There is no dark matter. Instead, information has mass, physicist says

Started by René, February 17, 2022, 01:16:26 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Dune

It certainly is. I have read other stuff about this earlier, but it's beyond me, obviously. I always had the simple notion there is antimatter filling the spaces between matter, in such a way that they don't absorb eachother, just not detected (yet). And as far as I'm concerned 'information' is just a word, and may be equivalent to 'tiny stuff' that carries that information, such as electrons and whatnot. Everything carries information, IMHO.

WAS

Oh cool. Very interesting indeed. I've always said there is no such thing as dark matter. Like their famous galactic background radiation shot to "map" the galaxies dark matter, and asserting then blanks spots of no data to the IR camera is dark matter.... Yep nothing, is proof of dark matter. Was the most ridiculous article I had ever read. That was most certainly the furthest thing from proof of dark matter.

And the problem with dark matter detection is we literally have no way possible to detect it. No device we use reads the universe in a way we would see it. It's all based on radiation, and electromagnetism.

Tangled-Universe

This reminds me of a video from Numberphile about, I believe, Graham's number. Or about another number even much larger than Graham's number. The physicist/mathematician interviewed about this subject said that if one was trying to store that number into one's brain there would so much information inside such a relatively small space that your head would implode into a blackhole.

I find this topic hugely interesting and I'm completely with @WAS on dark matter. I find it one of the most intriguing yet most unscientific concepts conceived by modern science.
I'm not sure if I can choose between dark matter and string theory. Both are, at the stage they are in, beyond empirical science.
No one will ever be able to directly (dis)proof it. Yet we're building entire frameworks around it, trying to convince ourselves it is real.
I find it somewhat disturbing that a lot of physics communicators online, like Ethan Siegel, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sabine Hossenfelder etc. systematically fail to address the serious concerns about the scientific validity of the dark matter concept.
One doesn't need a degree in physics to understand how ill-defined the problem is from a scientific point of view.

Observations didn't follow theory and the physics community felt a certain 'factor' was missing. Einstein considered his idea of a cosmological constant one of his biggest failures and decades later we dug up the concept to see if we can marry the observations with some kind of 'factor' like Einstein did.
This factor needed to have certain characteristics to make it follow the observations and the dark matter concept was born: "something" which only interacts gravitationally, but not with the other fundamental forces of nature.
Thus impossible to detect or study, since it does not interact with anything. 
What happens then blows my mind. Suddenly this concept becomes consensus, because it describes the observations so well. Miraculous! Or is it?
No, of course it isn't if f you modelled the concept in the first place according to the missing ingredients. This whole concept is the biggest confounding circular argument ever.

Any scientist outside the field of physics points out this flaw and the physics community can't do better than saying "you don't understand" or "it's complicated".
The latter scientists do always agree about, it's always complicated, but the scientific method is a way of thinking which is universal.
It can (and must be) universally applied and when one is doing this on the topic of dark matter and how the physics community came up with it, then one concludes it's bogus.
Therefore the attempts to deflect the justified criticism by saying "it's too complicated" or especially "you don't understand" is not only condescending, but also an extreme form of academic mental laziness.

Similarly and intertwined with the dark matter concept, is SUSY in the standard model. The Large Hadron Collider was expected to either prove SUSY or at least show a glimpse of it. It didn't.
Now scientists are seiving heaps of data to find something useful in the LHC data, because besides finding the Higgs Boson the rest of the project failed, basically.
The LHC was supposed to prove that the standard model is right, but they didn't find the particles they were hoping for.
This same model was used to model dark matter. The model also fails to accurately predict neutrino mass. Or expansion rate of the universe (different methods give different results).

I was tempted to reply to Hossenfelder's video asking the viewers which scientific findings of the James Webb Space Telescope the viewers are most excited about, by saying that I hope strongly that when/if the JWST fails to find stronger clues of dark matter that the phycics community would finally let go of the concept, because it's ill-founded from a scientific point of view. I'm afraid when/if this happens something similar will happen when LHC basically failed; at all cost denying it failed and that there's still a treasure trove of data "but we don't know what yet".
That's not hypothesizing, that's what we call HARKing in science; Hypethesizing After Result is Known.
Oh wait...how did we get to this dark matter idea again? Oh yes, HARKing.