Dark Matter

[gfish]

I'm not a astrophysicist or anything, but am I the only one who finds the whole dark matter thing rather dubious? It just smells of hand-waving kludge to me. Our observations don't match our calculations, so 95% of the universe must be made of invisible matter that only interacts with the rest of us through gravity? The universe is certainly a very odd place, but I just can't get over the feeling that this is the luminiferous aether all over again.

Comments

[stellar-dust.livejournal.com]

Apparently you can solve it by introducing infinite time dimensions (http://www.stanford.edu/~afmayer/)? Or something? Someday I will have time to go through his lectures, and/or read his (apparently upcoming) book.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was one of the things that started me thinking about it recently (also this BBC article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4679220.stm)). I was able to stumble through the lectures somewhat, and it certainly looks like a nice and elegant solution to a lot of little problems. But my relativity-fu is pretty weak, so I can't say much about the validity.

[ivy]

Big disclaimers about mapping intuition to physics, but... it never particularly made sense to me that we should have multiple space dimensions and one time dimension. I think the difference is most likely a matter of our perception. Even in the more recent takes on superstring theory, it's usually phrased as "nine space dimensions and one time", or, with supergravity, "ten space dimensions and one time". Holding on to one time dimension seems more likely to be an artifact of our measuring process.

Of course, this is based in no scientific data whatsoever, and I could be totally wrong.

[stellar-dust.livejournal.com]

I've had similar thoughts myself, which is one reason why this theory makes intuitive sense to me, too. ... But I haven't given it nearly the attention it deserves yet.