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

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

It does make the needle twitch on one's bogometer, doesn't it?

[jeffreycornish.livejournal.com]

Well, the problem is that you need dark matter to hold the whole thing (galaxies, clusters of galaxies) together, and to explain the flat rotation curve of most galaxies (the starts orbiting on the out fringes orbit just as fast as the stars near the core).

I consider it a wonderful mystery.

Now, quantum mechanics, that's spooky

[gement.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of it as a conscious handwave, but perhaps I have misunderstood. But I thought it was "this makes the numbers add up, even though it doesn't make any sense. So we'll just leave that as a placeholder until someone comes up with something smarter."

[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.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

I see where you're coming from, and I agree it sounds like a kludge. But in the science of astrophysics, there's a lot that we still don't understand and we're still at the theorizing stage for so much of it. It's a young science.

Dark Matter is a theory. I agree that it sounds like we need a better one. But that's the beauty of science: You come up with a better theory and try to test it. So there could very well be a better competing theory comin' 'round the bend any day now.

I find that I don't get hung up too much on theories related to astrophysics, because I know that those theories are at a different level of solidity than ones found in, say, biology, or regular physics.

[ash-blackwell.livejournal.com]

There is dark matter out there (planets count), but yeah, it's mostly a placeholder thing.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I feel a whole lot better about dark matter than I do about dark energy.

And while dark matter is a pretty vague concept, at least the name suggest that it's more of a question than an answer. A reasonable shorthand for "we don't know what's there but as far as we can tell there must be something." I think if it had a fancy latin or greek name or an acronym, I'd feel more that it was a deceptive answer. If someone called it "Umbratonium," it would sound a whole lot more like someone was hiding their ignorance.

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

I'm totally with you.
The matter we can see doesn't act according to what our equations say.
Conclusion: there must be a whole bunch of matter we can't see.
Huh???
Makes a hella lot more sense to me -- a lowly physics B.A., math B.S., and math M.S. -- to conclude that our equations are wrong.

[book-addict.livejournal.com]

See, I was going to say something here, but all the points I would have made have been covered already.
So it's left to me to point out just how very little one is expected to question these sorts of entities in the course of an astrophysics B.Sc. "There's this dark matter, because it explains the observations, and it's not your place to ask what it actually is..." or something like is that pretty much sums up my undergraduate third year.

In this case, it could be a particularly nonluminiferous aether.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

~sits back with a beer~ yup!

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

I haven't read into all the sub-threads here, so this might have been mentioned already. Forgive me if this is a repeat:

http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/EinsteinTheory.asp