if you happened to be asleep that day in your astrophysics class
Yes, I was! So please explain this in simple measurements I can understand such as standard London double decker bus or bronotosaurus lengths!
Higgs, Schmiggs... When that infinitesimal speck was sucking up all the journalistic oxygen on Independence Day, another momentous scientific discovery was also being announced: the first observation of filaments of dark matter, the stuff that forms the "skeleton" of our universe. Invisible, inexplicable dark matter makes up …
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
Is the Register ready, willing and able to handle the Truth ....... or not?
* Are Virtual Machines, Alien Beings, and/or just Simply Complex Figments of Absolutely Fabulous Fabless Imagination ....... which would nothing less than a Holy Trinity Revelation? I suppose you would need a Proof to Believe IT is True. Ok, that's fair and reasonable. One wouldn't want everyone believing in a fiction of dodgy false facts which are sub-prime intelligence services designed to Present and Product Place Dishonest Bigger Pictures, would one?
That would surely be a certifiable madness and confirmed badness if premeditated and deliberate, whenever the Truth is freely available at zeroday cost.
This post has been deleted by its author
Good answer. You're right that it no longer appears likely that dark matter can be accounted for by MACHOs. But there's a problem with the alternative of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which is - where the hell are they? They haven't shown up at CERN, in cosmic rays or in neutrino detectors, which seems odd given that it's proposed that they make up the great majority of gravitating matter.
The other possibility is that we don't understand gravitation as well as we think we do. A minority of cosmologists and physicists are working on Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND), which could account for the anomalous rotation of galaxies and the other problems for which dark matter is put forward as a solution.
I had the opportunity of an informal discussion of these issues with a leading British astronomer and cosmologist at a conference in Oxford earlier this year. His answer was along the lines of: I'd give the experimentalists another few years to find evidence of dark matter, failing which the theoreticians will need to start looking seriously for alternative explanations.
FWIW 'Dark energy' is even easier to explain away. It may well be that our understanding of type 1a supernovae and/or the transmission of their light across a substantial fraction of the observable universe is incomplete.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
Thank you! I'm intrigued to hear that the idea also helps with dark energy as well - I fully appreciate what you say about it being insanely complicated :-)
The idea I am exploring is whether this artificial looking setup actually comes good if you consider each of the branes involved to be the "universes" in the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. There is a paper by Page and Wootters (http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v27/i12/p2885_1) where they show that it's possible for what we consider the past and the future to be special cases of those universes, and the limitations of our brains would mean that we perceive the world as a "flicker-book" of these branes.
Also, the idea leads to a prediction - since the number of parallel worlds would be increasing all the time, dark matter (and I presume dark energy) should increase over time. I'm guessing it is possible to measure the dark matter from galaxies at different distances (i.e. times) from our own and see if there is any variation.
Since, @HolyFreakinGhost you are one of the few people I've ever had contact with who knows about this stuff, I would be grateful for any more insights...
This post has been deleted by its author
This is excellent stuff. I suddenly realised I hadn't explained about the time part of it. The idea of the Page and Wootters paper is that the whole thing (all the many worlds) is "pre-existing" (if you can call it that) and the passage of time is an artefact of the way our brains work. Like when spacetime was discovered, people worried that if everything was this pre-existing block of 4D stuff, everything would be predetermined.
With many worlds, it becomes more like a railway shunting yard that we travel through, changing points when our choices decohere. The whole railway yard already exists, but we cannot see it all at once.
I've realised now that we would need to have a way of modelling this astoundingly complicated picture before working out whether we can prove or disprove it...
I can understand why our current picture would be fine with a constant amount of dark matter, so I shall be very interested to see the results from actual measurements from the projects you mention.
You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means.
"Boffo is a kind of headology, described by Pratchett as "the power of expectations"; the strength one gains from behaving exactly as someone expects you to. Boffo is introduced by the witch Eumenides Treason in Wintersmith as a means by which she ensures people take her seriously.
It gets its name from the Boffo Novelty and Joke Shop, no. 4, Tenth Egg Street, Ankh-Morpork, from which Miss Treason purchases most of her interior decorating supplies, the better to ensure that when people come calling they don't see what is really there (a tired, blind 111-year-old woman), but what they expect (a venerable, terrifying 113-year-old witch).
The idea of Boffo is also understood by those forward-looking wizards who have to make a living in the community: the premises of C.V. Cheesewaller, DM(Unseen) B Thau, BF, in Quirm, are liberally festooned with hanging stuffed crocodiles, dribbly candles, skulls, and "the usual wizardly paraphernalia". Quoth the raven dismissively says "They get it all out of a catalogue. Believe me, it all comes in a big box". Any bets as to whose catalogue?
As a concept, Boffo is hardly unique to the Discworld: Roundworld bling such as Rolex watches, Armani suits and the crowns of kings is all Boffo, only more expensive."
/YET/
There are many theories out there and many eventually turn out to be true, just like there are many which simply end up forgotten because most people hardly care to keep up with 'stuff from the past'.
But when reading stories such as these I can't help wonder... What is the big problem with stating on certain topics that: "We don't know. Yet." ?
For all you "professionals" out there on the reg. it's my understanding that the Higgs particle exists in a yet undiscovered Higgs field of sorts. Could it be that these dark matter filaments ARE said Higgs field? It would seem to reason that the particle and the field would show themselves at relative times in scientific discovery.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
We go downscale we find the elusive Higgs-Boson giving elementary particles mass. We go upscale we find the elusive Dark Matter giving the universe mass.
T'is obvious it's all cyclical: Inside every elementary particle is an entire universe... and our entire universe is merely an elementary particle in someone else's universe.
Try dropping a load of magic mushrooms and thinking about that one!
..just consider the following.
The Big Bang happened about 14bn years ago (give or take a few). When we look out we can see no further than 14bn light years. We would be foolish to think that we are located at the centre of the Big Bang so if we think about an observer on another planet at the edge of where we can see, what do they see? Will it be blank on one side and light on the other? I think not. So it is likely that the universe is a LOT bigger than we can see. If the universe is 3 times bigger than we can see to then the mass which is out of sight is 26 time what we can see. That mass is invisible not dark.
Why then do we need to invoke dark matter as a solution?
This post has been deleted by its author