• Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    I don’t know for sure, but there are some debates that simply don’t make sense to me. For example, whether or not dark matter/energy exists is something many just absolutely insist upon. To me, I would imagine, if something exists, being “measurable” is a badge or prerequisite of its existence, but here we have a name for the black omnipresence essence everywhere, the substance of nothing, so to speak, to the point where one of the theories put forward about the gravitational anomalies in the outer solar system is that it’s simply dark matter. I’m not buying it. I’m of the school of thought that what we see really is just plain nothingness. For those who constantly accuse the “it could be aliens” theory, it ranks up there to float around a go-to for everything.

    Another one are the constant asteroid theories. What made the moon? An asteroid. What tipped Uranus? An asteroid. What killed the dinosaurs? The ice age An asteroid. It doesn’t come off as very critical, especially when imprecisions are growing out of them all, for example people went from saying dinosaurs were all genocided specifically by the asteroid to some people saying there were some who became birds to some saying all of them became birds and animals to saying the asteroid did almost nothing to any whole species.

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Dark matter isn’t something that was randomly invented and is believed for no good reason. We observe something going on, and the best way to describe the effect is through dark matter, as in matter that doesn’t interact with electromagnetic waves, but does affect gravity. There have been many alternative explanations for the effects (e.g. MOND), but none line up as well as dark matter.

      So it’s something that is measurable, insofar that we even came up with the idea due to measurements. We don’t know how to detect it directly, but we can detect its influence.

      • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Isn’t it judging a book by its cover that something so unknown to us is seen as so applicable as a go-to before we know what applies to it? It would be like seeing fire for the first time and thinking “we only know one thing about fire, that it’s hot, therefore anything that’s hot must be heated by internal fire”.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          All the models happen to fit perfectly when we describe the interactions as dark matter, and no better model has been proposed so far. Mind you, nobody is saying “dark matter must be this or that” - until we know more, it’s pretty much a placeholder. But unless someone comes up with a better model (and many, many people are trying to) the only alternative is to throw our hands in the air and say “god did it, we can’t describe it physically”. As soon as you start describing it physically, you’d arrive back at dark matter.

          • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            That’s kind of what I mean, it’s a cop-out, especially considering that we know so little about it. For all we know, it could be tiny microscopic black holes, and right now, we wouldn’t know the difference, yet we assume it’s something we “just know about”. Typically in science (or at least it used to be this way), you don’t resort to going with the placeholder hypothesis until the more specific ones are absolutely ruled out, so that we don’t draw a conclusion in a way that seals the deal on other possibilities.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              That’s where your understanding is wrong - nobody is saying that dark matter can’t be microscopic black holes. There are reasons to assume this to be untrue (e.g. microscopic black holes evaporating incredibly fast), but “dark matter” is a placeholder for whatever the underlying physical phenomenon is, be it microscopic black holes, or WIMPs, or whatever else. You yourself are asking for your explanation not to be considered.

    • zout@fedia.io
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      6 months ago

      I think you’re right about black matter, it might just be the modern day aether. The asteroid theories not so much, there is proof for the dinosaur extinction event being caused by an asteroid, and there is a measurable anomaly in the earth core which gives evidence to the moon origin theory (which was not so much an asteroid but a Mars-sized object). Also, asteroids are considered proven to excist.

      • Akareth@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        FYI, dinosaurs are not extinct; they’re quite abundant, and we walk alongside them. For example, chickens are dinosaurs.

    • Hammocks4All@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      I once heard that dark matter is just the consequence of using approximations and then having equations not balance out further down the line. So we inject dark matter in there so that the math maths all right.

      • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Thats literally how it started, yes.

        Then scientists realized that their math hack might actually hold some weight.

    • Akareth@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      FYI, dinosaurs are not extinct; they’re quite abundant, and we walk alongside them. For example, chickens are dinosaurs.