https://phys.org/news/2025-04-dark-energy-nature-universe.html
New theory of the expansion of the universe does away with the need for those two in favor of singularities popping in and out of existence too fast to be noted but causing the expansion and density of the universe.
So they next have to find experimental support.
@sonhouse saidI always was suspicious of dark matter and dark energy, as hypotheses. Undetectability is not science, it's magic.
At least they have a possible line of evidence, it sounds like quantization of red shift data using an array of Earth bound scopes.
It would certainly throw cosmology in a tiff if true🙂
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@moonbus saidYeah, it seemed like dark energy and such was just a construct to make the theory work.
I always was suspicious of dark matter and dark energy, as hypotheses. Undetectability is not science, it's magic.
BTW, I just saw a piece saying dark matter may have been made BEFORE the big bang, that moment where inflation was some 24 orders of magnitude faster than c.
That would also throw some poop into the game.
https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/08/08/dark-matter-existed-before-big-bang/
@sonhouse saidShould we really say goodbye to that which we have never met?
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-dark-energy-nature-universe.html
New theory of the expansion of the universe does away with the need for those two in favor of singularities popping in and out of existence too fast to be noted but causing the expansion and density of the universe.
So they next have to find experimental support.
Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder terms physicists cooked up that tasted better to them than saying "we don't know." They're a way to make ignorance about something look, to the public eye, like some kind of discovery.
Now there's a quarter century's worth of documentaries on cosmology that are saturated with talk of dark matter/energy, as if enough such talk might, like the incantations of a shaman of old, invoke the spirits of a mystic realm to present themselves in the mortal plane and say "Lo, we are come to fill the galaxy-sized gaps in your model."
Small wonder science's street cred is in the toilet these days.
@sonhouse saidWe don't even know dark matter is a thing, so this is wild speculation based on a wild speculation.
BTW, I just saw a piece saying dark matter may have been made BEFORE the big bang,
Christ on a cracker, am I glad I went into mathematics instead of particle physics or cosmology.
@Soothfast saidMOND says there is no dark matter but it has problems too.
We don't even know dark matter is a thing, so this is wild speculation based on a wild speculation.
Christ on a cracker, am I glad I went into mathematics instead of particle physics or cosmology.
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@Soothfast saidYep, it certainly could be a way to balance our cosmology but there is SOMETHING out there gravitationally effecting the stuff immersed in it. That is, BESIDES the fact Galaxies move more like the stars are on a plate rather then obeying Newton and Einstein version of gravity. So SOMETHING is going on outside our present knowledge.
Should we really say goodbye to that which we have never met?
Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder terms physicists cooked up that tasted better to them than saying "we don't know." They're a way to make ignorance about something look, to the public eye, like some kind of discovery.
Now there's a quarter century's worth of documentaries on cosmology tha ...[text shortened]... galaxy-sized gaps in your model."
Small wonder science's street cred is in the toilet these days.
BTW, you no doubt know about Hubble Tension.
A new idea there (of course hypothetical ATT) that it is explained if the UNIVERSE is slightly spinning.
The article mentioned a spin that one revolution would take 500 billion years but even at that, I did a bit of arithmetic🙂 and see that it would be going near the speed of light even if it takes a half trillion years per 360.
Not sure why a spinning universe would solve the Hubble tension but there it is.
Another theory says Hubble tension goes away when we realize we are in a billion ly wide more or less void.
News at 11🙂
https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/universe-may-revolve-once-every-500-billion-years-and-that-could-solve-a-problem-that-threatened-to-break-cosmology
@Soothfast saidAgreed. Dark matter sounds a lot like phlogiston, and dark energy sounds like ectoplasm.
Should we really say goodbye to that which we have never met?
Dark matter and dark energy are just placeholder terms physicists cooked up that tasted better to them than saying "we don't know." They're a way to make ignorance about something look, to the public eye, like some kind of discovery.
Now there's a quarter century's worth of documentaries on cosmology tha ...[text shortened]... galaxy-sized gaps in your model."
Small wonder science's street cred is in the toilet these days.
