about ...
"Einstein's 'Cosmological Constant' was about a static universe, 'Dark Energy' is about expanding universes, they're actually two different subjects."
Better? :)
In a textbook you might want to maximize clarity, but in a newspaper you want to maximize efficiency, which is clarity-divided-by-length.
Yep. In a newspaper, you also want to tell an interesting story. Adding the usual mention of Einstein and the Cosmological Constant made it into a more interesting story, and provided a (false) sense of context. The way to improve clarity AND reduce length would have been to delete all references to
Huh, confirming theories... that's a new one (Score:2, Interesting)
In other news, Einstein's grave is... (Score:2, Funny)
We have much to learn (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe that our knowledge about the universe is quite limited. I can imagine the scientists of the future will laugh about how we could seriously consider dark matter and dark energy. I think it is quite possible that gravity behaves differently over great distances (and I know about the latest "evidence" of dark matter where the dark matter was "imaged" but it is an indirect evidence, there may be other things up in the universe's sleeve which causes this).
I believe there will be another Einstein who will shed light upon this "mistery" and everything will be simple again.
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http://www.engon.de/protosimplex/posdzech/px_g_gravi1e.htm [engon.de]
Read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory [wikipedia.org]
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I believe there will be another Einstein who will shed light upon this "mistery" and everything will be simple again.
Simple again?
Whan was the last time everything was simple?
I'm thinking caveman's "If you don't know how something works, it must be a spirit".
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I believe that our knowledge about the universe is quite limited. I can imagine the scientists of the future will laugh about how we could seriously consider dark matter and dark energy.
I don't think scientists will laugh about it. I mean, there was phloginston, there was lamarckism, there was aether. We don't laugh about 19th century scintists considering them and taking them seriously. We might laugh if somebody still considered them seriously after a mountain of evidence showing they're not true.
I believe there will be another Einstein who will shed light upon this "mistery" and everything will be simple again.
Uh huh. I find "dark matter" and "dark energy" to be remarkably simple ideas.
Especially "dark matter" is very intuitive. I mean, it's pretty certain that there are particles we don't know about.
evolution baby (Score:1)
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Link to full paper (Score:5, Informative)
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Matter and Energy...or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight...we have Dark Matter because there's not enough gravity within a galaxy to explain the observations, and Dark Energy because there's too much gravity between galaxies to explain the observations.
Surely Occam's Razor comes into play here? Surely it's obviously simpler to say 'we've got the maths wrong for gravity beyond solar system scale' and start again at the chalkboard?
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http://www.engon.de/protosimplex/posdzech/px_g_gravi1e.htm [engon.de]
Because of equivalence of mass and energy Heim says there must also exist a field mass of the field energy of each field. However in case of gravitational field this results in a secondary (very weak) additional gravitative source because a field mass possesses its own gravitational field.
In a volume V0 there is mass which may be distributed in any kin
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I like it!
Re:Matter and Energy...or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely Occam's Razor comes into play here? Surely it's obviously simpler to say 'we've got the maths wrong for gravity beyond solar system scale' and start again at the chalkboard?
Well, from what I've understood adjusting the constant of gravity would explain some things but would make other predictions incorrect again. All in all, dark matter / dark energy is causing less headaches than the opposite, so unless you can pair it off with some other theory to make the world right again it won't get accepted.
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Re:Matter and Energy...or not? (Score:4, Interesting)
Surely Occam's Razor comes into play here? Surely it's obviously simpler to say 'we've got the maths wrong for gravity beyond solar system scale' and start again at the chalkboard?
Which is, in effect what we are saying. However, it makes little sense to simply scratch the whole, current understanding of the world and start over; introducing an assumption that gravity behaves differently outside a certain distance begs the question why it should be so, and we don't have any compelling answer to that.
My own favourite, which admittedly comes out of thin air, is that negative gravity corresponds to negative mass. If you look at the classical equation as a rough approximation, you'll see that a negative mass should repel a positive mass, but attract another negative mass. Intuitively this seems to potientially explain the "dark energy" phenomenon, and it might explain how, at the beginning, mass seems to have been created from nothing - perhaps an equal amount of positive and negative mass was created, so that mass was preserved, in total, and then it exploded apart. How about that for an explanation?
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introducing an assumption that gravity behaves differently outside a certain distance begs the question why it should be so, and we don't have any compelling answer to that.
If I'm not mistaken, we don't have any answer as to why gravity should exist at all. Is there ever a scientific answer to "why" questions about fundamental forces? Why does a positive electric charge attract a negative one, for example?
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It's true that we may never know the ultimate answer to everything - that is to be hoped; once we know everything, there will be nothing new to discover and no need for scientific inquistiveness. But I think we can and should always try to see if we can derive our understanding from more basic principles. Perhaps it is not massthat is the cause of gravity, but instead it is gravity that causes mass? Gravity on its own can be seen simply as "the shape of space-time", loosely speaking. Very loosely speaking.