I recently watched a physicist talking about Dark Matter. She said the name was really bad. A better name would be Transparent Matter. It is believed to be a type of matter that doesn't interact with photons, so they just travel through it (or they travel through the photons) and nothing happens.
We already have an example of particles that do this - neutrinos. Neutrinos couldn't be Dark Matter because they travel far too fast and wouldn't hang around in a galaxy. But it is a type of matter that behaves the way we think Dark Matter would.
Dark Energy of the other hand is something physicists don't like. It doesn't make any sense. It is whatever is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. All sorts of ideas have been tried to make it go away, including suggesting the laws of physics aren't constant over time, but all have failed so far.
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@Wyn-Davies saidYes, but ... so-called particles are merely figures of speech. Particles (neutrinos, quarks, and the lot) are not things, they are not little billiard balls, they do not have properties analogous to shape or size or hardness/softness or roundness, they will not hold still long enough to be assigned a definite location and a definite velocity. Heisenberg's principle is not merely an epistemological limit of what we can know; it's an indeterminacy in nature itself. At the smallest levels, the material world isn't material anymore, it is a swarm of statistical probabilities of measurable change. What we call 'particles' are minims of measurable change (emphasis on "measurable" ). In a sense, we haven't budged a millimeter from Pythagoras's concept that reality consists of vibrations, we have merely 'retuned' our measuring instruments to a different octave.
I recently watched a physicist talking about Dark Matter. She said the name was really bad. A better name would be Transparent Matter. It is believed to be a type of matter that doesn't interact with photons, so they just travel through it (or they travel through the photons) and nothing happens.
We already have an example of particles that do this - neutrinos. Neutrinos ...[text shortened]... way, including suggesting the laws of physics aren't constant over time, but all have failed so far.
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@moonbus saidNevertheless there are mysteries to resolve. Those little bundles of whatever do have energy and momentum and electric and magnetic fields and the like maybe even more dimensions than our 4 we know about.
Yes, but ... so-called particles are merely figures of speech. Particles (neutrinos, quarks, and the lot) are not things, they are not little billiard balls, they do not have properties analogous to shape or size or hardness/softness or roundness, they will not hold still long enough to be assigned a definite location and a definite velocity. Heisenberg's principle is ...[text shortened]... ty consists of vibrations, we have merely 'retuned' our measuring instruments to a different octave.
I get the feeling you feel like that will be all we know even with a thousand years of constant scientific evolution.
Just found this report, green flashes coming out of polymers with 1000 volts of reverse bias:
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-hey-green-polymer-semiconductor.html
Thought it was interesting.
@sonhouse saidEverything we have found out about the material universe indicates that matter is an illusion. 'Things' appear solid to us only because 'things' change at rates too slow for us to perceive with our five senses. But even mountains are worn away into sand and stars exhaust their fuel and explode. Everything is process. 'Things' exist only as human cognitive categories. Moreover, all the instruments we have devised, including the large hadron collider at Cern, deliver data which must be converted into some form which we humans can register with one or more of our five senses (primarily visual); but there is no good reason to suppose that the universe is restricted to phenomena in these five modes. Talk of other dimensions is merely a figure of speech for acknowledging that the universe need not manifest in only visual, audible, tactile, olfactory, or tasteable modes. Moreover, the apparent sequentiality of processes (the uni-directionality of time) may also be an illusion peculiar to our modes of experience. And that is the great mystery, what other modes exist of which we know nothing.
Nevertheless there are mysteries to resolve. Those little bundles of whatever do have energy and momentum and electric and magnetic fields and the like maybe even more dimensions than our 4 we know about.
I get the feeling you feel like that will be all we know even with a thousand years of constant scientific evolution.
@moonbus saidNow we have 'negative time':
Everything we have found out about the material universe indicates that matter is an illusion. 'Things' appear solid to us only because 'things' change at rates too slow for us to perceive with our five senses. But even mountains are worn away into sand and stars exhaust their fuel and explode. Everything is process. 'Things' exist only as human cognitive categories. Moreover ...[text shortened]... f experience. And that is the great mystery, what other modes exist of which we know nothing.