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Actually that's not quite what I was getting at. What I'm wondering is, are all the why questions even answerable scientifically? Could there ever be a scientific experiment or observation that demonstrates why gravity exists? I can't think how there could be.
If science cannot determine why gravity exists, could we expect it to determine why it behaves in a particular way? Perhaps we should be content with science discovering how gravity works, and leave the why as a philosophical question.
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You "why" as in "what is the purpose"? I think that simply lies outside science; science deal with cause and effect and doesn't need to assume that there is a higher purpose. I think in a scientific context, the only valid meaning of "why" is "what is the cause".
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If pressure attracts gravitationally, then negative pressure repels. This is dark energy.
But, pressure is caused by particles moving about and colliding with the walls of the confinement or the instrument used to measure with - particles with negative mass would intuitively have negative momentum and kinetic energy, and would thus cause negative pressure.
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"Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies. The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating. To think original
Re:Matter and Energy...or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to agree with ghostdoc. IANAP
Obviously. If you were even passingly familiar with the area, you'd realize that a) people *have* been re-examining the orthodoxy (see MOND, among other things), because, you know, some scientists are as smart as you (or perhaps even smarter) and realize that it's an interesting area of research, and b) no one has found an alternate theory that explains the current set of observations (see the Bullet Cluster, and some even more recent results).
Honestly, what is it with laymen who somehow believe that *they* have some insight into an area that those who've been studying it their entire lives do not?
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Yeah, if the history of physics has shown us anything, it's that laymen have never had any special insight into areas that professional physicists do not.
You really need to educate yourself if you honestly believe Einstein, a man who graduated in 1900 with a physics degree from ETH Zurich with a physics degree, was a layman.
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Are you saying that Gene Ray [timecube.com] Is not a physicist!?!
How dare you sir.
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Are you saying he was secretly a professional physicist
Do you even know what a "layman" is? Here, let me explain: It's someone who is uneducated in the subject manner about which he is speaking.
Einstein was *not* a physics layman. The man was formally educated in the topic!
He wasn't a layman like you and I are, but he was hardly a member of the physics establishment.
Fair enough, but my comment wasn't directed at people who are both educated and outside the establishment. It was directed at *laymen*. Pe
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By the way, to continue my tirade against moderators who misuse their points, the parent is *not a god damned troll!* Do I think he's wrong? Sure. But I'm sorry, there's simply no way his comment can be misconstrued as trollish... maybe a tad dickish, but my posts are certainly no better.
FFS mods: Troll, Overrated, and Flamebait are not for posts you simply disagree with!
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Then we look at galaxys, and they are slightly off... but always off by the same amount.
We add a "Two" or something to a line of the formula, and suddenly, the formula works again.
Logically, should we scrap the whole thing, and the years of perfectly accurate information the formula has provided us, or should we check to see if there is something out there that would add that "Two" so it makes s
Alternative explanation (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of proving the existence of Dark Energy, perhaps what this finding really does is prove that our models are wrong.
I often wonder if we're looking in the wrong place for an explanation...flaws in our cosmology sound more plausible to me than weird forms of matter and energy.
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Well, if we are able to go about it in a totally different way, that the dark matter/energy estimates weren't ad hoc-adjusted to fit, and we still see that those estimates fit, it means something. It might be something else, including a weirdness in gravity, but overall the data fits well with something that is quite similar to matter.
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I often wonder if we're looking in the wrong place for an explanation...flaws in our cosmology sound more plausible to me than weird forms of matter and energy.
Yes, because no one has been looking in other places, say modified Newtonian gravity, for alternative explanations...
The real problem is that no one has come up with an alternative theory which both excludes dark matter/dark energy while simultaneously explaining all current observations.
Just a Question (Score:2)
Wouldn't that only happen if they were receding at greater than the speed of light? Otherwise the light would still get to us, just being dimmer because of the increased distance.
"we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur." (Score:2)
!Confirmed (Score:2)
"But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur."
That's a damn stretch from "confirms", especially coming from a primary in the research.
All the study confirmed was that early galaxies appear to have behaved in a manner as though gravity were different or affected by another force. It doesn't mean they did, it means their observations can be taken that way. It doesn't mean there was dark energy, it means they don't seem to act as though they not affect
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1. To support or establish the certainty or validity of; verify.
2. To make firmer; strengthen
I'd say this study helps to support the validity of dark energy theory. In fact it helps to strengthen it.
Re: (Score:2)
but I thought we had a glimpse of it's fur
Re:Needs a better headline & summary (Score:5, Informative)
The summary makes it sound like they actually proved that dark matter exist, not simply added to the inference of it's existence :(
Science is not in the business of making provable claims. It's impossible to prove anything using the scientific method. Science makes falsifiable claims, and any experiment that fails to falsify them confirms the theory, but most certainly does not prove it. An experiment that "confirms" a theory is one that produces a result compatible with that theory under circumstances where a different result would have falsified it. Confirmation merely strengthens a theory, it cannot ever prove it.
Re: (Score:2)
And not nearly far enough in the late 90s and early 2000s.